It is possible to offer subscriptions to products—typically print newspapers—that are not delivered every day of the week. A classic example is a weekend subscription where, for instance, the printed newspaper is delivered on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
If newspaper subscribers are simply meant to receive the paper on all publication days, you do not need to set up the fields described below.
Setting up a custom field with weekdays
Delivery days are configured using a custom field on the campaign, which defines the days the newspaper is published—since some newspapers are not published all seven days of the week. Some, for example, are published Monday to Saturday or Monday to Friday, and in those cases, it wouldn't make sense to allow selection of non-publication days.
Custom fields are set up in the Account menu (top right corner) under the “Fields” section. To define which weekdays the newspaper is published, create a field for the campaign. Choose “New Field For > Campaigns.” You might name the field something like “Delivery Days.” Under Features, check “Days of the week on which a product must or can be delivered” For the Type, select “Weekdays.” At the bottom of the field setup, check the boxes for the weekdays when the paper is published. It might look something like this:
(Note: Campaign fields do not need to be linked to products to be active, as each campaign can include multiple products.)
Selecting available days for a subscription
When creating a campaign, you define in the Delivery Days field which days the subscriber can receive the newspaper. Important detail: The custom field defines the publication days, but when applied to a specific campaign, not all publication days need to be selected. For instance, a campaign might be for a digital subscription that includes a free printed Friday edition. In that case, only Friday is selected in the Delivery Days field.
Defining default days for a subscription
There is an extra layer to handling delivery days in campaigns. If most campaigns include delivery on all publication days, it can become tedious to manually check every weekday when creating a subscription. To simplify this, you can define which days should be pre-selected when setting up the campaign.
To do this, create another custom field in the same way as mentioned before, but with the change that you under Features, select the second option: “Preselected days of the week when a product can be delivered, if there is an option to choose.” Then, as described above, define which weekdays should be pre-selected. Note that pre-selected days must also be among the allowed days (as defined in the Delivery Days field).
Subscriber’s choice of delivery days
Let’s say a subscriber has a subscription to a printed newspaper published Monday through Sunday (as defined in the delivery field), but the campaign defines that the subscription includes Monday to Friday. However, the subscriber doesn’t want the paper delivered on Wednesdays because they always stay with their partner and read the digital edition instead.
For this situation, you can define one final custom field—this time on the product (i.e., the subscription)—which includes the days the campaign allows for delivery (in this case, Monday to Friday). The subscriber can then opt out of delivery on Wednesday.
Note: This final custom field is only necessary if you want to give subscribers the option to decline printed delivery on specific days. It can also be configured to appear in self-service (adjustable in the self-service settings), or you can choose to make it editable only by the newspaper’s subscription service.