Removing contacts from a workflow upon replying

I’m new to HubSpot workflows and am working on a straightforward workflow designed to send up to five emails to newly-added contacts, with delays between each message.

I understand that if a contact unsubscribes or marks an email as spam, they will automatically be unenrolled from the workflow, which is ideal.

However, I’d also like to set up the workflow so that if a contact replies to any of these emails, they’re removed from the workflow.

My plan for this was to create a branching condition using the contact property “Marketing emails replied” and set it to “is greater than 0” to trigger automatic unenrollment.

Would this approach accomplish my goal of removing contacts from the workflow when they reply?

Thanks.

Hi @card_sharp,

Just to make sure, you have followed these steps to track marketing email replies, correct? Track replies to marketing emails sent to a connected inbox

Once you have this, branches work, yes. I personally am too lazy to set up so many branches and typically simply use the unenrollment criteria:

That way, your workflow will be simpler: send email, delay, send email, delay. Without branches. HubSpot will remove contacts the moment they meet the unenrollment criteria.

Best regards!

Hi Karsten, many thanks and this makes sense to me. However, I don’t see the same “replied to email 1, 3 etc” goals in my own account. In fact, I’ve got no options at all under “Marketing emails”.

Thanks.

@card_sharp this is where your automated emails should appear. Have you published the automated emails in your workflow or are they still in draft mode?

They are still in draft mode. I’m assuming I need to publish them.

@card_sharp correct.

I see the option now - thanks! I presume that out-of-office emails are filtered by Hubspot so they don’t count as a “reply”?

@card_sharp yes, this is documented in the link I shared earlier: Track replies to marketing emails sent to a connected inbox


Please note: automated replies, such as out-of-office messages, are filtered and excluded from reply data.


Thanks so much for your help Karsten.

If I also wanted to remove contacts from the same company when one of their colleagues replies, is that also achievable?

I.e. Five contacts from Company A are enrolled in the workflow and one of them replies to Email 1. The workflow should now stop for all of them.

Hi @card_sharp,

Have you considered sequences? Create and edit sequences

There you get this behaviour by default.

In a marketing email world, you’d need another workflow that enrolls contacts who reply, the uses the ‘Set property value’ workflow action to update a custom property on the associated company.

You can them make this custom property on the company object an unenrollment criterion in your original workflow.

I did look at sequences, but it seems that there a far fewer email formatting options to play with. For example - no way to include a footer, buttons, and no way to preview etc. The whole interface just seemed a lot less feature-rich.

Thanks. I did look at sequences, but it seemed there were far fewer options around email formatting to play with and I much preferred the Workflow interface.

@card_sharp in that case you’ll need a second workflow like I described in my previous reply.

If my answers helped you so far, please mark them as accepted solution. It helps other user and also me. I’ll continue replying of course.