Additional workflow capability - unenroll upon email response

[Spencer]

Add the ability to remove a contact from a workflow if contact responds to an email. 

1. Important when a contact response might warrant a different email subject or removal entirely. 

2. It is much like sequences with the added ability to measure response, click through and open rate. 

Example:

I want to enroll the user in a workflow to get feedback on the product. Plan to send 3 emails asking for feedback 2 days between each. 

Email 1 - "Hey we want to get some feedback on x"

Contact Response - "I'm not the right person to ask"

Unless I personally un-enroll the user, they will get the second and third email. 

This feature would also help with sales as you could use the workflows to enroll users in sales workflows and get reporting on the messages. 

[ron_kagan]

Hi, I'm writing to let you know that your competitors offer this functionality.

People reply to emails.  It's expected behavior.

[MFrankJohnson]

+1

[MichaelThelle1]

We need this!

[rwolupo]

would love this

[bassic]

The lack of this feature is making sales/marketing cooperation harder. 

When mail automation is done with the name of business development representant, they would like to exclude leads that have already answered and continue to follow up those who have opened the email and so on.

[jura]

+1

[JamesIn]

Hi,

I had a similar issue and found a workaround. I haven't yet tested this so I can't guarantee that it works but I don't see why it wouldn't.

My scenario: I have set up a workflow to act similarly to a sequence so that it can be triggered by form submissions, instead of having to manually enrol, like in sequences. A series of follow up emails get sent to contacts when they submit a form, things like "Hey, thanks for downloading, do you want to book a meeting" followed up by a "Hey, I haven't heard from you" email if they don't respond, you get the idea! However, I want contacts to be unenrolled from the workflow if they reply so that they don't receive the "Hey, I haven't heard from you" email when they have in fact responded.

The problem: You can't currently unenroll someone from a workflow based on an email reply.

The solution: The solution involves HubSpot workflows and Zapier, here goes:

The first step is to create a HubSpot contact property called something like"remove from workflow". And then create a workflow like the one below, it will become clear why later.

The delay and clear contact property action is important because it means a contact can go through the same workflow twice.

Next, you'll need to set up a Zap to enrol a contact in a workflow when they reply to an email.

Select the new inbound email trigger, and create a Zapier email address. Add this email address as the "reply to" email address on the emails you send out from the workflow. Replies to this email address will be used to trigger the Zap.

(you can also set it up to trigger on replies to Gmail, IMAP, Mailgun or IMAP. Which is advisable, as you'll probably want to monitor the responses.)

Next, set the action for the Zap to enrol contacts in the Hubspot workflow you created earlier. Use the "sender" email address for the contact's email field, this will make sure that the contact that replied gets updated.

When this is turned on it will set the contact property "remove from workflow" to yes, on the contact that replied to the email.

You can then remove people from the workflow using an if/then branch. Like below:

Hope this helps! 

James

[Rachel10]

This needs to be added to Hubspot. All other marketing tools have such a feature and this makes it much harder for us marketers to do our job. Please please add this functionality!

[jskarke92267]

I agree, this is not intuitive for a marketing solution.

[MajaSustar]

This is the most desired functionality!! Just came here to post it by myself...

[ajeffers]

It is now almost 2 years since this idea was added to the forum. Is there any update? Would love to see this feature soon! Definitely don't want to have to manually remove someone each time, especially with a list of over 6000 emails!

[AndrewSober]

How is this not a feature yet???

If your automated email works and elicits a reply it's madness we can't automatically unenroll and prevent the person from receiving the rest of the emails in the workflow.

Consider the recipient's perspective: 1. receive email, 2. respond to email "that sounds great let's set up a meeting", 3. receive another email from the same person saying "since you didn't see my last email" - now the recipient is totally confused!

It seems the Sales Sequences product can do this, but it is a fundamentally important feature that I can't believe Workflows doesn't have yet. The absence of this feature neuters Workflow's email nurturing potential.

[jimgoldstein]

This would be a critical feature to add. We don't want our customers to feel spammed.

[jvalentine]

Yes I agree with this - if the contact replies back to a marketing email, they should be removed from the workflow. It should be in the goal criteria.

[gthomas]

Hi @JamesIn thanks for posting such a detailed solution! Checking to see if you had any problems using it?

[georgepwaked]

Silly not to have this. Creating personalized follow up emails is necessary, and I don't understand why there isn't an option to stop sending those emails to someone that's responded.

[ChiaraBeth]

Please, please, please enable this functionality ASAP. It makes no sense that it isn't already an option. Every other email sequence automation tool that I've worked with has had this automatically built in.

My current workaround is to assign myself a task to check for replies before each subsequent email goes out and unenroll contacts where necessary. VERY time consuming, and with tasks being assigned to me on the weekends, and emails going out at 6am on Monday, it simply doesn't work.

The lack of this functionality means Hubspot's Workflows do not fully enable lean practices.

[adelano]

This feature also needs to have reporting capabilities.

Ex:

- if a customer replies to an email, be able to get response rate by dividing replies by total email sends (preferably in the same report)

- this should be able to be filtered by a contact or deal property as well, or part of X workflow

- "frozen" response dates i.e. if a customer first replies on 1/1/19 it should be included in the quantity of email replies if filtering by only that date. if they respond again on 1/2/19, a reply should be counted on both 1/1 and 1/2

[BrittanyE]

I need this feature badly! I love sequences, but we have too many leads for me to put each one in a sequence for automatic unenrollment purposes alone. Workflows are much better for us right now EXCEPT for the fact that there's no automatic unenrollment ability based on a contact's email action (read/reply,etc). I'm struggling to even find a work-around of some sort.

It's ironic that HubSpot is an automation tool, but:

1. sequence enrollment is manual while unenrollment is automated
2. workflow enrollment can be manual or automatic and, in this case,  unenrollment is manual

PLEASE HUBSPOT! Please create the ability to automatically unenroll someone from a workflow the same way as people are from sequences!!!!

[iSchoolConnect]

Great idea. Came here to post it myself.