HubSpot Ideas

Brendan_

Custom Business Day/Holiday Calendar for Sequences

Is a feature to customize what days are recognized as non-business days being considered or developed?  It'd be nice to set certain days to automatically skipped (not just weekends) when sending sequences.

27 Replies
davidtaylorjr
Participant

Just to have holidays in general would be great. Not just for sequences but for meetings as well.

christourre
Participant

Agreed, had too many sequencial emails received on Christmas day this year.  An orgnizational calendar that would allow you to specify holidays would be great.  This would also allow you to block off days that the office may be closed (e.g. company outing) if you did not want customers/leads to receive communication when your org is OOO. 

Brendan_
Member

It would also be cool to set "custom weekends."  For example, I only want prospects to receive emails on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.  I know that there can be some (in my opinion, hacky) workarounds for this but "custom weekends" would be better.

sjudson
HubSpot Product Team

Now in beta is a new Sequences feature to allow users to see and edit scheduled emails. This will enable you to change the scheduled send time of an email should it fall on a holiday. 

davidtaylorjr
Participant

That's not really what we are looking for. We want to be able to set global holidays so emails are suspended on those days.

nickbodkins
Participant

@sjudson what we're looking for in sequence timing is the exact same thing we are getting to do in messages. Available Monday-Friday, 9-6 Eastern, etc. Sequences should have global rules or sequence-specific rules: Don't send on weekends, send between x-y time, etc. Especially as you guys think more about insights around best times for responses, etc. You have that data, proactive suggestions to the user about best times of the day or days of the week to schedule sequence message would be super powerful!

ernopyykko
Top Contributor

Hey @sjudson,

 

Might be assuming a bit too much here, but public holidays in a lot of countries tend to be on fixed dates. Would be handy to have bank holidays for different countries available in Hubspot. That way we could be suggested not to contact people on certain days, depending on where they're located. 

 

This could be then used as an option on sequences and templates, to allow reps to exclude sending on public holidays. 

cstetter
HubSpot Product Team

Users have the ability to edit their scheduled Sequence emails. Just navigate to the Sequences tool and click into the Scheduled tab. You can adjust the date and time of the send or the content of the emails. 

Eric_Fox
Member

That solution doesn't really deliver on the request. Brendan_ is asking for an automatic way. Manually editing dozens of sequences to idle for a couple days over Thanksgiving or what have you is a pretty poor substitute for being able to set a global period when sequences don't progress.

mrspabs
Top Contributor | Elite Partner

Yes we need this. I really don't want to look like an **bleep** having my drip emails delivering on Christmas day etc.. It would be great to have a settings area where you enter the dates you dont want to drips to go out.

amyleopold
Participant

 We need this. Adjusting 1 at a time as suggested by HubSpot in this thread is not a feasible solution. 

Thanks!

Certentnick
Member

Yes, my team has on average about 400-500 email scheduled to be sent on any given day, orginating from 20-30 different sequences to multiple countries. It would be much better to have a date field and country setting to pause all automated and sequenced emails for certain days 

crutten
Participant

It would be very helpfull to be able to fill out a 'do not send on" type calendar for Sequences. I add/remove contacts from sequences all the time so managing that by the individual or modifying the entire sequence for the upcoming holiday would be very painstaking and not automated. Please consider adding a do not send on option where we can pick the dates or select a Country for all holidays...etc. Thanks!

paulschmidtvo
Member

IMHO this is simply essential. It's unconscionable to me that we have to reschedule up to 150 sequence-driven emails manually when they are to fall on a Holiday. There should be a tool to select Holidays, and the system would then simply shift the entire sequences schedule by a day or days.

 

At the very least, we should be able to select Holidays and not have new enrollments send on those days. 

 

A CRM is supposed to save time. This constant manual rescheduling is a time suck EVERY holiday. It's by far Hubspot's biggest flaw and the thing that keeps me investigating other CRMs.

 

Please address this.

tmcdonnell
Member

Yes, agreed that this is an absolute must have. Not sure why it can't be added since weekends are already removed. Seems like a straightforward fix. 

 

A little disappointing with the Hubspot team replies - did they even read this thread before responding?

Chevenement
Member

Definitely MUST HAVE feature.

So many times emails end up in the Inbox during holidays. 

This does not help our brand.

Stricker1
Member

It is illogical for a B2B Marketing Automation tool to enable email sends on Business Holidays. An integral Holiday Calendar blackout feature is the minimum. An editable calendar to encompass some of the requests already in this thread (long weekend holidays) would be ideal. As mentioned the manual handling in Sequences is inadequate and rapidly scales effort to unmanageable levels as Sales reps multiply and their number of active Sequences grow. Please help. 

tmcdonnell
Member

Just wanted to comment on this thread again since I got hate mail form the sequences that were sent out yesterday...thanks, Hubspot...

talcohen
Member

When will this feature be developed?

it's a very important one and I must say that honestly, it's surprising that a tool like Hubspot doesn't have it as part of its features.

 

ChaosFreak
Contributor

Hi @talcohen

Unfortunately the answer is "never". Hubspot almost never develops the features that users want. You should get used to that now if you're planning to use HubSpot long term. Four out of five times when I come to the HubSpot community trying to find out how to do something that should be easy and obvious, I instead see these long threads (many of which started 4-5 years ago) with hundreds of people saying "this is essential, when will HubSpot develop it?" I don't think I've ever seen a thread where HubSpot actually developed the feature.

They are now planning a new feature called "HubSpot Hero" but when you look at the details, it's clear they are planning to fob off customer support onto their customers, so things are about to get worse, unfortunately...