HubSpot Ideas

BrianR

Pausing a Sequence

I think it would be good to be able to pause a sequence. Sometimes you put a prospect on a sequence and things happen... illness, weather (hurricanes) and there is no sense continuing sending them emails and making calls when you know they aren't going to be there. I think it would be good to be able to pause them and schedule them to restart at a later date... Thoughts?

103 Replies
glencornell
HubSpot Product Team

Hi Community,

 

We are now taking some calls to plan the scope of this project, and I am updating the status now to "In planning". If you would like to participate in our discovery and research, you can fill this short form and I will reach out about our next steps.

(this is an updated link from the one provided when we this item was "being reviewed")

 

As we learn more and make progress, I will update this issue, thanks everyone for your feedback and looking forward to hearing from some of you!

 

Best,

Glen 

finn
Top Contributor

+1

rtruncale
Top Contributor

Please add me to the research. Thanks

rruain
Member

I find it unacceptable that I cannot pause my sequences today, as the majority of my clients are observing Juneteenth.  This makes myself and my company look completely insensitive as they are receiving solicitations from me today.  

finn
Top Contributor

+1 

 

We have the same with international markets: what is a work day in one country might be a public holiday in another. 

dougfairbro
Contributor | Diamond Partner

This year I've seen more out of office responses than I have seen at any time before COVID. 

 

The challenge is that I want to send out weekly emails to my contacts, but I don't want to send the email to contacts that I know are on holiday, or furlough. It's a feature I've always figured would be useful but now it is more of a need.

 

Sending emails after receiving an OoO is pointless as not only will the recipent not be reading emails (majority of the time) but it will also harm performance metrics. 

 

Therefore I propose HubSpot adds a new feature so that we can set contacts as 'on holiday' or 'pause email until X date', thus suppressing them from emails and tasks until they return on the specified date. Better yet, the feature would also generate a task to notify the contact owner that said user is back in.

 

E32crew
Member

I'm afraid we are going to have to look at other tools because of the lack of this basic feature. This needs to be an option. I spent a lot of time setting these up. I guess I made the mistake of assuming this basic feature was in place already. 

CSG
Participant | Partner
Participant | Partner

This would be very helpful. I hate to stop a sequence and restart later by sending the first email again, but it doesn't make sense to send emails or call when I know someone is out of the office. 

RV6
Participant

Any Updates @glencornell ?

 

We waste a lot of time with the workaround...

Catrina
Member

Yes! I need to be able to pause over the holidays too! 

glencornell
HubSpot Product Team
 
chad2
Participant

With the upcoming holidays, it is imperative that sequences should be able to be paused. Thanksgiving is next week followed by several more holidays. Please consider bumping this to the top of your priority list. Thanks! - Chad

glencornell
HubSpot Product Team

Some details on this beta for folks that are looking to get access:

 

We have finished the ability to bulk pause sequence enrollments, but at the moment we are still working on the ability to bulk resume sequence enrollments (which technically is actually the more complex part of the work!). There are also several usability issues that we are working to resolve. We hope to have the ability to bulk resume ready in the week following Thanksgiving. So for folks that do need access, this is how it will look:

https://www.loom.com/share/5b66bdd74a334380abb73f250cbb9547

MonikaS
Contributor

Awesome, well done! So glad it came now!

Lizagalano
Member

I was desparately looking to pause my sequence so emails don't get sent over the holidays.  See that I am probably not going to be getting the feature anytime soon, I disabled my email integration. I tested it and when I re-enable it, the emails that were scheduled started to send again.  It's a desparate workaround.  Hopefully there won't be any negative side effects. Fingers crossed.

Lizagalano_2-1606337369955.png

 

 

glencornell
HubSpot Product Team

Hi Community,

 

The ability to pause and resume sequences is now live to all portals with access to sequences! You will be able to do this from the enrollment table of the specific sequence.

 

View a gif of sequences being paused

View of gif of sequences being resumed

 

When paused, sequences retain the time delay before the next step. So if a sequence that was scheduled to send on Tuesday is paused on Monday, and resumed on Wednesday, the next step will send on Thursday.

 

For those following this issue, the infrastructure changes needed to make this change were beyond our initial anticipation, so we appologize for the time spent waiting.

 

For those following our roadmap of priorities in sequences, we are currently focused on improving the visibility of contacts engaging with seqyences (opens and clicks)  and making improvements to the experience in the management of enrollments (better bulk management for pausing, unenrolling, etc.) 

 

Thanks,

Glen

 

hamish3
Member

This is awesome! Thanks Glen!

WorkflowNinja
Participant

Awesome addition. Would love the ability to have sequences PAUSE instead of UNENROLL.

 

Scenario: Many times our team will get a low level response like "Thanks for the email" and it will unenroll them from the sequence. Ideally, we would like to to PAUSE their sequence... and then we would decide whether to Unenroll or Continue based on the level of response. 

 

Right now we just throw them into the sequence again at the place they left off.... but it skews our sequence data. 

 

(Related: Would love to be able to A) Edit a sequence without losing the open/click/response rate data and B) Delete people from a sequence as an admin that shouldn't have been included.) 

ngeer
Member

Hi, 

 

It would be great to be able to bulk pause & resume sequences for more than 10 contacts at a time (i.e. the full list). 

 

 

ASpencer
Member

Glad to see that you can pause a sequence. However, I have a sequence that needs to be paused. If I have 200 people in a sequence, and only 10 people show up on a page, I have to go through 20 pages to pause the sequence? Then go through 20 more to resume? Is there any way to add a display button that allows viewing 50 or 100 contacts in a sequence on the sequence info page as you can do in other parts of Hubspot? Would make needing to do this much easier.