Delay workflow on the basis of out of office messages

[afuturemanager]

Hello,

we use workflows in which a series of e-mails are sent. If the reader interacts, he will receive the follow-up mail directly, if he does not interact, he will receive it after the set delay.
Now my question: there are leads who are on vacation. It makes no sense to send them all emails. Therefore the following question:
Is there a way to catch this into the workflow.
E.g. by a smart delay that triggers an additional delay due to the out-of-office message?

[MFrankJohnson]

Maybe consider delays without regard for out-of-office messages -- see image.

Click here for full-size image.

[Krystina]

Hi!

Could you, possibly, use Zapier?

You could try this:

1. Setup an auto forwarding rule to catch "auto reply" emails—forward these emails to a GMail account
2. Setup a new Zap in Zapier and have the trigger be a new email in the GMail account
3. Use the built-in tools/logic in Zapier to process "auto reply" emails only
4. Update the contact associated with the email address in HubSpot—a new field that you create to track auto-replies to campaigns/workflows
5. Use the field update in HubSpot to stop and start workflows

If your corporate email is powered by GMail, you could skip step 1.

Maybe?

[PamCotton]

Hi @afuturemanager ,

How are you? 

That's a great question, at the moment workflows won't be able to identify if the customer is out of the office since emails sent from Workflows are marketing emails and HubSpot does not offer a feature that tracks responses to marketing emails. Responses to your marketing emails will be sent to the reply address inbox in your email, which is understandably difficult to track if you have variable reply addresses based on the HubSpot Owner.

The reason we don't offer response tracking in marketing emails is because emails of this type don't normally need to be answered.

As a workaround you could use a if/then branch and insert a link in your email, that if the customer do not click in your link he won't be receiving the following email.

Also you can create a sequence if you would like, that in case the customer answers " vacation email" he will be unnerolled in the sequence, and you are able to check their answer, so in case they are Out of the office, you can reenroll the customer back in the sequence adding a delay to when he is back to work.

More information here :  Create and edit sequences

Stay safe,

Pam

[afuturemanager]

Hi Pam,

thanks.

I understand that it is not possible to track out of office mails automatically.

Is there a technical solution for a semi-automated workaround?
e.g. a workflow 'out of office', which causes actions to pause in other workflows.

[MikeCormack · Accepted solution]

Hi,

So if you create a folder in your outlook for the automatic replies as you probably already do then you can export that data into a csv and then run logic to find the out of office with a contains, extract those ones and upload them as a list for suppression. Minor manual but gets the effect you want. Would have to be done for each email send as like a daily task or whatever but... hope that helps.

[afuturemanager]

That gives me an idea. I create a server-side forwarding rule in Office that gets forwarded to Hubspot. That should make it available at Hubspot. Thanks!

[PamCotton]

Hi @afuturemanager 

We do offer a unerollment and suppression option inside the workflow, but won't be based in the out of office option.

Attaching a screenshot bellow with more information about this feature in the Workflow.

Kindly,

Pam