I have many behavioural email automations that get triggered in different scenarios…
For example:
User signs up for a lead magnet (eBook, etc)
A welcome series if they are new to my list
User visits product page X number of times
Abandoned cart series
New customer series for people who make a purchase
VIP customer series for people who make a lot of purchases
Win back series for people who haven’t purchased in X days
Re-engagment series for people who haven’t opened or clicked in a while
etc
etc
These all work great for their particular purpose, but I’m worried that someone will trigger too many of them at once, causing an avalanche of emails to their inbox. This is not good for obvious reasons.
I already asked support if there is some sort of “maximum emails” per day/week setting. But there is not.
Has anyone figured out a way to cap the maximum number of emails a contact is sent?? I’m hoping someone has created an automation or some other type of workaround for this.
P.S. If you think this would be a helpful setting to have please make a quick suggestion for it here Login - ActiveCampaign. The more people that ask, the higher priority it will get.
One way I have seen others limit the avalanche of emails is by using goals within automations. Goals are a way of measuring the effectiveness of your marketing and serve to measure milestones and key events. Below are a couple guides for you to check out:
This has helped a lot. I vaguely knew about goals but never implemented them. Now that I have set them up I can see they’re really useful.
I have added a goal to each “message” automation that ends the automation if the goal is achieved (purchased, clicked, replied, etc) but I’m still worried they might get too many emails at once.
For example, my lead magnets usually have about 4 emails in a series. And the welcome series has 3 emails.
If someone new decides to sign up to 3 of my lead magnets they will get 15 emails in 4 days (3 welcome emails plus 12 lead magnet emails). I would like to avoid that if I can.
Do you know any other ways to put a cap on email frequency?
Assuming you aren’t using wait steps in your automations I think that could be another great way to help the timing of the emails. Maybe something similar to the below automation:
So essentially I’m suggesting that each series is built out similar to the picture so you have a built in wait step and goal for each email in the series. This will also ensure that the lead is not moving on to the next email in the series until they have interacted with the email previous.
If I understand you correctly, I don’t think that will work for me.
Each automation has one goal (e.g. purchase a product) and all the emails in that automation are designed to nurture the lead until they achieve that goal.
Therefore I don’t want to wait for them to interact with an email before sending the next email in the series. That would mean they are not getting all of my nurture emails and less of them convert into in a purchase. Instead, I want to keep sending the nurture emails until they achieve the goal of making a purchase.
Here is an example of a lead magnet automation. I normally have about 4 emails in these lead magnet nurturing series, but I couldn’t fit 4 emails on the screenshot.
This automation works great. The user signs up for a lead magnet, and they are sent a series of emails to get them to purchase a product. If they purchase the product (i.e. they achieve the goal) they skip over the rest of the nurture emails and end the automation.
But the problem is that someone could sign up for 3 different lead magnets at once. And that would trigger 3 of these automations at the same time, causing about 15 emails to arrive in the space of 4 days.
So I need a way of limiting how many emails they will receive if they sign up for a bunch of lead magnets at the same time. Or some other mechanism for limiting the number of emails someone recieves.
Another option that you could use (that I use on some personal projects) is to use our lead scoring functionality as a sending “heat score.”
The way this works, is that you use the “adjust contact score” action inside your automations to add a point(s) to a contact score after you send an email. That way, the “score” doesn’t act like a score at all - it acts like a metric for how many emails the contact has received.
In a separate automation, you can then decrement the points from the contact score on a weekly basis, so that you can create appropriate thresholds to avoid collisions.
A simple way to start doing this, is to make no major changes, other than just add the “adjust contact score” action with a +1 point after every “send email” action. Then you can count how many emails contacts are receiving.
I have added some screenshots and some articles about lead scoring and engagement scoring. They are not exactly what you want, but should be a good place to get your creative juices flowing.
If this approach doesn’t work let me know, I think I have another “weird” way you could do what you want.
Could an easier option be to “End Other Automation” when your highest priority one is started? That way you wouldn’t have 10 automations running, where each might cap out after a couple emails if your weekly quota is met.
Hi Perry, thanks for pointing me out to this thread. I have EXACTLY the same problem. Unfortunately, for the reasons explained already by user, the “setting goal” wont work for me either.
The “end other automation” isn’t awesome either because I would have to add one by one each automation as there isn’t a “end all automations” button. @jskole, would you be open to share your “weird” way you mentioned please?
It’s hard to believe we are only 2 online businesses having this concern and problem!
We’d need PAUSE other automation… essentially a WAIT on other automations.
Example:
I have an automation sending an timed offer when a contact reaches a certain score.
For the next 24h I don’t want any other email to go out.
I need to pause the other automations and resume after 24h.
At present there is no easy way to do this.
It can be done with a tag PAUSE and build every automation to check for the tag PAUSE before sending any email.
It works but it is very cumbersome.
PLEASE, give us the possibility to pause all other automations
I can’t seem to set this automation up. What are you using as the trigger? Because ‘email sent’ is not an option as a trigger unless I’m missing something.
