Subscribe to List/Unsubscribe From List

Hello, all:

I have a series of emails I send out on schedule via Automation to cold leads and former leads/clients.

I used to have one Automation for this, until my # of emails got to over 300 and performanace edting the Automation was impossible.

To fix this, I made several automations. For example, Follow up 1, Follow up 2, etc. Then, each Automation only only gets 50 emails.

At the end of each automation, I Unsubscribe them from the current list and Subscribe them to the next list in sequence. For example, at the end of Follow up 1, I unsub from 1 and sub to 2. Then when 2 is done, they go to 3, and so on.

Here’s the question. Should I sub them to the new list first and then unsub them second?

Or should I unsub first and then sub them second?

Another way to ask this is if someone is in a an Automation and they are in the automation because a triggering event is “subscribe to follow up list one”, if I, in the middle of the automation, unsubscribe them, do they stop receiving emails or do they continue to receive emails until they reach the end of that automation?

Trying not to screw this up too bad. Lol.

And advice/insight would be appreciated.

Second question: I have over 1000 people in the old Automation. I put “Subscribe to Follow Up 1” at the end, which should them move them to the new Automation.

But if I remove all triggering events from the origianl 300+ email Automation, will all those folks top getting emails forever, or should they move thru the old list and onto the new one thanks to “Subscribe to Follow up 1”?

I’d recommend subscribing to the new list first, then unsubscribing from the current list. This ensures your leads/clients remain in the new automation without gaps.

If you remove triggering events from your old automation, people already in the automation will continue receiving emails until they reach the end. As long as you’ve added “Subscribe to Follow Up 1” at the end, they’ll automatically move to the new list and automation without issue once they complete the old automation. The exception to that would be if you have any steps in the automation that check for and/or add/remove based on lists, etc.

Hope this helps!

Hey there, Devin from Automations here. You really don’t need to have unique lists for any of the automations. You can use a single list for all of them and either use the Enter automation action OR use a Tag to enter them into the next flow.

This is best to ensure you respect the users desire to unsubscribe if they do so early on in the series (i.e. don’t subscribe them to List 2 if they unsubscribed from List 1).
You can set the unsubscribe logic at the automation level under Manage Messages to ensure all of the automations are assigned only to a specific list so that you avoid getting users unsubscribing from all lists without having to rely on the List trigger (as you might have in the past).

As for the question around sending: if the user is unsubscribed from the assigned List(s) that an automation has OR is not on them, they do not receive the emails when they arrive at the action. This is also true if they unsubscribe from the list they subscribed to in order to trigger the automation.

Lastly, removing the triggers will not remove a contacts lists associations for an automation. The contact is assigned those when they enter the automation so, even if the trigger is removed, they still would unsubscribe from the triggering list.

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