I’m curious about what happens if there are subscribers in an active automation, and that automation is then set to inactive. Do all of the subscribers get dumped out of the automation? Does it just “pause” wherever each subscriber is, and pickup where it left off if the automation is returned to active status?
Right now I use an extra “donotmail” tag to manage subscribers who I want to temporarily exclude from a automation sequence… but I’m wondering if there are other options to stop/pause automations (like for holidays or one-time promotional broadcasts, etc.)
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I went ahead and ran a test for this…
I created an Automation as follows:
- Enter Automation on Tag
- Send Email #1
- Wait 10 Minutes
- Send Email #2
- Wait 10 minutes
- Send Email #3
- End Automation
After the system sent Email #2, I changed the status to Inactive. Waited 15 minutes and changed back to Active. 2 minutes later the activity stream showed that it send Email #3 and Completed the automation.
So, pausing an automation by using the Inactive feature is safe.
-Ed
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That is brilliant. Thank you!
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Hi there, Amy from ActiveCampaign’s Customer Experience Team. We’re just refreshing our forum page and I wanted to add some help here for anyone who comes across this page/question/post.
Different scenarios will happen when an automation is paused (set to ‘inactive’):
- No Contacts in the automation: if the automation is paused when there are no contacts in the automation, no contacts will be affected and no contacts will enter the automation
- Contacts ‘waiting’ in wait steps: With wait steps there are 2 types of ‘conditions’ you can set:
- Time based conditions eg: wait for 3 days (from the date of entry to the wait step).
When the contact is in a time based wait step, say 12 hours, and the automation is paused for 14 hours, when the automation is set to active again, the contact will pass through the wait step as the contact has met the wait conditions (waited for at least 12 hours). However if the automation was paused for say 10 hours, when the automation is activated again, the contact will just remain queued at the wait step until a minimum of 12 hours has passed.
- Specific conditions: Wait until contact does X or has tag or date is 15th March 2027 etc.
If the automation is set to active again, and the contact has met the conditions, they will pass through. if not, they will remain queued until meeting the conditions.