Thread by @ruinunes

How to pause your emails when your subscribers are OoO (Out-of-Office)?

📷 Picture this: You're opening your email inbox after a well-deserved vacation, and your notifications 🔴 banner keeps growing like a maniac. 😱

#emailmarketing #ooo #outofoffice #marketingautomation

Nobody likes that—an inbox filled with emails of all kinds.

It will take a week to go through the entire inbox and select the ones that matter. All of the rest?

❌ Goes to the trash;

❌ Unsubscribe (when we're lucky);

❌ That fabulous spam button is so easy to click. 🫣

➜ The point is that you don't want to be on that batch of emails.

But how can you pause your emails from reaching out-of-office people if they don't say anything?

1️⃣ One of the obvious options is to drop a link for people to access your email marketing preferences and choose a pause period (if your preferences centre allows it).

2️⃣ One is to automatically use the OoO replies you get when you send a campaign to change your list information.

"Oh, amazing!"—I can hear your little sarcastic voice from here. 😅—"If that's so easy, how can I do it?"

If you're working with a developer, it's pretty standard to bridge your email sender address inbox and your list.

Here's the rule:

💥 [New Email Matching Search] > [Update Record]

Simple, right?

Sorry, it's not that easy. 🤷‍♂️

It is just like the rule says, but it has more workarounds to be effective.

Here are a few to look at:

1️⃣ Make a search rule that includes all possible Out-of-Office automatic messages.

2️⃣ Make the program query any identifiable date format.

3️⃣ Create a simple rule that any date later than TODAY found inside the OoO should be the expected return date.

4️⃣ Create a column in your list named Status and change the content of that column depending on what you consider pertinent to your case: active, paused, non-engaged, etc.

5️⃣ Run a small program outside your email marketing and email client flow that's only managing the change of this status according to each deadline OoO. When the date is here, it changes the status to active again.

All of this can happen outside your usual email sender inbox, and your email marketing platform since most of them don't have this natively prepared.

We've prepared something similar with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and a few others, but very rarely can this happen on most email marketing solutions.

I think it's not feasible when you have a small list. It doesn't pay off to do this custom work (coding, API connectors, etc.) if it's only going to impact 30 or 40 a year, or you're someone who only sends one email per month.

But when you have a few tens of thousands of subscribers on your list, making them happy and caring to avoid being tagged as a spammer or losing a chunk of them every month can be worth it.

Let me know if you have ever tried this and if you think it can be worth it in your case.

Have a great day!