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You’ve set up your first automation.
Subscribers are coming in.
Omg, it’s working!
Wait, wait, noooo, why are they being unsubscribed from the sequence??! You’re still adding emails to that!
How do you get them back in??!
When a subscriber is added to a sequence via visual automation, as soon as they’re sent the last published email in the sequence, they are unsubscribed from the sequence (or ‘complete’ the sequence if you’ve got the February 2019 update in your account already).
Here’s what you need to do to get them back in the sequence so they can resume where they left off:
Step 1 – Add more emails to the sequence
Add more published emails at the end. If you are going to be adding to this sequence over a longer period of time and you don’t want subscribers to keep falling out the end, set one email to be published 9999 days later, and add new emails above it:
In this example, you’d publish Day 4 and Day 5 (and even Day 6 or Day 7) when you’re ready. They won’t drop out the end of the sequence though because 999999 is in 2700 years!)
Step 2 – Create a new Visual Automation
This visual automation will be triggered when a subscriber has a specific tag added. I recommend creating a new tag, something like ‘Re-add to Seq: ________’. And then the immediate next action is to add them to the sequence.
Make sure you turn on the visual automation (top right)!
Step 3 – Tag the subscribers to be re-added to the sequence
Next you need to isolate subscribers who need to be re-added to the sequence. This is likely to be subscribers with a specific tag, or possibly subscribers who subscribed to a specific form. (If it’s a form, you’ll need to create a segment of all subscribers who subscribed to that form).
If there’s only a handful of subscribers, you can manually click into their subscriber profiles/accounts and add the tag (that triggers the visual automation you created in Step 2).
If it’s more though, once you’ve isolated the subscribers to be re-added (this might mean clicking on the tag, or into the segment), you can then select them all → bulk actions → tag (with the tag that triggers the visual automation you created in Step 2).
Step 4 – Wait a few minutes
When I tested this it took about 5 minutes. Be patient. Not all numbers in ConvertKit update in real-time (for app speed). But it does work and they will be re-added to the sequence and resume where they left off!
Notes
- In Step 3, you need to be careful that you’re not tagging people who are not yet supposed to be in the sequence, as anyone you tag will be added to the sequence immediately. If you add someone to the sequence who is already in the sequence though, nothing will happen, they’ll just continue on as they are.
- If you’re using rules, bulk actions or the old-style form builder to add subscribers to sequences, you don’t need to worry about any of this as subscribers eternally stay in a sequence unless you remove them via an automation rule of some sort.
- If you have several sequences you need to add people back to, you can just create one visual automation in Step 2 that has up to 5 different tag entry points, followed by the corresponding sequence they are re-added to.