Turn back on a lead to receive emails without subsequences

Currently if any reply is received, including an OOO (out of office) reply, the lead is STOPPED and any further messages are STOPPED.

There is no way to turn a lead back on to continue the drip from the place in which they stopped.

That does not make sense, and I think the lack of this function is detrimental to the success of an automated email program like Instantly. This is the reason we use Instantly to begin with…

An OOO email is basically the same as no reply, in my opinion, as it’s not an actual response. It’s essentially a bot 🤖 reply. Not a human.

Currently the way instantly works… by changing the status back to a "lead" it would only re-activate them if there was no reply. Why can't I just turn them back on?

They'll need to be in a subsequence if I want the email resumed….. MY POV… That’s not great since it loses the strategic plan of why we built a sequence in the first place.

According to you and your team, disabling the "stop on auto reply" option from campaign settings would help solve this issue on one hand — but at the macro level it’s affects our ability to make sure we shut off the human replies and not annoy / piss off potential leads.

It’s the automated OOO bot 🤖 replies that is the greatest challenge.

There is NO way to turn back on the lead without a subsequence. A subsequence is not good for us because we specifically write each Step of the drip series for a specific reason… each email should follow the other.

Subsequences do not work well for this since people who are at Step 3 and a ROBOT 🤖 out of office message reply sent, and they are essentially stopped. I want that lead to get Step 4 next…. not a subsequence. And someone who is at Step 1 should go to Step 2, if turned back on.

Here is the suggestion:

1. Remove the subsequence requirement for a scheduled next email.

2. I disagree with turning on the “do not stop on auto-reply” because I typically want a stop on auto reply…. BUT I’d love to have an option that gives these options…

Option A: Pause until (DATE) e.g. Nov 12, 2023 (then it sends them to the next step in their process. If they were at Step 3 at the time we got a reply but wanted to send them back into the drip, it will send Step 4 on Nov 12, 2023. Obviously if Nov 12, 2023 is a Sunday and you only have the campaign set for Monday to Friday, it will actually send on Nov 13. Or you could have an option to force an early send on Nov 12 specifically.

Option B: Same as Option A, but instead of putting a specific date you can put X amount of Days, Weeks, or Months

Basically, allow us to toggle a lead to start getting emails again, based on where they last stopped, on a certain date. That simple.

Thank you.

Updated suggestion: Instead of PAUSE UNTIL, it should be more like RESUME ON. This will avoid any issues. This was Sumit's suggestion which I agree with.