Editing emails after your auto responder is live
diting an email holds it until you publish again. Schedule changes only reach contacts who enroll afterward.
Updated
A live auto responder is different from a draft. People are partway through it, and changing something under them has to be handled carefully. Two rules cover almost everything.
Editing an email holds it until you publish again
Auto responders send the published version of each email. The moment you edit a step, it goes back to unpublished, and we stop sending it.
Nothing errors and nothing is lost. Contacts who reach that step wait there. As soon as you publish the edited email, the queue moves and everyone who was waiting receives it.
This is the behavior most often mistaken for a bug. If your sequence goes quiet right after you fixed a typo, look for an unpublished step.
The fix is one click on the step. You don't need to deactivate the responder or rebuild anything.
Schedule changes only affect new contacts
The order of your emails and the waits between them are frozen when someone enrolls. Everyone in the sequence keeps the schedule they started on, all the way to the end.
So if you add a fourth email, or change a wait from three days to seven, the people currently moving through the sequence are unaffected. They finish on the old plan. Contacts who enroll after the change get the new one.
Otherwise someone three days into a seven-day gap would suddenly get an email they weren't due, and someone else would sit an extra four days because you lengthened a wait they had already half-served.
What each change actually does
- Editing an email's content or subject — holds that step until you publish it. Applies to everyone, including contacts already in the sequence.
- Adding, removing, or reordering emails — applies to new enrollments only.
- Changing a wait — applies to new enrollments only.
- Pausing — stops all sending, keeps everyone's place. Resume and it continues.
- Archiving — ends the responder and exits everyone. Not reversible.
Deleting an email leaves a gap, and that is fine
Remove a step and the remaining emails keep their existing numbers rather than shuffling up. You might end up with emails 1, 2, and 4. Nothing is broken. Renumbering would move people who are tracked by step number, so we leave the numbers alone and skip the missing one.
See also How auto responders work.