Remove People from a Flow

People leave a Flow in one of three ways:

Default: when the Flow ends for them.
Forcefully: using the End Flow Step.
Forcefully: through a Filter Step.

Let's explore each one separately.

When the Flow ends for the person

Every Flow has a start (a Trigger Step) and an end (an Action Step). Regardless of whether you use the End Flow Step, every person will eventually leave a Flow once they go through all of the Steps in the Flow.

In the scenario below people will leave the Flow below once they receive the last email:

Using the End Flow Step

The End Flow Action Step can eject people from the current Flow and/or other Flows. By default, the End Flow Step is configured to eject people from the current Flow only.

Let's say you have an onboarding email sequence and you want to stop sending onboarding emails when people upgrade their subscriptions. To do that you could create a separate sub-flow with Trigger Tag Added "paying-user" → End Flow.

It's important to note that the End Flow Step will remove people from the whole Flow. If you have two or more paths that are not connected, the person will be removed from all of them. For instance, in the scenario below the person will be removed both from the onboarding sequence (on the left) and the other sequence (on the right):

Important note: People can re-enter a Flow even when they pass through the End Flow Step. Learn how people can enter and re-enter a Flow.

Using a Filter Step

If a person does not satisfy the conditions of a Filter Step (and depending on how the Filter Step is connected to the rest of the Flow) he or she will leave the Flow.

Filter Steps put people into different paths based on meeting or not meeting the conditions of the Step. If a path does not have a link to other Steps, the person will leave the Flow.

Let's examine the Flow below:

We're using a Check Field Filter Step to put people into different paths based on their country. If the country is US we send them down the email sequence, otherwise, we create a deal in HubSpot.

Now, let's examine the exact same Flow but without the link to the Create HubSpot Deal Step.

If a person is from the US they would still continue down the Flow. However, if the person is not from the US the Flow will end for them on the Check Field Filter Step, simply because there's no path for them to continue in the Flow.

Removing a specific person from a Flow using the Filter Step

The easiest way to remove a specific person from a Flow is to use a Filter Step.

The Check Field Filter Step allows you to be very specific with who you Filter out. For instance, you can use the Email address field to target a specific person.

How to find how many people have ended a Flow?

On each last Step of the Flow, you can see how many people completed the Flow under "Were here".

In the example below 67 people left that Flow after the Send Email Step:

What happens once a person leaves a Flow?

Let's say you create a Flow, 67 people enter and leave that Flow, but later you decide to edit the Flow and add a few more Steps at the end of it.

Once a person leaves the Flow, they will not continue to new Steps that are added in subsequent edits.

If we take our previous example and add 2 more Steps after the last Step, the 67 people that were previously on the last Step will NOT continue to the newly added Wait Step.

However, any new people that enter the Flow for the first time and any people that are currently in the Flow (i.e. haven't reached the last Step, yet) will continue to the newly added Steps.

How to keep people in a Flow?

If you want to prevent people from leaving a Flow, you could do that by adding a Wait Step at the end of the Flow. Make sure you give that Step a long waiting period like 9999 days — that way people will stay in the Flow for a long, long time.

Unlike other Steps, which are processed immediately, a person will remain on a Wait Step for the time period specified on the Step. Because they haven't left the Flow, you can add new Steps later in the Flow and they will be eligible to proceed to them. Learn more about adding Steps to an activated Flow.