Prevent People from Being in Too Many Flows and Getting Spammed
One of the biggest concerns that people have is that having too many Flows could lead to over-emailing subscribers and in some cases straight up spamming them (e.g, sending too many emails in a short amount of time).
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution and the preventative measures for this problem would vary depending on the number of Flows you have and the way they are set up. That being said, there are a few methods that you can use to help avoid this problem.
The End Flow Step
The End Flow Action step enables you to eject people from the current Flow or any other Flows in your account, that way preventing people to be in too many Flows at the same time.
Let's say you have two activated Flows. If a person is already in one of the Flows and enters the other one — you'd like to eject them from the first Flow.
To achieve that you'd want to use three types of step:
- Add Tag Action Step
- End Flow Action Step.
- Tag Added Trigger Step.
Let's examine the Flows below:
Flow 1:
First, (to the left) we add the tag entered-flow-1 whenever a person enters "Flow 1". This is to ensure we know when a person has entered "Flow 1".
Second, (to the right) we use the Tag Added Trigger Step connected to the End Flow Action step to eject a person from "Flow 1" whenever a person enters "Flow 2".
Flow 2:
"Flow 2" is very similar to "Flow 1", the only difference is that we have switched the tags around.
First, (to the left) we add the tag entered-flow-2 whenever a person enters "Flow 2". This is to ensure we know when a person has entered "Flow 2".
Second, (to the right) we use the Tag Added Trigger Step connected to the End Flow Action step to eject a person from "Flow 2" whenever a person enters "Flow 1".
This setup will eject people from Flows whenever they enter another Flow.
Filter Steps
The setup above will eject people from Flows whenever they enter another Flow. But what about preventing people from entering a Flow if they have already entered another flow.
Instead of using the End Flow Action Step, you'd want to use Filters.
In the scenario examined before, we'd need to use the Has Tag Filter Step to prevent people from continuing down the Flow in case they have already entered the other Flow.
This is how "Flow 2" would look like in that case:
We're using the Has Tag entered-flow-1 Filter Step. If the person doesn't have the tag (i.e., has not entered "Flow 1") they will continue down "Flow 2", otherwise, they will be ejected from the flow.
Note that it's not required to use the End Flow Step in that case. People that don't meet the conditions of the Has Tag Filter Step will simply stop the Flow there. However, it's convenient to have the End Flow Step as you can see how many people have ended the Flow through the metrics of the step.
Wait Steps
If you have two or more Flows with email sequences — for example, a Lead Nurturing sequence and a User Onboarding sequence — you might want to keep people in both flows but space out the emails evenly to avoid spamming people.
A handy tip in that scenario is to use the advanced options in the Wait step and send the emails in the flows at different days and/or times. You could send the Lead Nurturing emails on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the Onboarding sequence on Tuesdays, and Thursdays.
Wait Step with advanced timing.
This is how your first Flow might look like:
