When you’re using HubSpot workflows to send emails and notifications to your prospects and to your team, you want them to be helpful and reduce friction. The last thing you want to do is to be annoying and to spam someone’s inbox. 

Most of the time, setting your workflow to only execute during business hours is enough to keep your emails on a ‘natural’ delivery schedule to reduce noise for the recipient. But over the holidays you might want to take some extra steps to let people take their time off and enjoy the break. 

HubSpot recently added “Pause Workflow by Date” capabilities so you can pump the breaks on your workflows at any time of the year. 

When to Pause Your Workflows

Thanksgiving and Christmas are the main times when people are out of office and don’t want to be receiving B2B solicitations. Getting the emails over the break -- or coming back to an inbox that’s unmanageable -- is a sure way to build negative brand association. 

For the B2C crew, if you’re running some hot Black Friday sales or a ‘countdown to Christmas’ you might want to pause other workflows to avoid over-communicating with your contacts. 

You may also want to pause your workflows for certain times when your know your internal team is not available to engage with your audience, such as a company 'week of rest' or conference when you're generally unavailable and want to encourage your team to disengage from work.   

How to Set a Date to Pause Workflow Actions in HubSpot

Access your workflow settings for your HubSpot account.

• Navigate to Automation > Workflows
• Hover over Workflow, then click Edit
• In the workflow editor, click the Settings tab

Basic Workflow Settings

In your basic settings you can set when you want your workflow to execute, by days of the week and times of day. 

Below that the section, you’ll now see a section to pause actions.

When you enable these pause dates, any action that would have occurred on that day will execute on the next available date. 

Examples

If your workflows are set to execute Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm and you pause them for Thanksgiving Day, any action that would have been triggered on that Thursday would now be triggered on Friday. If you paused the workflow for Thursday and Friday, the actions would kick back in on Monday at 9am. 

Set to Recur Annually

If you want to make sure you don’t forget to pause your emails on Christmas next year, you can check the box to have this pause action recur annually.  

Advanced Workflows & Configurations

Ready to take your workflows to the next level? Our HubSpot Consultants can get your workflows running so you’re executing all the right actions at the right time.