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How to Manually Add Subscribers to an Automation
How to Manually Add Subscribers to an Automation

Do you need to pull certain subscribers into an automation, but set up the automation a bit too late? We can fix that.

Updated this week

Automations aren’t retroactive.

This means if you create a Visual Automation triggered by a form, the only subscribers who will enter that automation are those who sign up to that form after the automation was created.

Now, that’s all well and good if you’re aware of it beforehand and can plan accordingly. But what if something changes, or for some reason you create an automation a bit too late?

No worries! Here’s a workaround you can use to retroactively pull those subscribers into that automation.

1. Create and add a new tag as an additional entry point to your automation

To add an additional entry point to an automation, click the plus sign to the right of the current rightmost entry point.

Next, click ‘Is added to a tag’, then type a new tag name in the field. Click ‘Add Event’, and your new tag will be created and added as a new entry point for the automation.

Don’t worry too much about what to name your tag. We’ll be deleting it by the end of this tutorial! Just make sure you create a new tag instead of picking an existing one.

2. Add the tag to the subscribers you want pulled into that automation

❗️Make sure you complete Step 1 first! For this method to work, you have to add the tag as an Entry Point before you tag your subscribers.

Click here for a guide on how to bulk-add a tag to your subscribers!

3. Wait for those subscribers to be pulled into your automation

Since those subscribers will have received the tag after it was added as an entry point to the automation, those subscribers will be pulled into that automation.

It may take a few minutes for the system to fully process this action, especially if you’re adding it to a large number of subscribers. You should be able to check the progress by monitoring the number of subscribers marked as Completed under that entry point here:

NOTE: It takes the system longer to update the 'completed' number than it does to actually complete the bulk action. One way you can check a little sooner is to click on 'completed' on the step in your automation. That will redirect you to a page showing you how many subscribers have been processed through the node. You can actually observe the progress by refreshing that page and watching the count at the bottom increase.

4. Delete the tag and entry point

Once the Subscribers have been pulled into the automation, you no longer need the tag or entry point we created.

There are two things to delete in order to fully ‘clean up’ this process:

  1. The temporary tag you created from the sidebar of the subscribers page (How To Delete a Tag)

  2. The entry point of the automation

Removing the tag will not remove the subscribers from the automation.

NOTE: Deleting the entry point for an automation will remove any of its statistics. If you think you'll need statistics later, we recommend not editing the automation.

That’s it! Those subscribers will now continue to move through that automation as expected.

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