How to exclude subscribers from a campaign or an automation

You can exclude certain subscribers from receiving a campaign or from being triggered in a workflow. 

This means that the subscribers in the excluded group(s) or segment(s) will be ignored, even if they are duplicated in any other list that you select as a recipient or participant.

For example, you want to send a campaign to those who are in Group A, but you don’t want those who are in Group B to receive this campaign. Since some subscribers can be in both groups, you would select the option to exclude those who are in Group B. This means that everybody who is in both Groups A and B will not receive the campaign.

This feature will save you a lot of time by not individually choosing which subscribers you want to include or exclude.

You can select and filter recipients on the Details page of a campaign.

By choosing Select recipients, you’ll open the Basic tab, where you can exclude recipients by simply clicking on Exclude segment or Exclude group.

Once a segment or group has been successfully excluded, it will be highlighted in red. The number of recipients will also be updated at the bottom of the page.

By choosing Advanced filters, you can exclude subscribers in a more specific and flexible way, using different conditions or filters. 

You can choose one of the predefined filtering options: 

• Exclude last emailed - filter out subscribers who have been emailed in the last X number of days.

• Time inactive - select subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails lately.

• Signup source - select subscribers by registration method, such as API or webforms. 

Additionally, you can specify your own conditions using More advanced filters.

For example, if you want to exclude subscribers who do not belong in a specific group and signed up after a certain date, you would set up the following conditions:

Groups > Does not belong to > [name of group] and Signup date > Is after > [date]

As you can see, you have a lot of different ways to exclude subscribers, not just by groups or segments, but also by any other condition that’s applicable.

Excluding subscribers is only available in workflows with the following triggers: 

• Subscriber joins group(s)

• Event anniversary

• Exact date

To exclude subscribers:

1. Click on the trigger step of the workflow.

2. On the right-hand sidebar, in the Group section, click on the button Exclude to bring up a list of all existing groups. 

3. Select the group(s) that you want to exclude from the workflow, even if the subscribers in it are part of the main workflow group.

4. Click on the Select button and save these settings before completing and activating the workflow.

If a queued subscriber joins one of the excluded groups at any point in the workflow, they will be canceled from it, and no further steps will be executed.