Limits on Bulk Actions

When you send or schedule an email, process a postcard, or publish a website or landing page, we place a temporary hold on some bulk actions for your audience. This helps us ensure proper delivery and gather important data for your reports.

In this article, you'll learn about limitations on bulk actions, and alternative ways to make changes to your audience.

About the bulk actions limit

When you send or publish a marketing message, your audience will need to remain intact for a certain period of time. This means we'll temporarily limit the following actions.

• Combine audiences
• Delete audience

These actions can be limited for a few reasons.

You scheduled or sent an email within the past 7 days.

• Recipients generally interact with an email in the first week after a send. We need your audience to remain intact during this period, while we gather engagement statistics for your reports.
• If your active email automations send one or more emails each week, you’ll need to temporarily pause them to access all of the bulk action.
• Scheduled emails also limit bulk actions. Pause your scheduled email if you’d like to perform a bulk action on your audience.

Your audience is connected to a Customer Journey.

• Customer Journeys in an active, paused, or draft status will prevent your audience from being combined or deleted. Delete your Customer Journey if you’d like to perform a bulk action on your audience.

You published a website or landing page.

• While your website or landing page is published, you won't be able to perform bulk actions on its related audience. To use a bulk action, temporarily unpublish your website or landing page.

Your postcard is still being processed.

• When a postcard is processing, your audience will need to remain intact. You will not be able to perform a bulk action on your audience until your postcard is sent to the printer.

Alternative actions

To work around bulk action limitations without stopping your emails, you may want to try one of these alternatives.

• Copy contacts
  If you need to move contacts from one audience to another, copy them instead. We typically advise against storing duplicate contacts across multiple audiences, because it can increase your monthly bill, but we know that it's necessary in some cases. After you copy your contacts, you may want to archive them from the original audience to prevent billing changes.
• Remove specific contacts
  Even though you can’t delete your entire audience, you can still remove individual contacts. Keep in mind, this may impact postcards that have not yet been sent. To learn about the different ways to remove contacts from your audience, read Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts and Delete Contacts.

Audience actions are permanent and can't be undone. Review our requirements and best practices and back up your lists before you make any major changes.

Troubleshooting bulk actions

I waited 7 days after sending an email, but bulk actions are still limited.

There may still be an active website or landing page, automated email, or postcard associated with the audience. To resolve this issue, navigate to the Campaigns page and pause or unpublish any active emails or customer journeys for your audience. If you have a website, follow the steps to unpublish it. If an automated email was sent, you’ll need to wait 7 days after the send date for bulk actions to return.