With the Automated Journey Builder, you can easily pause and edit your automated programs. Read below to learn best practices for editing your programs, as well as some considerations you may need to take before making certain edits.

Instructions

Edit a running program

You need to pause your program before editing steps or changing program settings. To make changes to a running program:

1. Pause your program in the Automated Programs Dashboard.
   Go to Automation > Automated Programs, hover over the running program (with a green dot), and click Pause program:
   
2. Edit your program in the Automated Journey Builder.
   Hover over the paused program (with a yellow dot) and click Edit:
   The Automated Journey Builder appears, where you can:

• Edit steps in the Program Flow
• Add or delete your program's email messages
• Change your program's source list and segments
• Create Early Exit conditions
• Update your program's Settings

Learn more about these options in our Automated Journey Builder User Guide.

Edit program steps

If you remove a step that contacts are currently in, such as a wait step, you'll have the option to either remove these contacts from the program or move contacts to the next step once you restart the program. 

Time-based wait steps use the date and time of a contact's entry to determine when to advance them to the next step. For example, if a contact enters a Wait 1 Day step and the program is paused for two days, they move to the next step immediately when you restart the program.

Learn how pausing a program may impact its Program Flow and steps here.

Remove or change your program's list

You can remove a list or segment within the Automated Journey Builder's Settings. If you remove a program's Source List or Segment, the program will remove all contacts from that list as well. If you delete a list from the Contacts page of your Act-On account, the list and its contacts will also be removed from any programs where they're currently in use.

Other best practices

While there are many ways to build automated programs in Act-On, the particular flow of a given program or set of programs will always be unique to your goals and business needs. Here are a few strategies that might help keep things organized and efficient:

• Always stage and test your program, including changes to your program, in a test version before publishing or saving updates to your final program
• If your Program Flow is getting too long or contains lots of branches, consider splitting it into a set of smaller, simpler programs
• Keep up-to-date documentation about the programs in your account, including information on the purpose of each program and notes about any changes made to programs