How Deleting Contacts Affects Your Ongoing Campaigns

Automation journeys are built to run quietly in the background — nurturing leads, sending drip campaigns, and triggering personalized emails based on user actions. But what happens when a contact gets deleted in the middle of that journey?

In Mailmodo, the equivalent of deleting a contact is archiving. And while it might feel like a harmless cleanup task, archiving contacts mid-journey can silently disrupt your automation flows in ways you won’t be alerted about — unless you’re actively looking for it.

In this guide, we’ll break down exactly what happens when contacts are archived during an active journey, how that affects journey performance, and how to measure the effects using Mailmodo’s reporting tools.

What is archiving a contact in Mailmodo?

Mailmodo doesn’t support direct deletion of contacts. Instead, it offers archiving, which removes contacts from all active marketing operations while still retaining their past campaign activity.

When a contact is archived, they are:

• Removed from all lists, segments, and ongoing journeys

• No longer eligible to receive emails or be evaluated in automated workflows

• Retained in reports and dashboards for historical tracking

How archiving impacts ongoing journeys

If a contact is active in a journey and gets archived, they are instantly removed from that journey — no matter what step they were on.

Here’s what that means:

• The contact will stop receiving all future emails, wait steps, or conditional logic within the journey

• They will be excluded from any decision paths or goal checks

What visible effects can this have on your journeys?

When this happens at scale — for example, after a list cleanup — you may notice:

• Drop in email sends: Journey steps will have fewer sends than expected

• Reduced conversion metrics: Contacts archived mid-journey won’t convert, skewing journey performance

• Incomplete journey paths: Analytics may show a steep drop-off after a certain step

• Shrinking segments: Segments tied to journey engagement may lose contacts unexpectedly

Because these disruptions don’t trigger any alerts, the only way to catch them is by proactively monitoring your journey data.

How to check how much your journey was affected by archiving contacts

Mailmodo gives you a simple but powerful way to measure the impact of contact archiving — through journey-level campaign reports.

Use individual campaign within reports to analyze engagement trends

Every email step inside a journey is linked to its own campaign report. You can use this to track engagement on a daily basis and identify any sudden drops that may be tied to contact archival.

Here’s how:

1. Go to your Journey from the Mailmodo dashboard and select the specific running journey.

2. In the campaign table, click on the individual campaign you want to analyze.

3. Scroll down to the Engagement Trend chart. This chart shows parameters such as date, sent, delivered, open, clicks, submissions, and bounces.

Conclusion

Archiving contacts is an essential part of list hygiene — but when done during an active automation journey, it can cause more disruption than you might expect.

Before cleaning up your lists, make it a habit to check journey-level performance. A few minutes of proactive analysis can help you avoid losing leads mid-conversion and keep your automations running at full strength.