Best Practices - Maternity Leave

It's an interesting question. I suppose it makes sense not to fill their inbox while they are away. 

The execution of a "pause for n months" campaign is straightforward, but it would be a pretty manual process to identify these leads and put them into the campaign, which could be onerous depending on your list size.  

If these are replies coming to sales reps, you could create a requestable campaign that they can activate via Sales Insight (if you use it). 

SMART LIST
Campaign is Requested, Source = Sales Insight

FLOW
Change Data Value - Marketing Suspended = True
Wait, n months/days/etc/
Change Data Value - Marketing Suspended = False

If you wanted to be even more personalized you could try creating and having your reps populate a date field "Suspend Until Date" or something -- use the change data value on that field as a trigger, then use that field as the token in your wait step: 

Wait until {{lead.suspend until date}}

Then after you reactivate them, send a welcome back/congrats email when they return ;) 

You can use a Marketing Suspended campaign for anyone. Run a campaign:

List=Soft Bounces
Flow: Marketing Suspended=T
wait X time
Marketing Suspended=F

Except that, if it is an auto-response, I don't think they would be flagged as a soft bounce, no? 

Because folks could set up an auto-response if they are out of the office for a day or a week but the email is still perfectly valid. 

We mark them Marketing suspend.  On average, what we've seen are people going on maternity leave or extended leave for at least 3 months, some from Europe for 6 months, this is based on the autoresponse messages.  If they don't tell us when they'll be back in the office, we keep them marketing suspended for 3 months.  We have campaigns that reverse their marketing status each month.  If they come back to work mid-month, we reverse marketing suspend for the following month.