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Actions

An action is a step in a journey that does something for a contact — sends them a message, tells your team about them, changes something about their record, or moves them somewhere else in your systems. Actions make up the bulk of most journeys: after a trigger starts things off, actions are usually what the journey is actually there to do.

The action types

  • Send message — sends an email or text to the contact. You write (or ask the assistant to draft) the content, choose the channel, and for email, which subscription list it's sent under so recipients can unsubscribe from it.
  • Notify team — sends an internal notification to people on your team, by email or in-app, rather than to the contact. Useful for flagging a contact to a teammate — for example, when someone meets criteria that calls for a personal follow-up.
  • Update contact — changes one or more fields on the contact's record, such as setting a value, clearing a field, or adjusting it based on what it currently holds.
  • Membership — adds the contact to a segment or removes them from one. Use this to move contacts between audiences as they progress through a journey.
  • Apply Tag — applies a tag to the contact, or removes one. Tags are a lightweight way to label contacts, and applying one here can also be used elsewhere to trigger other journeys.
  • Webhook — sends a request to an external web address outside the product, with a method, headers, and body you configure. This is for technical users only — it's meant for connecting custom systems, so ask your dev team if a journey needs one.
  • Enroll in journey — enrolls the contact in a different journey, letting you chain one automation into another instead of duplicating steps.

When a journey is linked to a campaign, the emails sent by its send message actions carry that campaign's tracking parameters on outgoing links, the same as an email sent directly from the campaign, and those sends count toward the campaign's metrics. If the campaign doesn't have a tracking name set, the email still sends — its links just go out without those parameters. Text messages sent from the same action are not affected, since text links use their own short-link tracking instead.

Once a journey linked to a campaign has scheduled or sent an email, that campaign's tracking name can no longer be changed — it's already built into the links that went out, so the field becomes read-only.

Steps

  1. On the journey canvas, open the step palette along the side and switch to the Actions category.
  2. Drag the action you want onto the canvas, or click it to drop it in.
  3. Draw a line from the previous step to the new action to connect it into the flow, in the order you want it to happen.
  4. Click the action to open its settings panel, and fill in the details specific to that action — the message content and channel for a send, the field and new value for an update, the tag for an apply-tag step, and so on.
  5. Continue connecting further steps after the action if the journey keeps going.
  6. Your changes save automatically. Publish the journey when you're ready for the action to run for real contacts.

Tips

  • You can chain multiple actions in a row — for example, send a message and then apply a tag marking that the contact received it.
  • Ask the AI assistant to draft message content for a "send message" action if you'd rather describe what you want in plain language than write it from scratch.
  • If you're not sure whether a change belongs in an "update contact" step or a "membership" step, remember that update contact changes a field value, while membership moves the contact in or out of a segment.

FAQ

Q: Can I set up a webhook action myself? A: The Webhook action is intended for technical users connecting to external systems, so it's best to ask your dev team to set it up or review it with you rather than configuring it on your own.

Q: What happens if a send action fails, like a bad email address? A: You can choose how the step handles an error — either it retries automatically, or it follows a separate error path you connect on the canvas, so you can route the contact somewhere sensible instead of the journey silently failing for them.