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Triggers

A trigger (also called an entry step) is the very first step in a journey — it decides when and for whom the journey starts. Every journey needs exactly one, and it's always the first box on the canvas, with lines flowing out from it into the rest of the steps. There are five kinds of triggers, covering the main ways a journey should kick off: something a contact does, a schedule, starting it yourself, an external system telling it to start, or a send to a whole segment at once.

The trigger types

  • Event trigger — fires when something a contact does happens: they submit a form, open or click an email, get created as a new contact, get updated, or a tag gets applied to them. You pick which event to listen for, and can narrow it further with conditions (for example, only when a specific form is submitted, or only when a particular field changes to a particular value). Contact updated also has a Fields picker: pick one or more contact fields and the journey only starts when one of those fields actually changed — leave it empty and any change starts it. You can also set a minimum gap so the same contact doesn't re-trigger the journey too many times in a row from repeated opens or submissions.
  • Scheduled — fires at a set time instead of in response to something a contact does. You can point it at a fixed date and time, at a time relative to one of a contact's date fields (like a renewal date or a birthday), or set it to repeat on a recurring schedule.
  • Manual entry — fires only when you start it yourself, for the segments you choose. Nothing happens automatically; you decide when to enroll contacts.
  • API entry — fires when an external system sends a request to a dedicated web address set up for this journey. This is meant for connecting other tools or custom integrations your team has built; if you need one set up, ask your dev team.
  • Broadcast — fires for every contact in one or more chosen segments at once, as part of sending a one-time email or text to that whole audience. You choose the segments, the channel (email or text), the content, and when it should go out. If the journey is linked to a campaign, an email broadcast carries that campaign's tracking parameters and counts toward its metrics, the same as any other email send from the journey.

Using more than one trigger

A journey can have several triggers, and each one starts the journey at itself. So a "First name changed" trigger and an "Email changed" trigger on the same journey each begin at their own node, and each can lead into its own steps before joining a shared path — you don't need a separate journey per event.

Two things to keep in mind:

  • A contact still only travels the journey once at a time. If someone is already partway through, a second trigger firing for them doesn't start a parallel run. Whether they can come back through later is governed by Allow re-entry in the journey's settings.
  • Each trigger narrows independently. Two "Contact updated" triggers can watch different fields, and a contact's edit starts the journey at whichever one matches the field that actually changed.

The "Contact updated" event

Contact updated is the event to reach for when you want a journey to react to a contact's details changing — a lifecycle stage moving to "customer", a city being filled in, an email address being corrected.

Narrowing it down. Left as-is, it starts the journey on any change to the contact, which is almost never what you want. Two settings narrow it:

  • Fields — pick one or more contact fields, and the journey only starts when at least one of those fields actually changed. Picking several means "any of these", not "all of these". Leave it empty and any change starts the journey.
  • Conditions — pick a field and a value, and the journey only starts when the change lands on that value. Conditions on this trigger look at the new value, so "Lifecycle stage is customer" means "changed to customer", not "was already customer". Use Fields to say which field, and Conditions to say what it became.

Conditions here read the change, not the whole contact. A trigger's conditions can only look at what the event itself carries. To gate on something else about the person — a tag they hold, a value on another field — put an If/Else step immediately after the trigger; that step can see the full contact. And if what you actually want is "when this tag is applied", that's its own trigger (Tag applied), not a condition on Contact updated. Publishing will refuse a trigger whose conditions are set up the wrong way round and will point at the node to fix.

What counts as an update. The trigger fires for changes made through:

  • editing a contact by hand in the app
  • edits the assistant makes for you when you ask it to
  • a contact filling in one of your web forms
  • a sync from a connected CRM, whether it comes through one record at a time or as a bulk sync
  • a spreadsheet import, but only if that import was set to run live — imports are silent by default precisely so a 50,000-row file doesn't enroll everybody at once. See Importing contacts.

What deliberately does not count. A journey's own Update contact step (and its Apply tag step) does not fire this trigger. That's a safety guard, not an oversight: without it a journey that sets a field could re-enroll its own contacts forever, or ping-pong endlessly with a second journey listening for the field it writes.

Contact status isn't offered. You won't find Status in the Fields picker or in the condition fields for this trigger. Archiving a contact is how the app deletes them, and archived contacts can't be enrolled in a journey — so a "when status changes" trigger would look like it was set up correctly and then silently never start anything for anyone. It's left out rather than left broken.

Replaces "Contact field changed." A Contact field changed trigger used to be offered, and older journeys may still be built on it. It has been retired in favour of Contact updated and is no longer in the event list, so you can't pick it on a new journey. If you have an existing journey on it that never seemed to start anyone — that's exactly what was wrong with it, and rebuilding that journey on Contact updated is the fix.

Steps

  1. On a new or draft journey's canvas, open the step palette along the side and switch to the Entry category.
  2. Drag the trigger type you want onto the canvas, or click it to drop it in. This becomes the starting point of the journey.
  3. Click the trigger step to open its settings panel.
  4. Fill in the details for that trigger type — for example, which event to listen for and any conditions to narrow it, the date or recurring schedule, which segments to enroll, or the endpoint and content for a broadcast.
  5. Draw a line from the trigger to the next step in your journey to connect it into the rest of the flow.
  6. Your changes save automatically. Publish the journey when you're ready for the trigger to start working for real contacts.

Tips

  • Event triggers are the most common choice for journeys that should react to something a contact does in the moment, like signing up or opening an email.
  • Use a scheduled trigger for anything date-driven, such as a reminder ahead of a renewal or an annual check-in.
  • A broadcast trigger is best for a one-time send to an audience rather than an ongoing, per-contact journey — use manual entry or an event trigger if you want the journey to keep enrolling contacts over time.

FAQ

Q: Can I change a journey's trigger after I've already built the rest of it? A: Yes, you can edit the trigger step's settings at any time on the canvas, the same way you'd edit any other step. Just make sure the rest of the journey still makes sense for the new trigger before you publish.

Q: I edited a contact and my "Contact updated" journey didn't start — why? A: Check three things, in this order. First, the Fields picker: if it lists fields you didn't actually change, the journey correctly stayed put. Second, the source of the edit — a journey's own Update contact step never re-triggers a journey, and a spreadsheet import only counts if it was run live rather than silently. Third, whether the contact is archived: archived contacts are never enrolled in journeys.

Q: What's the difference between manual entry and a broadcast trigger? A: Manual entry starts a journey for the segments you choose, and the journey then runs its normal steps for each contact individually. A broadcast trigger is specifically built for sending a single email or text to an entire segment at once, with the send itself configured on the trigger.