How triggers work in drip campaigns

If you want to add personalization and flexibility to your email campaigns, you may enjoy our Trigger feature. Triggers help create conditions in your email sequence and send alternative emails to your recipients based on their engagement.

Let’s dig deeper into how triggers work and how to add one to your sequence: 

1) Add a trigger to your sequence

On the sequence editor page, drag & drop a trigger element to the field.

In the flow, the email element must come before the trigger element. After the trigger, you can continue the sequence with email, delay, or goal element. 

2) Define trigger settings

Click the trigger element to activate settings pop-up. 

Triggers are based on predetermined criteria:

• Trigger condition

Choose a condition (prospect’s action) to determine the trigger. 

Think of it as “if” conditions to personalize your next emails for those who take selected action and for those who don’t.

• Contact opened email: checks if a recipient viewed previous email at least once. Requires open tracking to be enabled. 
• Contact clicked on the link from email: checks if a recipient clicked any of the links from the previous email (except the links in the email signature). Requires link tracking to be enabled. 
• Prospect booked a meeting via Calendly: checks if a recipient booked a meeting in your Calendly. Requires Calendly integration to be active.

Based on the condition being met or not, you can split the sequence into Yes (action taken) and No (action not taken) path.

• Trigger timing

Set a timer before the trigger checks whether the condition is met.

Enter the number into the input field and choose a unit of time: hours, days or minutes. 

Minimum timer value is 1 for every unit of time and should be a whole-number.

Note:  If you want to stop the campaign for a prospect after getting a response, we suggest setting a waiting time for at least 30 minutes to make sure the reply is tracked.

Maximum timer value is 30 days or 720 hours.

Timer starts when the email preceding a trigger is sent. When the timer is over, it checks if the trigger condition was met while the timer was running. 

In other words, it identifies whether the recipient took the action or not in the indicated time window.

To sum up, here’s the trigger’s workflow:

an email preceding a trigger is sent → trigger timer starts → recipients interact (or don’t) with your email → timer reaches the end → checks if the condition was met → sends the recipients to Yes or No path.

Have more questions? We’re here to help at help@snov.io or live-support chat.