Triggers are what kick off automations. They're the inciting event that causes an automation to run.
Let's run through a couple examples:
- You want to send a series of three welcome emails to new users when they sign up. The trigger would be a subscriber.confirmed event, and you'd add multiple "send email" actions with different delays.
- You want to automatically invite all paying subscribers to a private Discord server. The trigger would be a subscription.paid event.
- You want to send a follow-up email to folks who have churned from your paid subscription after sixty days, letting them know about new content you've added. The trigger would be a subscription.churned event.
You can see that each of these triggers is a different event type. There are many different event types that you can use as triggers for your automations. We've cataloged them all in our list of event types.
Trigger and action compatibility
Certain triggers restrict which actions are available. For example:
- When an email is sent --- Unlocks social media cross-posting actions (Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Tumblr, Twitter, Arena) but doesn't include subscriber-level actions like tagging.
- When a subscriber replies --- Adds the "Forward the reply" action alongside the standard actions.
- Calendar triggers (new day/week/month/year) --- Limited to notifications and exports, since there's no specific subscriber involved.
- Stripe/Memberful/Patreon triggers --- Offer a focused set of actions relevant to payment events (like creating subscribers or updating email addresses).
The action picker in the automation settings page automatically shows only the actions that are compatible with your selected trigger.