Trigger
Automation mechanicsAlso called: automation trigger, entry event, workflow trigger
A trigger is the event that starts an automation for a contact — a tag being added, a form submitted, a link clicked, a date arriving — deciding both who enters the flow and when.
Everything downstream inherits the trigger's mistakes. Choose one that fires too broadly and your sequence reaches people it was never written for; choose one too narrow and the flow sits idle while you debug copy that nobody ever received.
Triggers divide into events that happen to a contact (a tag added, a field changed, a reply arriving) and moments that arrive on their own (a date, a schedule). Date-driven triggers are the ones that surprise people: they run on a scan, so they fire on a cadence rather than the instant a value changes.
An automation with no trigger at all is a legitimate and underused design. It runs only when something else enrols a contact — another flow, a webhook, a manual run — which is exactly what you want for a shared sub-sequence.
How it works in FrazzleCRM
- ✓An automation can carry several triggers at once, or none.
- ✓Available triggers include contact created, tag added or removed, field changed, a date field with an offset (annually, for birthdays), a schedule with matching rules, appointment booked, appointment status changed, trigger link clicked, an inbound message from the contact, and — when company email tracking is on — email opened or clicked.
- ✓Webhook entry is deliberately not a trigger type: external systems enrol contacts by posting to a wired Inbound Webhook URL instead.
- ✓New automations start as drafts, and real triggers do not fire until the automation is set live.
Where teams get this wrong
A tag-added trigger on a flow that also adds that tag is an infinite loop, and it is the most common self-inflicted outage in any CRM. Frazzle's cross-automation audit looks for exactly this pattern, along with duplicate triggers and self-cancelling stop tags.
Common questions
Can one automation have more than one trigger?
Yes. Multiple triggers on one automation are ordinary — for example both a form submission and a tag added by an import feeding the same welcome sequence.
Why did my date-based trigger fire late?
Date field triggers run on a daily scan rather than watching the field continuously, so they fire on the scan following the date, at the time configured — not the moment the value changes.
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Related terms
Enrollment
Enrollment is a single contact's active run through one automation. Each enrollment holds its own position in the flow, its own timers and its own state, which is why two contacts in the same sequence can be at completely different steps.
Tag
A tag is a simple label attached to a contact that records a fact about them — a source, an interest, a state — and which automations can react to, branch on, and use as an exit condition.
Inbound webhook
An inbound webhook is a URL your CRM exposes so that other systems can push events into it — a payment succeeded, a booking made, a form submitted — enrolling a contact and carrying the event's data into the automation.
Re-entry
Re-entry is the rule deciding whether a contact who has already been through an automation can enter it again — repeatedly, once ever, or only after their previous run has finished.
Or browse all 24 terms — grouped by what part of the funnel they belong to.
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