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What are Triggers?

You could sit there and press “Run all” whenever you want your automation to run, but in case you’ve got more interesting things to do, you can fire off your automation with a trigger!

But they’re even more than a way to automatically start your automations. Triggers allow you to incorporate your automation into the flow of your business and into conversations with your customers.

For example, with the Email Trigger you could create an email service that generates reports based on requests in inbound emails. With the API Trigger, you could create a backend API service that determines if customers are eligible for a discount based on their purchase history. With the Scheduled Trigger, you could run a sales pipeline report every morning at 8am and send it to your sales team. Triggers make it possible to integrate automations into everything you do.

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Types of Triggers

There are three triggers available:

  1. Scheduled Triggers: Start your automation on a schedule. Options are minutely (every 5 minutes), hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.

  2. API Endpoint Triggers: Get an API endpoint with API Key that starts your automation when called. Once you’ve got an API endpoint, you can integrate your automation into other systems, use it as a backend service, or even call it from other automations (which is great as a “tool” for AI agents). See documentation for API Triggers and also the slash command guide for Trigger Calls.

  3. Email Triggers: When you set up an email trigger, you’ll get a custom email address for your automation. Any email sent to that address will start your automation with the subject, body, and sender of the email as the input.

  4. SMS Triggers: Bonus trigger! If you have an account with Twilio (or similar SMS provider) you can use our SMS router to send SMS messages to your automation. See SMS Triggers for more information.

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Key Features of Triggers

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For All Triggers:

  • Name: Each trigger has a name for easy identification.

  • Release Version: Triggers can be pointed to specific versions of your automation. However, it’s easiest to just use the latest version. When you have it pointed to latest, it will always run the latest published version of your automation.

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Important Concepts

  • Publishing Requirement: You need to publish your Automation before adding triggers. This ensures that triggers are associated with a specific, stable version of your Automation.

  • Multiple Triggers: You can have multiple triggers for a single Automation, allowing for various ways to initiate your workflow.

StepsSlash Commands (Skills)