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A trigger is the thing a contact does that starts an automation. Every automation has exactly one trigger card at the top of the canvas, and that card can hold several triggers at once. Every trigger Senderz offers has a real source behind it. There are no placeholder triggers in the picker that quietly never fire.

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Set up the trigger before you build anything

Picking a trigger does not arm the automation. It opens a draft that you configure and then save.
1

Pick a trigger

A new automation shows Select a trigger to start on the canvas, with the note Steps unlock after the trigger is set. The left panel has a Triggers section with the hint Profiles enter the flow when this happens.
2

Configure it in the panel

Choosing a trigger opens Set up trigger on the right. Work down the panel: the trigger list, how often someone can enter, whether this is a transactional automation, trigger filters, and profile filters.
3

Save

Nothing counts until you press Save. Until you do, the action palette, the + on each connector and drag-and-drop are all locked.
4

Build the rest

With the trigger saved the palette unlocks and you can add steps.
Clicking the trigger card at any time reopens the same panel. Change trigger asks you to confirm first, because it clears the current setup and you pick a new trigger and save again before adding more actions.
Starting from a recommended flow or from an AI proposal skips the lock. Both arrive with the trigger already set up, so the palette is unlocked as soon as the canvas opens. You can still open Set up trigger and change anything.

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What is in the panel

Transactional automation changes who your messages can legally reach. Its messages go to contacts who never opted in to marketing, carry no unsubscribe link, and ignore quiet hours, Shabbat and frequency caps. Only use it for order updates, receipts and shipping notices. Only a workspace owner or admin can turn it on, and Senderz asks you to confirm. Sending advertising this way breaks Israeli anti-spam law. See Israeli compliance.

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Several triggers on one automation

A trigger card can hold more than one trigger. They are combined with OR: a contact enters when any of them fires. The panel says so plainly with Contacts enter when any trigger fires. Each trigger in the list keeps its own settings. A custom event carries its own event name, a list trigger carries its own list, a date trigger carries its own date setup, and each one has its own Only when conditions.
Listing the same event twice does not give you two independent copies of it. The duplicate is dropped along with its conditions. Keep one entry per event and put all of that event’s conditions on it.

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The trigger catalogue

The picker has a Recommended tab and an All triggers tab with a search box. All triggers is grouped into ten categories.

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Profile

There is no separate “tag added” trigger. Adding a tag is a change to the contact, so it arrives as Updated profile.

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Date based

This one works differently from every other trigger. See Date-based triggers below.

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Lists and subscriptions

The two opt-out triggers live in this category rather than a category of their own, so search for “unsubscribed” if you cannot find them. Added to list has a list picker. Leave it empty and the trigger fires on any list join. Pick a list and it only fires for sign-ups that record which list was joined, which today means a Senderz storefront popup.

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Site and browsing

This comes from the Senderz tracking that runs on your storefront, which the Shopify app and the WordPress plugin install for you. It only fires once Senderz can tell who the visitor is, which normally means they have already signed up through a popup or clicked a tracked link.

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Orders and checkout

These come from your connected store. Which of them your store actually sends depends on the platform. See Shopify and WooCommerce.
Build an abandoned-cart automation on Added to cart. There is no trigger called “abandoned cart”. The trigger fires when the product goes into the cart, and the wait step after it is what turns that into abandonment. Placing an order removes the contact from cart-recovery automations automatically, so buyers stop receiving reminders.

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Reviews

These need a reviews app connected. Senderz supports Loox, Judge.me and Yotpo Reviews.

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Loyalty and referrals

These need a loyalty app connected. Senderz supports Rivo and Yotpo Loyalty.

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Email engagement

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SMS engagement

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Other

Choosing this adds a Custom event name field. Type the same name you send from your integration, for example quiz_completed. Only that event starts the automation. See Event ingest.

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Date-based triggers

Date based is the only trigger that is not started by something happening. Nothing pushes it. Senderz scans your contacts once an hour and enrols anyone whose date is coming up. That is what makes birthdays, renewal reminders and “eight hours before the webinar” possible. Because it is a scan, it only looks at live automations. A date automation left in draft enrols nobody, and no one is caught up retroactively when you publish it.

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Setting one up

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required
Created (signup date) or any date field on the contact. Custom date fields you have defined in your account appear here, searchable.
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required
An amount, a unit of minutes, hours, days, weeks or months, and before or after. Set the amount to 0 and it sends on the date itself.
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required
A fixed time of day, or The time stored in the date field. The second option uses each contact’s own stored time, so the offset counts from their exact event time.
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required
The hour and minute, in each contact’s local timezone. When Fire at is set to the field’s own time, this is only used as a fallback for contacts whose date has no time on it.
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required
Once (never repeat), Every month, or Every year.

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How the timing actually behaves

  • Minutes and hours shift the exact moment. “8 hours before” a webinar that starts at 19:00 fires at 11:00 on the same day. It can legitimately cross midnight into the day before.
  • Days, weeks and months shift the calendar date and keep the time. “3 days before” a date lands three days earlier at your chosen send time, and stays correct across daylight-saving changes.
  • Send times are local to the contact. A 09:00 birthday email reaches each person at 09:00 where they are. Contacts with no timezone on file are treated as Israel time.
  • Short months are clamped. A yearly repeat on 29 February fires on 28 February in non-leap years. A monthly repeat on the 31st fires on the last day of shorter months.
  • A repeating date can enrol the same contact again next time round. A yearly birthday automation re-enrols each year even if the re-entry mode is set to enter only once, because each year is a separate occurrence.
Only date fields are offered. If the field you want is not in the list, add it as a date-type contact field first, then come back. See Contacts.

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Trigger filters: conditions on the event itself

Trigger filters narrow the trigger by looking at the event that just happened. In the panel they read as Only when. This is how you build “only orders over 500” or “only 1 to 3 star reviews” without touching who the contact is. Add them per trigger. All conditions on one trigger must match for the contact to enter. Number conditions offer equals, does not equal, greater than, less than, at least, at most and between. Text conditions offer is, is not, is one of, is not one of and contains. Senderz also offers any extra properties it has recorded for that event in your workspace, so an event that carries more detail gives you more to filter on. If an event carries nothing you can filter on, the panel says Trigger filters are not available for this event yet instead of showing you an empty picker.
To treat happy and unhappy reviewers differently, build two automations on Submitted a review, one filtered to a rating of 4 or more and one to 3 or less. A conditional split later in the automation will not work for this: a split checks the contact, not the event that started the run, so it cannot see the rating.

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Trigger filters are not profile filters

These two sit in the same panel and answer different questions.

Trigger filters

About the event. Was this order over 500? Was this review 5 stars? Only checked at the moment the event arrives, because the event is a moment in time and does not exist afterwards.

Profile filters

About the person. Are they a VIP? Are they subscribed to SMS? Are they in Israel? Checked when they enter, and checked again before each step that does something.
Profile filters use the same building blocks as a segment: contact properties, consent, metrics, list membership, predictive scores, country and more. See Segments. Leaving them empty means everyone who fires the trigger can enter.

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How often the same person can enter

How often can someone enter? has three options. The default is the first one.
A profile can enter this automation a single time, ever. Correct for a welcome series. It is also the reason a mistake is expensive: if the automation went live with nothing to send, the contacts it already enrolled cannot be enrolled again after you fix it.
A profile re-enters each time the trigger happens again. Correct for order confirmations, shipping updates and cart reminders, where every occurrence deserves its own run.
A profile can re-enter, but only after the window you set has passed since their last entry. Enter a number and choose hours, days or weeks. The default is 24 hours and the minimum is 1. Use this for a cart reminder you do not want firing several times a day.
A contact who is currently part-way through the automation never re-enters, whichever mode you pick. Re-entry only applies once they have finished or exited.

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What does and does not enrol

A draft or paused automation enrols nobody. Events that happen while it is paused are not queued up and replayed when you resume. If you want people who qualified earlier, use Add past profiles after publishing.
Enrolment is idempotent per event. If a store sends the same order webhook twice, or a delivery is retried, the contact is enrolled once.
Importing contacts from CSV, Excel or Google Sheets deliberately does not start any automation, no matter how many contacts it creates or updates. Uploading a 40,000-row list will not fire a welcome series at all of them. See Importing contacts.
Firing the trigger gets someone considered, not delivered to. Profile filters decide whether they enter at all, and every message then goes through consent, suppression, frequency caps and, for SMS and push, the Israeli quiet hours and Shabbat window. See Quiet hours and Shabbat.
Nothing fires for your whole audience at a fixed date and time. Date based is anchored to a date on each contact’s own profile. For a one-time dated send, use a campaign instead.

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Publishing

An automation cannot be published without at least one trigger. If you see a message that a trigger is required, open the trigger card, make sure at least one trigger is listed, and press Save in the setup panel before publishing again. Return to Automations for the rest of the build.