Autopilot: Trigger - Email Activity

The Email Activity trigger allows you to add a contact to a Journey when they are sent, or interact with:

  • any email; or
  • a specific email.

Please note thatTo send email please use the Send Email action.


How do I configure this trigger?

To configure the Email Activity trigger, first select whether you'd like to target activities from any email, or a specific email:

Next, select the activity type:


When will this trigger fire?

This trigger will fire (i.e. add the contact to the Journey) immediately when the activity occurs.

"Sent", "Opened", "Replied", "Unsubscribed" and "Bounced" activities are unique in the sense that they can only occur once per email. If an email is transactional, each send is considered unique, so each of these events can occur once per transactional email sent.

When it comes to click-based activities, each click of an individual link in an email is considered a unique activity. This means that if you select the "Clicked any link" option, each click of any individual link in your email will add the contact to the Journey. In contrast, the "Clicked specific link" option will only do so if the link clicked matches what you specified. Finally, please note that:

  • Separate links to the same web page are treated as independent links. For example, a link to your contact page in the header and footer of your email are both independent links.
  • If a contact clicks on the same independent link twice, they will not enter the Journey again via this trigger.
  • Clicking an unsubscribe link will not cause this trigger to fire. In other words, it is not treated as a "click".
  • UTM parameters are ignored for the purposes of this trigger.

Example use cases

Record how many times a contact has performed an activity, and take action when they hit a specific amount

Add the necessary custom fields based on the activities you'd like to track (e.g. "Opens"), ensuring that you choose "whole number" as the field type. Then do the following:

You could then create a smart segment based on one or more of these fields, and add contacts that enter the segment to a Journey using the Smart Segment Trigger. For example, you could notify your team when a contact has exceeded 10 clicks:

Record the date a contact last performed a particular activity

Add the necessary custom fields based on the activities you'd like to record dates for (e.g. "Last opened"), ensuring that you choose "date" as the field type. Then do the following:

As demonstrated above, by inserting "--today--" into the Update Field action, the field will be updated with today's date.

You can then create date-based smart segments to find contacts that have performed an activity within a particular window; for example, contacts that have opened an email in the last 30 days:

Perform an action when a contact clicks a specific call to action

If you have more than one link in your email, but want to follow up people that click a specific call to action, you can select the specific email and link, and connect it to an action of your choice. For example, you might add a Pipedrive deal when someone clicks through to your pricing page from a welcome email: