Triggered flow
An automated email sequence that fires in response to a customer event or property change. The timing is determined by what the customer did, not by what day of the week it is.
Definition
What a triggered flow is
A triggered flow is the moving part of modern email marketing. A customer signs up, abandons a cart, completes a purchase, hits a lifecycle stage, or trips a behavioural threshold. Each of those events can be wired up to fire a sequence of one or more emails. Most marketing automation platforms call these flows, journeys, workflows or sequences. The mechanics are the same: an event triggers entry, the customer moves through a series of steps with timing and conditional branches, and the journey ends when the customer hits an exit criterion.
Triggered flows are powerful because they let one set of decisions run for thousands of customers in parallel. They are dangerous for the same reason: when a flow breaks silently, it breaks for everyone.
Components
The moving parts of a triggered flow
Trigger
The event or condition that causes a customer to enter the flow. Could be a list join, a property change, an event from the storefront, an API call from a backend service, or a lifecycle stage transition.
Audience or segment
The set of customers eligible to receive the flow. Filters can be applied at the trigger or at each step. Audience definitions are one of the most common quiet-failure surfaces.
Steps
Email sends, time delays, conditional splits, and goal checks. Each step has its own configuration, its own template, and its own ways to silently fail.
Exit criteria
Conditions that remove a customer from the flow before completion: completing a purchase mid-cart-abandonment series, unsubscribing, hitting a goal. Misconfigured exits can drop customers out before the email they actually need.
Failure modes
How triggered flows go quiet
Because triggered flows are made of multiple moving parts, the failure modes are wide. The trigger event renames upstream and stops firing. The audience definition narrows after a property migration and excludes new customers. A step is reordered and a delay is silently lengthened. A template asset is updated and breaks in one flow but not another that shares it. Each of these failures looks normal in the platform's own dashboard, because the platform is reporting on the flow as configured, not on what customers actually receive.
How to monitor them
Inbox-side monitoring per flow
The reliable way to know whether a triggered flow is doing its job is to put a monitored address through the same trigger your customers are hitting and watch the inbox for the resulting messages. The setup is the same regardless of platform: Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, or anywhere else. One monitor per flow, an arrival window per send, and an alert when the inbox does not match what the platform says was sent.
Related reading
Concepts that travel together
- Silent send: the failure pattern triggered flows produce most often.
- Heartbeat monitoring: alerting on cadence rather than single sends.
- Lifecycle email monitoring: long-cycle triggered flows in the wild.
- Welcome email monitoring: the simplest triggered flow, and where most teams discover the inbox-side gap.
From the blog
Triggered flows breaking quietly
- Your abandoned cart flow broke when you changed your Shopify theme: a triggered flow with the trigger silently disconnected upstream.
- How to detect broken merge tags in Klaviyo flows: the trigger fires, the send goes out, the content is broken. ESP says delivered.
Monitor your triggered flows
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