What types of behaviors can trigger automated emails? (e.g., website visits, link clicks, inactivity)

Every time someone does something on your site, in your app, or inside your emails, they're sending you a signal. Behavioral triggers let you catch that signal and respond with something relevant, right when it matters.

Here's a breakdown of the most common behaviors that trigger automated emails, grouped by where they happen:

Website activity
Page views, product browsing, category exploration, search queries, time spent on a specific page. A visitor who reads your pricing page twice in three days is telling you something worth responding to.

Commerce activity
Adding to cart, abandoning checkout, wishlist saves, completed purchases, and returns. Abandoned cart emails are probably the most well-known example here, and for good reason. They work because the intent was already there.

Email engagement
Opens, link clicks, forwards, replies, and unsubscribes. Someone clicking your "learn more" link on a specific product three times is a very different subscriber from someone who just passively opens.

App activity
Feature usage (or non-usage), in-app purchases, session frequency, and milestone completions. A user who logs in daily is healthy. One who hasn't opened the app in two weeks might need a nudge before they churn.

Form interactions
Full submissions, partial completions, and specific field values. Someone who starts a "get a quote" form and doesn't finish it is practically raising their hand.

Account activity
Login frequency, profile updates, preference changes. These are often underused triggers, but a subscriber updating their product preferences is telling you exactly what to send them next.

Inactivity patterns
Days since last visit, a streak of unopened emails, lapsed purchases. Sometimes it's the absence of behavior that's the most important signal. A good re-engagement sequence starts with noticing the silence.

The triggers worth building first depend entirely on your business model. An e-commerce brand will lean hard on cart abandonment and browse behavior. A SaaS product will care more about feature adoption and login frequency. A newsletter might focus almost entirely on email engagement signals.

Now the practical rule: if you can measure it and it says something meaningful about where a person is in their relationship with you, it can trigger an email. The question is whether you'd actually have something useful to say in response. If not, don't trigger anything. (A badly timed email is often worse than no email at all.)

Ready to start building? Check out how to set up behavioral triggers for a practical walkthrough.