# Flow Anatomy - Trigger Step ### About this export | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | **content_type** | lesson | | **platform** | contentstack-academy | | **source_url** | https://www.contentstack.com/academy/courses/data-insights-automating-journeys-with-flows/data-insights-course-5--flow-anatomy-trigger-step | | **course_slug** | data-insights-automating-journeys-with-flows | | **lesson_slug** | data-insights-course-5--flow-anatomy-trigger-step | | **markdown_file_url** | /academy/md/courses/data-insights-automating-journeys-with-flows/data-insights-course-5--flow-anatomy-trigger-step.md | | **generated_at** | 2026-06-08T14:32:02.453Z | > Part of **[Automating Journeys with Flows](https://www.contentstack.com/academy/courses/data-insights-automating-journeys-with-flows)** on Contentstack Academy. **Academy MD v3** — structured for retrieval; no quiz or assessment keys. #### Video details #### At a glance - **Title:** 38-data-insights-flow-trigger-step - **Duration:** 5m 4s - **Media link:** https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/ZpRe4a8P - **Publish date (unix):** 1752897121 #### Streaming renditions - application/vnd.apple.mpegurl - audio/mp4 · AAC Audio · 113459 kbps - video/mp4 · 180p · 180p · 132863 kbps - video/mp4 · 270p · 270p · 145680 kbps - video/mp4 · 360p · 360p · 154732 kbps - video/mp4 · 406p · 406p · 162077 kbps - video/mp4 · 540p · 540p · 183954 kbps - video/mp4 · 720p · 720p · 216877 kbps - video/mp4 · 1080p · 1080p · 307132 kbps #### Timed text tracks (delivery) - **thumbnails:** `https://cdn.jwplayer.com/strips/ZpRe4a8P-120.vtt` #### Video transcript So, starting with Trigger, to configure Trigger, it's pretty easy, but there are lots of different options. So, clicking on the step will open the sidebar. The sidebar is where you manage all of the different options. When it comes to entering into a flow, it's always related to an audience, so you're going to build an audience prior to the flow setup, and then you're going to use that to trigger entries into it. But there's a couple of different options how we can interact with that audience. By default, it'll say when added to, so this means in the case of a welcome series, you're going to build an audience, like we already had, that's any user that has an email address. You don't want to backfill and add everybody that's currently in that audience when you turn this flow on. You only want new people that are added to the audience to be triggered and entered into this flow. So, added to only does the flow entry when that added trigger happens on a segment. So, if I were to go in here and I say, email, status is known, and leave it like this, it's going to say every time that they're added to this audience, as opposed to already existing in this audience or this segment, they're going to be entered into this flow. Likewise, we can switch it to member of. The difference here, and the description should walk through it as well, but the difference here is I have an existing segment, an existing audience of 10,000 people. I want to make sure that all 10,000 of those people enter into this flow immediately upon publishing, as well as new entries that happen in the future. So, this is, you know, equivalent of a backfill in our traditional sort of jobs and export works. So, very important kind of subtle difference there. You can also see roughly, actually, exactly five minutes after the first one went through, we got now the second email, which is just a 20% off coupon to Petsy, and the profile would be updated. So, back over to the trigger, so added to only new entries into the audience, member of, everybody that exists, as well as new entries. And then there's also the configuration option to handle reentries. So, in the case of, say, a cart abandonment use case, you're going to want users, folks to be able to go through that flow multiple times based on some cadence. So, if I abandon a cart today and next week, I want to go through that flow and get messages and communications to help prompt that purchase. So, if I turn on allow reentry, you're going to get prompted again with a few different options. So, similar to the original flow entry, you can choose when they reenter, if they enter the audience again, or if they're still in the audience. So, think about like an evergreen newsletter campaign where I never, you know, if I'm targeting anybody with an email address, there's never going to be a point in time where I have an email address and now I don't have an email address, and I have an email address again to cause me to enter back into that audience. So, in that case, you would probably want to do enters or remains in audience. So, it's going to allow me to reenter based on the delay, which we'll touch on here in a second, to reenter that flow after I've completed it if I'm still in the audience. For something like a cart abandonment where it's time-based, you're likely going to want to do something where it's just enters the audience again. So, in a cart abandonment use case, you would say has added an item to a cart in the last 24 hours, but hasn't made a purchase in the last 48 hours or something along those lines. And the way that you configure that logic will ultimately kick them out of that audience at some point in time, so the next time they abandon, they'll literally reenter the audience, which re-triggers this campaign or this flow. So, those are the sort of two nuances there. And then the reentry delay is defaulted to one hour. You can add additional time. This just adds an additional buffer to the reentry. Very important, actually required when you use the enters or remains in audience. If you didn't have that and you only had a flow that was like one step with a two-minute wait, you would just have an infinite loop to where they would go through that flow every two minutes. So, definitely important to think about how often you want users to reenter, if they should ever reenter at all, etc. So, in this case, just for our demonstration purposes, we'll just turn off reentry. We'll just say we want to target anybody that's been added to our email address or our email status known audience. Again, you'll have access to all of the different audiences in the account here. So, you can be filtered, searched, you have sizes, all that kind of stuff available in the sidebar. So, we'll save this. It will update the canvas. So, now it says we've configured our trigger. #### Key takeaways - Connect **Flow Anatomy - Trigger Step** back to your stack configuration before moving to the next module. - Capture one concrete artifact (screenshot, Postman call, or code snippet) that proves the step works in your environment. - Re-read the delivery versus management boundary for anything you changed in the entry model. ## Supplement for indexing ### Content summary Flow Anatomy - Trigger Step. Flow Anatomy - Trigger Step in Automating Journeys with Flows (data-insights-automating-journeys-with-flows). ### Retrieval tags - Flow - Anatomy - Trigger - Step - data-insights-automating-journeys-with-flows - lesson 05 - Flow Anatomy - Trigger Step - data-insights-automating-journeys-with-flows lesson ### Indexing notes Index this lesson as a primary chunk tagged with lesson_id "05" and topics: [Flow, Anatomy, Trigger, Step]. Parent course slug: data-insights-automating-journeys-with-flows. Use asset_references URLs as thumbnail hints in search results when present. Never surface LMS quiz content or assessment answers from this file. ### Asset references | Label | URL | | --- | --- | | Video thumbnail: Flow Anatomy - Trigger Step | `https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZpRe4a8P/poster.jpg?width=720` | ### External links | Label | URL | | --- | --- | | Contentstack Academy home | `https://www.contentstack.com/academy/` | | Training instance setup | `https://www.contentstack.com/academy/training-instance` | | Academy playground (GitHub) | `https://github.com/contentstack/contentstack-academy-playground` | | Contentstack documentation | `https://www.contentstack.com/docs/` |