Event-driven automation
Your contacts are doing things all day. Joining lists. Hitting segments. Updating fields. Each is a moment that deserves a response. Set the trigger once and Mumara reacts for you — as events happen, on every match, forever.
How they fire
A list join. A segment match. A profile change. A custom event from your app. Mumara catches each one and runs the action you chose.
One trigger can start a drip, send a broadcast, move a contact between lists, alert an admin, suppress a problem address, or update a field. Whatever the right reaction is, you decide it once. Mumara fires it forever, every time the signal hits — without you opening the dashboard.
Why it matters
Most marketing teams spend half their time reacting to things that should react themselves.
A contact hard-bounces twice. You don't catch it for a week. By then they've complained — and your reputation is taking the hit.
A prospect lands in your high-intent segment at 11pm. You catch it at 10am. The window to engage closed eleven hours ago.
A trial upgrades to the Pro plan. Sales should hear about it in minutes. Without a trigger, they hear about it from the billing report a week later.
A contact updates their preferences. The right thing is to move them to the matching list, send the right welcome, and clean them off the old one. Doing that by hand for 500 contacts is a job. For 5,000 it's impossible.
Recipes
Every team's stack is different, but these show up most often. Each is a single trigger doing the work of an entire workflow.
Pick the signal
Step one of the trigger wizard. Pick the event, scope it down to the contacts you care about, name it, save it. Mumara starts watching the moment you flip it on.
Contact added to a list. Contact added to a segment. Profile field changed. Each one has its own sub-form — pick selected lists or any list, a specific segment, a single field changing to a specific value.
List-add triggers can fire only when the contact came from a chosen source — manual entry, API call, CSV import, or web-form signup. Run a trigger ONLY for API-sourced contacts, for example, and skip everyone else.
Don't start from scratch. Mumara ships a library of cloneable templates — welcome on join, win-back on inactivity, suppress on bounce. Clone one, tweak it, save it.
Decide the response
Step two. Pick the action. Choose when it runs — with no delay, or after minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, even years. Hit submit and the trigger is live. Reorder triggers by dragging them; they execute in list order.
The most common use. The trigger becomes the entry point for a full lifecycle sequence — welcome, nurture, win-back, whatever the journey is. See the drip campaigns page for what runs inside.
Pick the broadcast, pick the sending node, dial in tracking and sender info. The trigger sends the campaign to every contact that matches the event — through the infrastructure you chose.
Move them to another list. Copy them onto a second one. Update a custom field. Change their status. Suppress them. Whatever needs to happen to the contact record — handled in the trigger, no second tool.
Send a rich notification email to an admin — subject, body, merge tags for subscriber data, sending node, attachments. Sales, ops, support: they hear about the events that matter, as they happen.
The automation stack
They're not alternatives. Triggers are the upstream piece. Drips and workflows are two shapes the response can take.
You are here
You are hereDetect the event, run a single action. The action might be a drip start, a broadcast, an admin email, a contact move. Triggers are what kick everything else off.
Linear journeys
A sequence of emails sent in order with delays between them. The trigger fires; the drip group plays out. Best for welcome series, lead nurture, win-back — anywhere the path is a straight line.
Branching journeys
A visual canvas with branches. IF/ELSE on opens, clicks, segment changes, contact state. Reach for workflows when a drip's straight line isn't enough — when the next email depends on what the last one did.
“Greatest mailing app you'll ever need. Drip and trigger functions are amazing. Superb support. Hands down the best mailing app I've ever used.”
Zito Calderon
Verified Trustpilot reviewer
Common questions
It depends on the event. A contact-based event — a list join or a field change — set to 'Instantly' is acted on as it happens, so the welcome goes out while the signup is fresh. Segment matches and any trigger with a delay run on a trigger cycle you control in Cron Settings — tighten it to every minute for time-critical work like abandoned-cart recovery, or relax it for routine automations. Either way it's your schedule, not an overnight batch. For sub-second event delivery to external systems, reach for Webhooks.
A trigger detects a single event and runs a single action — list join, segment match, field change → start a drip, send a broadcast, alert an admin. A drip campaign is one of the actions a trigger can run: a sequence of emails sent over time. You almost always use both. Triggers are the upstream piece; drips are the response sequence.
Yes. Each trigger has a 'When to execute' setting — Instantly, or after a delay in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years. That long-tail range is what makes anniversary triggers (renewal reminders, birthday flows) possible from a single event. The delay is calculated as event-time-plus-delay, then runs at the next cron cycle.
Each trigger has one event and one action. To run several actions on the same event, create several triggers with the same criteria — each runs independently, and you can drag them into the order you want them to execute. For richer branching (different actions based on what the contact did next), workflows are the better tool.
Yes, indirectly. If Trigger A updates a field that Trigger B watches, A's action will satisfy B's event. That can create a loop. To prevent it: use 'Changed to this value' (not 'any value') on field-change triggers so you narrow the match window, and add timing delays so the loop has circuit-breaks. Test with a sample contact before turning a trigger on.
Yes. The Triggers page has a 'Pre-defined templates' button. Mumara ships a library of common triggers — welcome on join, win-back on inactivity, suppress on hard bounce, alert on high intent — that you can clone and tweak instead of building from scratch.
Yes. The event step lets you pick 'Selected lists' (multi-select) or 'Any list'. For segment events, you pick a specific segment. For field-change events, you choose any field or a specific one, and either 'changed to any value' or 'changed to this specific value'. The dial goes as fine as you need.
Start a drip group. Send a broadcast through a chosen sending node. Send a rich notification email to an admin (full WYSIWYG with subscriber merge tags). Move or copy a contact to another list (with skip-and-keep, skip-and-remove, or overwrite handling for duplicates). Add a contact to the suppression list (global or list-specific). Delete a contact. Change status to active or inactive. Change email-format preference. Update a custom field. Each action has its own configuration sub-form.
Related
The most common thing triggers start — linear sequences of emails over time.
Read more"Contact added to a segment" is one of the three trigger event types — and segments can layer thousands of criteria.
Read morePair triggers with form submissions using the 'adding-method: webform only' filter. The killer combo for lead onboarding.
Read moreTriggers can fire one-shot broadcasts as their action, with sending nodes + tracking + sender info dialled in per-trigger.
Read moreMumara Campaigns
Triggers ship on Professional and Commercial tiers of Mumara Campaigns Self-Hosted, and on every Mumara Machine plan. No credit card to try. Wire one up today and watch it run.
