Playbooks, Triggers & Data Trust
Prepare useful journeys, inspect their paths and repair data issues before sending.
Open interactive lesson and quizWhat you will learn
- Prepare and review a business playbook
- Choose schedule, audience or API entry
- Simulate a flow and inspect activity and data trust
A sales team wants a welcome journey for new contacts and a clear view of failed imports and sends.
Lesson 1
A launch kit prepares drafts for review
Open Business tools → Launch kits for Welcome new leads, Recover inactive customers, Follow up after purchase, Follow up with open leads, Welcome new customers and Reconnect after a lost deal. Each prepares a saved audience, draft email, draft Send Flow, review report and three assigned checklist tasks. They do not send automatically. Welcome uses contacts created within seven days and audience-entry flow mode. Recover uses contacts whose record was not updated for 90 days; that is a data-age signal, not proof of disengagement. Purchase and lost-deal kits use a linked Deal; adjust its stage to your sales process. The review report is an object overview, so verify its filters if you want it to exactly match an audience. Review recipients, consent, content and timing, then mark the email Ready and activate the flow deliberately.
Lesson 2
Choose how a person enters
Scheduled flows begin on activation, at a chosen time, or recur daily or weekly. Audience joins and leaves are checked by the background worker on its run, typically every five minutes. Members present at activation form the baseline; they do not fire a join event immediately. Leave events use the last known email and values, and delivery suppression still applies. API entry requires a BU integration key kept on a trusted server. POST flowId, a currently matching recordId and a stable eventId to /api/flow-trigger/{BU code}. Repeating the same event ID for that source does not enroll twice. API entry rejects records that are not currently sendable in the approved audience.
Lesson 3
Simulate before activation
Save a draft and choose Simulate. Select a currently matching record, and optionally assume an earlier engagement to explore a Yes or No branch. The preview shows criteria, the path, email subject and rendered content, and whether suppression or a missing address blocks delivery. Simulation does not create an execution, send, reserve a coupon or update a CRM field. It uses current values and an assumed engagement event; actual delivery may differ when data or preferences change.
Lesson 4
Use data trust and activity to repair problems
Data Trust shows failed import rows, stopped or failing integration sources, duplicate Contact email groups, old Contact records and audience refresh errors. The card actions open the owning tool: re-map and re-import rows in Data Handler → Import, inspect integration deliveries and keys in Integrations, or review identity resolution in Customer 360. Age and shared email are signals for review, not automatic corruption. Activity & errors displays recent successful, failed, skipped and stopped flow, recipient, automation, audience, import and playbook entries. Use the filter to focus on items needing attention, then repair the source and rerun according to the owning tool’s controls.
Lesson 5
Update fields and calculate related records
A Send Flow Update field step targets the primary audience record or a related record ID selected in the audience path. Choose an editable field and a value; identity and system fields cannot be changed. The activating user needs edit access to that object, and each step records an audit entry. Automations can calculate a count, sum or average across Deals or non-cancelled Orders linked to a Contact or Company. Store it in Contact Score, add a numeric Contact custom field or create an insight object with an aggregate record. The calculation runs when that automation’s configured trigger fires; it is not a continuous materialized metric. Check the run history for failures and ensure the trigger runs when you need a refresh.
Practice · Prepare a safe welcome journey
- In Business tools → Launch kits, prepare Welcome new leads. Inspect its audience, draft email, flow, review report and checklist tasks. The audience uses contacts created in the last seven days; adjust it for your real consent policy.
- Edit the draft email, send a test to yourself and mark it Ready. In Send Flows, simulate the flow using a matching contact and inspect the email and any suppression reason.
- Review the flow and activate it only after verifying recipients. Existing members form its baseline; a later matching contact enters on the next worker check.
- Open Activity & errors to inspect successful and failed events. In Data Trust, inspect failed imports, duplicate emails and integration delivery issues, then open the relevant repair view.