How Do People Enter a Flow?

In this article:

• A person can re-enter a Flow more than once
• How to prevent people from re-entering a Flow
• Example ways people can enter a flow
• Advanced use cases for re-entering a flow/step

People enter Flows through Trigger Steps.

A person can re-enter a flow more than once

By default, a person can re-enter the same Flow more than once through trigger steps. 

A person can re-enter a flow even when they leave it due to not meeting the criteria of a filter step or through an End Flow action step.

Let's explore the following scenario:

In this flow, every time the event "Team Member Invited" is performed by a person, that person will enter the flow.

Whenever a person is tagged with the team-member-invited tag they will be removed from the flow through the End Flow step. 

This means if a person is currently in the flow, the flow will end for them. For instance, if they're on the Wait Step while the tag is added, the flow will end for them on that Wait Step. They will not receive the 2nd email in the flow.

However, if that same person performs the event "Team Member Invited" again, they will re-enter the Flow once more. Regardless of the fact that they already went through the End Flow Step.

How to prevent people from re-entering a Flow

As of 25 Sep 2023, you can prevent people from re-entering a flow using an option as explained below.

If you want to prevent people from entering a flow more than once (regardless of which trigger step they entered the first time), you can do it from the flow settings. At the bottom right of the flow, click on the burger icon:

And enable the option "People can enter this flow only once":

When this option is enabled, a person can enter a flow only once. Regardless of which step they attempt to re-enter the flow from, they won't be able to enter the flow.

If you only want to prevent a person from re-entering a specific trigger step, you can enable this option on a single step alone (instead of the whole flow). To learn how to do that, please check our doc on Trigger steps.  

Use a Filter Step to prevent the person from continuing in the flow

You can use a Filter Step to stop the person from continuing to the next Steps in the Flow. You need to add a Filter Step between the Trigger and the next Step.

If we look at the same scenario, we can use a Filter Step Has Tag and allow people to proceed to the Send Email Step only if they don't have the tag.

The person would still enter the Event Trigger when they perform the event "Team Member Invited" but the Flow will end for them on the Has Tag Filter Step if they already have the team-member-invited tag. They will be ejected from the Flow due to not meeting the criteria of the Filter Step. 

Every time they perform the "Team Member Invited" event they will enter the Flow and then be ejected on the next Step, that way using the Filter Step as a blocking Step that prevents people to continue in the Flow.

Make sure that people can't receive an email more than once

To protect you from over-emailing people, by default Encharge doesn't allow sending the same email to the same person more than once.

Let's look at the same scenario again, without a Filter Step. When a person performs the action for the second time, they will enter the Event Trigger but the email will not be delivered twice, effectively ending the Flow for them there.

If you'd like to send an email more than once, you need to turn on the appropriate feature in the setup of the Send Email Step:

Example ways people can enter a flow

Let's explore some Triggers that you can use to get people into a Flow.

Form Submitted

In the example below, when a person submits a form in Elementor, they're going to receive an email and get tagged.

Entered Segment

In the example below, once a person enters the segment "Engaged", we're going to send an internal notification to our team.

Time Trigger

See the example below.

Segment.com Event

Advanced use cases for re-entering a flow/step