Some campaigns shouldn’t run just once — they need to repeat on a schedule. The Recurring Start trigger launches a SmartFlow on a repeating cadence (daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly), which makes it ideal for automating events that happen again and again, like regular promotions.
What the Recurring Start trigger does
SmartFlow always answers three questions — what starts it (Trigger), who it goes to (Target), and what happens (Action). Recurring Start is one of the Trigger – Date and Events types that answers the first question.
Unlike Scheduled Start, which fires once at a single date and time, Recurring Start activates on a repeating schedule and keeps running on that cadence until you stop the campaign.
When to use it
Use Recurring Start whenever a campaign needs to repeat on a fixed cadence, for example:
- regular promotions, such as a weekly newsletter or a weekend sale,
- recurring reminders,
- monthly or seasonal campaigns,
- any automated task that should run again and again.
How to set it up
- Click Add trigger and choose Recurring start from the Triggers list.
- Under Trigger timer, choose how often the flow should repeat: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly tabs.
Daily- run every day, every set number of days, every weekday (Mon-Fri), or on a specific day of the month
Weekly- tick the specific days of the week the flow should run
Monthly- choose a day of the month (for example, the 1st), a relative day (such as the first Monday), the last day, or the last weekday, then select which months it runs in. - Set the Start time — the time of day the flow activates (for example, 12:00). From your choices, Incomaker automatically generates a Quartz Expression (the schedule shown in code form); you don’t need to edit it.
- Optionally, turn on Send Time Optimization (STO). This distributes execution throughout the day so each contact receives the message at their historically most active time, rather than everyone at once.
- Add your Contact selection (Target) to define which contacts the flow applies to, then add the Action that follows (such as sending an email or SMS).
- When everything is in place, click Confirm & Schedule. The flow will then run automatically on every cycle of the schedule you set.
A quick tip
Because Recurring Start keeps firing on its schedule, decide up front whether the same contacts should be pulled in each cycle. Use the Contacts can re-enter SmartFlow setting under Campaign behavior to control how soon a contact can go through the flow again.