The rules
- Leave the safety defaults on. The replied / opted-out / bounced / auto-replies triggers exist so you never send a follow-up to someone who answered, unsubscribed, or has a dead mailbox. Removing them is how teams get spam-flagged and annoyed replies.
- Add alerts before you add actions. The most valuable trigger change for most teams is "notify a human faster", not "automate more". A reply alert beats an elaborate auto-branch every time.
- One change at a time. Triggers run account-wide. Change one, observe, then change the next.
- Tag, don't destroy. When a trigger condition is ambiguous (unrelated replies), tag the prospect for human review rather than automatically removing or resuming them.
- Review triggers quarterly. As your team and campaigns change, old automation outlives its purpose. Check each trigger still reflects what you want.
- Watch the interaction with sending windows. A trigger that resumes campaigns interacts with windows and Daily Prospect Start — verify timing behavior after edits.
Debugging a misfire
When a trigger does something unexpected: check the prospect's timeline for the exact event that fired it, confirm the condition actually matched (an "unrelated reply" classification is judgment-based), and check whether a recent trigger edit is the cause. Revert recent trigger changes first — it's usually the last edit.