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Choose who gets a trigger's email: order contact, primary contact, employees, tags or typed addresses

Every recipient option on a trigger email: the person who placed the order, the primary contact, employees, tags or typed addresses, and who is skipped.

When a trigger sends an email, the action section is where you choose who gets it: employees picked by name, the customer company's primary contact, the person who placed the order (the Order Contact), addresses you type in, or, instead of all of those, every contact of that customer who carries the recipient tags you choose. This article explains when each option is offered, how to reach several people at a customer, how to reach people outside the customer's company, how to alert the right sales rep or regional employee, who is skipped without a word, and where the email comes from. Building the rest of the trigger is covered in How triggers work and how to build one.

Applies to: every Allmoxy site and every order type. Editing a trigger's recipients needs the Add/edit site triggers permission, at Settings > Operations > Triggers.

In this article

The recipient options and when each is offered

A trigger that sends an email offers these recipients in its action section. You can combine the first four on one trigger.

  • Employees picked by name: choose one or more of your own people from the To list, and use Add Recipient for each extra one. The list shows only active contacts who hold the Add/receive tasks permission.
  • Primary Contact for Account: the one primary contact on the customer company the record belongs to. A company has exactly one primary contact.
  • Order Contact: the person who placed the order. The option is listed on every event, but it is filled in only on order events (such as Order Status Changes To, Ship Date Modified and Remake Status Changes To), on the two process events and on Order Attachment Added, because those are the events with an order behind them.
  • Custom Address: a name and email address you type in, as many as you like, for people who are not contacts in Allmoxy or who belong to another company.
  • Use tags for Recipient (Yes): instead of the options above, the email goes to every contact of the record's own company who carries at least one of the tags you choose.

On events without an order behind them (a new company, a payment, a note, a finance charge) the Order Contact option sends nothing, so use the primary contact, employees or typed addresses.

Order Contact or Primary Contact

When you create an order-related trigger that is going to be sent to your customer, you have two ways to reach them. The Primary Contact is a static person set for their company: the same person every time, whatever the order. The Order Contact is the person who placed that particular order, so a customer with three people who place orders gets each email sent to the one who placed it.

Use Order Contact for order confirmations, status updates, ship date changes and anything else about one order. Use Primary Contact for things about the account as a whole, such as past-due reminders and finance charges, or when the customer has asked that everything go to one person.

Two details worth knowing. The Order Contact is whoever is on the order as its contact, so when one of your employees enters an order on a customer's behalf, it is the contact they chose on the order. And the primary contact for account option sends exclusively to that one primary contact, so if you need more people at the customer to get the email, read the next section.

Email several people at the customer

The primary contact for account option sends only to the one primary contact associated with the company, and you can only have one primary contact for each company. If you want the email to go to specific individuals at the customer instead, tag those contacts and set Use tags for Recipient to Yes when creating the trigger: every contact of that order's company who carries one of the tags gets the email.

Recipient tags reach only contacts of that order's own company. If a tagged person belongs to a different company, including your own staff and any vendor, they are left off without a word and without a row in the Trigger Call Log. To reach people like that, use the next section. Adding a tag to a contact is covered in Tags in Allmoxy.

Recipient tags are an either-or choice: when the trigger uses tags for its recipients, the employees, primary contact, Order Contact and typed addresses on that trigger are not used. If you need both groups, clone the trigger and give the copy the other recipients.

Email people outside the customer's company

The Custom Address option lets you manually add several email addresses as recipients, one Add Recipient row each. Use it for anyone who is not a contact of the customer company: a vendor, an installer, a bookkeeper, or a sales rep who can't be picked by name because they don't hold Add/receive tasks.

Typed addresses are fixed on the trigger, so a trigger that should go to different outside people for different customers needs one trigger per group: target each trigger at one company or one company tag and type that group's addresses. For vendors this usually means a different trigger for each vendor, which is why purchase orders are often the better route; see the vendors section below.

Alert the right sales rep or regional employee

This setup is helpful if you have sales representatives, or employees who look after a region. The idea is the same in both cases: a company tag says who looks after the customer, the trigger's target picks companies with that tag, and the recipient is the right employee.

  1. If you haven't already, tag each of your customer companies with a tag unique to the sales rep (just their name will work) or to the region, for example "north". You can edit a company's tags on the company information tab or on the sidebar while viewing the company dashboard. See Company tags.
  2. Go to Settings > Operations > Triggers, click Add Trigger, and pick the event. For "one of my customers placed an order", choose Order Status Changes To and tick Ordered. If your customers submit bids first and you want to know about those, tick Bid instead, or as well.
  3. Under Trigger Target, choose Use Tags and enter the company tag you want to use.
  4. For the action, choose to send an email and pick the sales rep or regional employee by name. Write the message with variables such as {company_name}, {contact_name} and {order_num} so they know which customer and order it is.
  5. Activate the trigger, then clone it for each rep or region, changing the tag and the recipient on each copy.

For example, if Sarah's customer places an order, Sarah receives an email alerting her that her customer submitted an order and asking her to reach out. With a "north" tag, the trigger fires to the employee for the north region whenever a company tagged north places an order or a bid, whichever status you ticked.

Make sure the tag is on every company you want the trigger to apply to; a company without the tag is skipped, and nothing is written to the Trigger Call Log for it.

Who is skipped, without a word

A few recipients are dropped quietly: no error when you save, no row in the Trigger Call Log, nothing in the Email Log.

  • A contact who is inactive.
  • A contact with no email address on their record, including a primary contact without one.
  • A tagged person who is not a contact of the record's company.
  • A sales rep you can't find in the employee list, because they don't hold Add/receive tasks. Type their address instead.

So if a trigger shows nothing in the log for one customer, check that company's contacts before you check the trigger. The other causes are in My trigger didn't fire, fired twice, or sent the wrong thing.

Sender and reply address

Trigger emails are sent from Allmoxy's notification address with your company name as the sender name, so customers see your name in their inbox. The address you put in the trigger's Reply Address field is where replies go, so put your office or sales address there; leave it empty and replies go to the notification address, where nobody reads them. The subject is the trigger's subject, or the trigger's name when the subject is empty.

On order events you can attach output pages and export files to the email; the PDFs are built fresh for every recipient. If an email shows Success in the Trigger Call Log but never arrived, the problem is delivery after sending: see Email Log and Ensure your Allmoxy emails send properly.

Emailing a vendor

A trigger's recipient tags can't reach people at a vendor, because they are not contacts of the customer company on the order. To email a vendor from a trigger, type their addresses as custom email addresses, and expect one trigger per vendor.

For the orders you place with a vendor, use a purchase order instead: the purchase order email takes several addresses separated by commas or semicolons, so everyone at the vendor who needs the order gets it from one send. See Create a purchase order.

Things to know

  • Order Contact is filled in only on order, process and attachment events. On every other event, use the primary contact, employees or typed addresses.
  • Recipient tags reach only contacts of that order's company. Tagged people at any other company are dropped without a log row.
  • The employee picker lists only active contacts who hold Add/receive tasks. Anyone else goes in as a typed address.
  • Inactive contacts and contacts without an email are skipped silently. Nothing is written to the Trigger Call Log or the Email Log for them.
  • Replies go to the trigger's Reply Address field. The email itself comes from Allmoxy's notification address with your company name, so fill the Reply Address in.

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