Trigger guide step

A trigger guide step makes the current recipient eligible to see a guide as part of a workflow or broadcast run. Unlike a channel step, it doesn't send a message on a channel — it enrolls the recipient into a managed audience that backs the guide's targeting, so the guide becomes eligible to display the next time the recipient fetches their guides.

Use a trigger guide step when you want guide eligibility to be driven by workflow or broadcast logic — for example, showing an onboarding tour after a recipient completes a specific action, or making an announcement guide eligible as one branch of a larger cross-channel campaign.

A trigger guide step references a guide by its key. When you add the step to a workflow or broadcast, Knock creates a managed static audience behind the scenes and links it to the guide's targeting rules. Every time the step executes for a recipient, Knock adds that recipient to the managed audience, which makes the guide eligible to display to them.

Because eligibility is granted through audience membership, the same rules that apply to audience-based guide targeting apply here: the recipient still needs to fetch their guides (or have them refetched) in your application before the newly eligible guide appears, and any activation rules or property-based targeting configured on the guide are still evaluated.

Enrollment is one-directional. A trigger guide step only ever adds the recipient to the managed audience — it never removes them. If a recipient runs through the step more than once, they simply stay enrolled; there's no duplicate membership or error.

1. In the workflow or broadcast builder, drag the Trigger guide step onto your canvas. It's listed alongside your channel steps in the step panel.
2. Select the guide you want to make eligible. Only guides that have been created and committed in the current environment are available to select — you can't reference a draft guide.
3. Optionally, add step conditions to control when the step should run.

A trigger guide step has no channel, template, or send windows to configure — its only setting is the guide it targets.

Once a guide is referenced by a trigger guide step in a workflow or broadcast, the guide's Audience setting reflects that it's targeted by a workflow or broadcast step rather than (or in addition to) a manually selected audience. You can see which workflows and broadcasts trigger a given guide in the Triggered by section on the guide's page in the dashboard.

If you also set a target_audience_key on the guide directly, both forms of targeting apply: a recipient is eligible if they're a member of the manually selected audience or if they've been enrolled by a trigger guide step.

If the guide is targeted only through a trigger guide step (no manually selected audience), you can still enable tenancy strict mode on the guide, since the managed audience carries the tenant the recipient was enrolled with.

You can inspect trigger guide step executions in the workflow run logs. The step appears as Trigger guide step and logs one of the following outcomes for each run:

Outcome	Description
Success	The recipient was added to the guide's managed audience.
Success (already enrolled)	The recipient was already a member of the guide's managed audience. No change was made.
Skipped	The step could not enroll the recipient — for example, if the referenced guide's managed audience no longer exists.