How to enable a flow to start sending

You will learn

Learn how to enable specific flow steps or an entire flow so that the flow starts sending out messages to qualified recipients.

Flows in Klaviyo do not have an on/off switch. Each individual message in a flow has its own send status: draft, manual, or live. This allows you to build out a flow series and enable certain emails and/or text messages to start sending while still finalizing other messages you may want to enable later on.

Understand how live status works

Turning a message live means new individuals entering your flow will be queued up to receive this email or SMS message and it will send out automatically at the right time. Updating the send status won't affect anyone who might have received this message in the past.

If this message’s status was manual, and there are any recipients still awaiting review, those recipients will still need to be reviewed and sent manually. Messages marked for manual review are not sent automatically when the status changes to live.

If you would like to enable an entire flow to start sending, you will need to turn each message live one-by-one or by bulk updating the status of every action in the flow.

Turn an individual flow message live

For each message in the flow you want to start sending:

1. Make sure you've customized and previewed the content and all settings.
2. Click on the message in the flow builder.
3. Next, in the left-hand configuration sidebar, click the Send Status dropdown and change the status to live.
4. Alternatively, you can click the dropdown on the message card itself to change the status.
   
5. You will notice the icon on the card update to turn green as well.

Turning every flow message live

1. When you first create a flow, click the Review and Turn On button in the top right corner to update the status for every configured action in the flow at once.
2. Note that unconfigured actions will remain in draft even if you bulk update the flow's statuses.
3. When the confirmation modal appears, choose Live from the Action status dropdown if you want your flow to start sending messages immediately or Manual if you’d like to manually approve messages before they send.
   
4. Click Turn On to confirm.

If you need to change the statuses of flow actions again after you have set the flow to either live or manual status, you can click Update Action Statuses in the top right.

For more information, see our article on how to bulk update flow statuses.

Additional resources

Check out other flow-related articles: 

• Getting started with flows
• How to bulk update flow statuses
• How to add an additional filter to a single flow email