Create a journey
The real-time nature of the journey ensures that you can respond to customers immediately and convert their expression of interest into a sale.
When building a journey, you'll begin by deciding if the audience will be based on a trigger or segment. Within the journey, you can add various actions or elements to send your audience down paths that are based on their interactions with your marketing content.
To access customer journeys, go to Real-time journeys > Engagement > Journeys.
Prior to building your journey, you'll need to create the segments, triggers, and content that will be used in the journey.
Set up a new journey
To view, edit, delete, or create a new marketing email, go to Real-time journeys > Engagement > Journeys.
Get started by creating the journey, setting the goals, and defining the end date.
To create a new journey, select + New journey in the command bar.
Enter a Name for your journey.
Choose the type of journey.
Trigger-based - People will start the journey when an event happens, or they'll take a specific action.
Segment-based - People will start the journey if they're part of a specific audience segment.
If you're starting the journey with a trigger, fill out the following information:
Choose a trigger - The trigger that customers must perform to start the journey.
Repeating this journey - Specify whether a customer can repeat the journey and how soon they can repeat it if they perform the trigger again.
Start date and time - Customers can start the journey only if they perform the trigger after this start date and time.
Conditions - Personalize the trigger by adding data attributes from the trigger’s core entity/table or from entities/tables directly related to those attributes.
For more information, see Create a trigger-based journey.
If you're starting the journey with a segment, fill out the following information:
Select a segment - Segment-based journeys work with segments from outbound marketing and segments from Customer Insights.
Frequency - Specify if this journey is a one-time journey with a static audience, a one-time journey where newly added audience members can start at any time, or if it will be a repeating journey where all audience members repeat the journey in the interval that you specify.
Start date and time - Specify the start date and time when you want to send the announcement.
For more information, see Create a segment-based journey.
Select Create.
Review the journey start details
Your next task is to review the journey start details:
In the Journey settings pane on the right, select Start.
Review the details that you entered at the start. Make updates as needed.
To exclude a group of customers from this journey, use the Exclude by segments section to select segment(s) that you want to exclude. You can select multiple segments.
If needed, specify an End date and time for the journey.
When finished, select the arrow to return to the journey details.
Set the journey goal
Most customer journeys have been created to drive a specific customer behavior or action, such as making a purchase, signing up for an event, or renewing a subscription. For this reason, we highly recommend that you define the goal of your customer journey as much as possible. Goal settings allow you to analyze your journey to measure its success. With built-in analytics and trend charts, you can observe how your journey's performance corresponds to its goal. This feature can help you to make incremental improvements to reach your targets quickly and effectively.
In the Journey settings pane on the right, select Goal.
Under The goal of this journey is, select the general purpose of the journey. Various out-of-the-box options are available, and you can create your own custom goals.
Under This goal is met when, choose an action that people must perform before they're counted as having met the goal. The successful criteria can be in the form of a standard trigger, custom trigger, or an action such as opening a message or selecting a link.
Under The amount of people needed for this goal, specify a target amount that you would consider as meaning success. You can enter the values as a percentage or a number.
When finished, select the arrow to return to the journey details.
For more information, see Set a business goal and measure progress through a journey.
Set the journey end details
By default, the journey will end when the customer completes all steps. However, you can set alternative exits to the journey. Adding alternative exit options will provide a way to remove customers from the journey when they meet specified criteria. This approach helps ensure that customers don't receive irrelevant messages from your journey.
In the Journey settings pane on the right, select End.
Use the alternative exit options as needed.
Exit when an event occurs - Customers who perform this trigger will immediately exit the journey, regardless of where they are in the journey. This option provides a simpler way to remove customers who perform the trigger from the journey, ensuring that customers don't receive irrelevant messages from your customer journey.
Exit by segment - Customers who are part of this segment will immediately exit the journey. This capability is often referred to as a suppression segment and helps you ensure that members of this segment are suppressed from the customer journey. The Exit by segment option will remove members of that segment from wherever they are in the customer journey. This option is notably different from the exclude by segment property in the journey's start, which will only exclude members of the exclusion segment from starting the journey.
When finished, select the arrow to return to the journey details.
Save your changes.
Frequency cap
The frequency cap feature lets you set a limit on the number of messages your customers receive in a given amount of time through a particular channel. Some customers qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously. This results in them receiving multiple messages through on channel in a short period of time. With the frequency cap feature, you can optimize engagement by controlling how many messages are sent across multiple channels over a period of time. This improves engagement, decreases canceled subscriptions, and reduces the number of messages marked as spam over time.
When utilizing the frequency cap setting, you'll first need to create a global setting and then utilize that setting within a journey.
Enable or disable a frequency cap for your journey
The frequency cap setting is enabled by default for all journeys. Once the frequency cap limits are defined in the global settings, the messages will be capped. Users who have editing rights for a journey are able to decide if the cap should be bypassed for a specific journey. To bypass the frequency cap:
Navigate to journeys.
Select a journey to edit it (you can only edit draft journeys; live journeys have to be re-published with a new setting to bypass the frequency cap).
Under Other settings, you’ll find Frequency cap. Here you can exclude the journey from the frequency cap.
For more information, see Limit the number of messages sent with frequency capping.
The next unit explains the various capabilities that are available in the journey designer that helps you build and tailor your journeys.