Building a Journey

From the canvas, you can:

• Save your work
• Lock the canvas
• Zoom
• Undo/Redo

Adding your first steps

Every journey needs a Start step, at least one Exit step, and something happening in the middle.

1. Click the + symbol for Add Step in the left-hand menu.

2. Drag and drop a Start Journey and Exit Journey step onto the canvas.
3. Drag any other steps you want in-between.

Best Practice(s): Lay out your steps in the way that you want to visualize your journey before you connect them. This makes it easier to edit.

4. Connect your steps by hovering over the step, and dragging from the Blue Exit Node to the Green Entry Node of the steps you want to connect

This is your Inaction Path. All customers entering this journey go down this path unless they meet conditions (such as making a purchase) that you specify later in this guide. Typically you would set this exit to a Neutral Exit (see Configuring Your Exits).

Configuring your Start step

Your start step listens for Events such as a customer making a purchase or signing up for your newsletter.

1. Give it a name.

2. Give it an icon.

3. Specify the event by typing the event name that you set up (make sure that there is an exact match).

Creating Events

Events from Engage+ are managed using webhooks, and you need to make sure that the naming that you use matches exactly.

To read more about setting this up, refer to the Setting up Webhooks guide[link]

You can also add conditions to your start step. For example, you might have a completely different journey for customers with a high-spend. Creating conditions is covered here.

Define when the journey ends, but they are also used in Reporting [link] to understand whether your journey achieved its objectives.

Configuring your Exits

There are three types of exits:

• Positive Exits: used when your customer has done something that you want them to do, such as making a purchase
• Negative Exits: typically used when a customer performs an action that is destructive - for example, if they remove themselves from a mailing list and has a detrimental affect on your KPIs
• Neutral Exits: used for customers who neither positively nor negatively affect your KPIs. They are typically used in your inaction path.

Best Practice(s): Limit yourself to 3-5 exits in your journey to avoid confusion in your reporting as you can always set up more journeys.

In addition, try and think about negative exits in your journey and what behaviors you do not want to see. Your reporting reveals ways in which you can improve your customer experience.

To configure your exits:

1. Enter a name which clearly and accurately describes the outcome
2. Set the Outcome Type to the type of Exit you want for this journey path
3. Enter an Outcome Label. If you set up your table to use this field, this will be displayed against the customer record.

Configuring Email, SMS, and Push Notifications

Journeys is linked to your Engage+, allowing you to select campaigns that you set up there. You need to have an asset that has been set up correctly to be able to find it with your Campaign step.

Configuring campaigns to work with Journeys

All of your campaigns in Engage+ need to be configured with the following settings in order to work with journeys:

• Set your send type to Messaging.
• Data Source needs to be the same as the table you use for your journey.
• Event Type should always be Event Triggered.

Once you have created your campaign, the other step you need to configure is to add a Simple Event Trigger in your campaign set up:

For details about setting up triggers, refer to this guide.

The principle is the same for all these steps:

1. Give your step a name.
2. Use the selector to find your campaign.

You can also use the preview options in the selector to check that you have the correct campaign, and if you ever need to make changes, the edit button takes you directly to that campaign in Engage+.

Adding wait durations

Each step in Journeys will follow immediately after the next. Rather than sending out content to your customers in quick succession, you can use wait steps.

There are three types of wait in Journeys:

• Wait Step - defines a duration
• Wait Until - defines the next day/time to send
• Countdown Steps - count backwards from a specific date you have set

Configuring Wait steps

Waits Steps(s) allow you to configure a duration in Weeks, Days, Hours, or Minutes.

1. Add a number to define the time
2. Choose Weeks, Days, Hours, or Minutes.

Early Exits from Wait steps

If you want to move the customer along more quickly, Wait and Wait Until steps allow you to create an Early Exit path.

The Early Exit listens to an event you specify, so that if the customer does something you want them to, such as making a purchase, you can progress them more quickly to a Positive Exit, rather than waiting for the whole duration of the wait.

Note: This is very similar to the Update Journey step and is another option you have available, but it requires an additional connection. Think carefully about the design of your journey before using this option.

Configuring Wait Until steps

Wait Until steps work in a similar way to Wait steps but allows you to have control over scheduling. You might have internal processes, which run on a regular basis (e.g. updating customer lists at 5pm on a Tuesday). Wait Until steps allow you to sync the journey with those processes.

1. Define a day

2. Define a time on your chosen day

Early Exits from Wait steps

If you want to move the customer along more quickly, Wait and Wait Until steps allow you to create an Early Exit path.

The Early Exit listens to an event you specify, so that if the customer does something you want them to, such as making a purchase, you can progress them more quickly to a Positive Exit, rather than waiting for the whole duration of the wait.

Note: This is very similar to the Update Journey step and is another option you have available, but it requires an additional connection. Think carefully about the design of your journey before using this option.

Configuring Countdown steps

Countdown steps, rather than counting upwards from a previous step, count downwards to a date which you specify.

This can make it much easier to manage journeys such as bookings so that you can picture what happens before the date, and what happens after the event.

Best Practice(s): The Journey Target Date is not the same as the journey exit. As a result, you can use Countdown steps to define what happens before the target date and then switch to wait steps to perform follow-ups, such as getting a customer review.

Late Arrivals

Similar to Early Exits, you can define what happens if a customer doesn’t arrive at your Countdown step with enough time for the timer to run down. For instance, you might have built a booking journey with campaigns at T-2 weeks and T-1 weeks, and a customer arrives with less than a week to go.

In this instance, you can set the Exit via a “Late Arrivals” path option. This allows you to draw a new connection which you can use to either bypass certain steps, or define a completely new path with different campaigns for customers who book late.

Best Practice(s): If you are defining a journey using Countdown Steps, use the late arrivals path on all of your countdowns and string them together to catch all of your customers making late bookings.

Setting target date for your Journey

Your journey target date is found under Journey Settings in the left-hand menu.

There are three options for setting the target date -

• Actual Date: allows you to set a date that is the same for all customers (e.g. if your journey is for a one-off event).

• Event: uses the data relating to an event (e.g. a flight check-in).

• Table Attribute: looks up data about your customer in the table you have used in your journey (e.g. Birthday).

Setting a target date from an event

Events are determined by the data that you have in your webhook.

Within the JSON payload of your webhook is a list of properties, simply copy the name of the property that contains the target date you want into the input. In the example below, this is “checking.”

Setting a target date from a table attribute

In scenarios where you have a date or dateTime attribute in the table that you use for your Journey, you can configure your journey’s target date as this value. Thus, personalizing it based on customer data.

Examples might include the customer’s birthday or the date of their first purchase with you.

Use the selector to choose the attribute that you want to base the journey’s target date on.

Multiple Paths: Personalizing your Journey for customers

So far we’ve looked at journeys that use a single path, the “inaction path”, which doesn’t require the user to do anything.

This might be enough for Welcome journeys or educational series, however, Journeys of this type are difficult to have any meaningful success metrics and are not personalized to your individual customers.

In this section, you can add some new paths by personalizing the journey based on customer data and preferences, customer behavior, and record how these affect your journey objectives.

This guide introduces some new concepts:

Split steps: allow you to split a journey into two paths (A/B Split and Advanced Decision steps).

Update Journey Steps: listen for another event, so that at any point in your journey, you can move a customer onto a new path.

Update Profile steps: allows you to write back to your table to record data when a customer does something.

Split Steps

Split steps allow you to determine which of two paths a customer goes down by defining the criteria you want to use in order to split traffic.

Best Practice(s): If two paths are not enough for you, you can string split steps together to create more and more personalized routes.

Remember to think about your journey design and what level of personalization is worth the effort. You can always create separate journeys to make management of this easier.

There are two types of split:

• A/B Split - used to randomly send traffic down each path

• Advanced Decision - used to create rules to define how traffic is split

Using the A/B Split step

The A/B Split step is not designed for testing content. It is designed to understand the difference that combinations of journey steps can have on your journey outcomes.

For example, if you want to test whether you have different results with changing channels or adding wait durations, you use a Split step:

Configuration of the split takes place on the connectors.

Open the connector to see the option to change the percentage of traffic that will go down each of your paths (always equalling 100% of traffic between both).

Using Decision steps

Decision steps allow journeys to be personalized by sending a customer down a different path.

You can use data from a recipient table to send a customer an email or SMS depending on their preferences. You can also use Event Metadata (such as Cart Total), Table Attributes (such as Channel Preference), or a Literal Condition (such as the Day of the Week) to make a decision.

Best Practice(s): Decision Steps use a Yes/No logic to determine which route to send a customer down. When you are designing your journey, think about how you can build the expression to get a true/false answer.

Creating an Expression

The Expression Builder can be found in several places around Journeys: Decision steps, Start steps, and Update Journey steps.

It allows you to create simple rules using either the Basic builder, or if you’re an advanced user, you can use the Advanced tab to write your expression.

More details about formatting can be found in the Expressions Guide.

1. Click Add Condition (you can add multiple conditions with AND/OR logic).
2. Choose whether you want to base your condition on the following:
   1. Member Attribute: build a condition based on data in the table your journey uses.
   2. Event Attribute: properties from the JSON payload of your webhook
   3. Literal Condition: e.g. Day of the week
3. Use the modifier to create the expression.
4. Enter a value that you want to match with, e.g.
   1. Date of Birth EQUALS 1998-09-01.
   2. Cart Total IS GREATER THAN 200.

Click here to configure your Event/Campaign data to best utilize Decision steps and create webhooks. 

Using Update Journey steps

Rather than having lots of connections from every single step to move a customer on a new path, you can use the Update Journey step to define a parallel path whenever an event is triggered.

For example, a restaurant manager wants to get customers to leave a review after they have made a booking and sends an email to ask for their review after they had their meal: