Building a Journey

If you changed your mind about changes you’ve made want to revert to a previous version, you can use the Journey Logs section in the left hand menu:

Open the Logs Pane, and you can see a revision log. Each version is taken from whenever you save your work. You can select any of these to review the changes, and if you want to revert to that version, click Restore.

• Lock the Canvas - to make sure no one can accidentally make changes. When a journey is Published, the canvas is automatically locked
• Zoom - you can use the Canvas Controls to zoom in and out, or fit your journey to your screen. You can also use the mouse wheel to zoom.

From the canvas, you can:

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

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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+.

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

Wait Step(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Events are determined by the data that you have in your webhook (see Creating Events).

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 “checkin.”

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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. 

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:

In this example, we will wait 7 days for a review, and if at any point in that 7 days the customer leaves a review, we can send them to an alternative path and mark them as Negative or Positive, depending on the review that they leave.

1. Add an Update Step from the Add Pane.
2. Enter the event that you want to listen for.

You can also add conditions because both steps are listening to the same event. You can use the Event Data to determine whether the review is negative or positive.

Update Profile steps allow you to write to the table that your journey is using in order to add information, which might be useful to your team. For example, you might want to create a list of customers who have left a bad review:

1. Use the Attribute Selector in the Update Profile step to choose where you want to write.

2. Use the field below to enter the value that you want to use to update the row. For example:
   1. Bad Review simply writes this string into the field.