The latest Journey Designer releases and features.
Undo/Redo (September 22nd, 2022)
This one really needs no introduction! When you're trying out ideas or making changes to a journey, you can now undo and redo changes using the icons on the canvas or via the following keyboard shortcuts:
- Windows: Undo CTRL+Z, Redo CTRL+Y
- Mac: Undo CMD+Z, Redo CMD+SHIFT+Z
Step Notes (September 22nd, 2022)
Have you ever looked back at something you did a while ago and can't, for the life of you, remember why you did it the way you did? Well, Step Notes are here to help!
You can now add notes to steps in a journey to capture important things about them, such as:
- Things you need to do before finalizing the journey
- The reasons you choose a particular approach
- List of ideas for enhancing the journey at a later date
To add notes, simply click on a step on the canvas and add your note in the settings panel. When a note exists, you'll see a little sticky note on the canvas and hovering on it will display the note. Happy note taking!
Expression Builder (September 15th, 2022)
Advanced Decision Steps direct people down different paths based on sophisticated rules. This helps you ensure your journey intelligently adapts to the needs of each and every user, helping build a more personal and relevant experience for each person.
In this release, we have introduced an easy-to-use Expression Builder for Advanced Decisions. The Expression Builder not only helps you build a valid expression, but also helps you discover useful attributes to include in your decision. You can discover and include user attributes such as profile information, traits, preferences and propensity scores. You can also discover and include other data related to activities a user performs, such as purchases, abandoned carts, and flight check-ins.
To get started, add an Advanced Decision step to your journey canvas and then click on it to bring up the setting panel. Here, you can find and then add one or more attributes, and combine them with logical operators.
Further details are outlined in the online help guide, available by clicking "Help" under the builder. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or our Support team.
Save Work In Progress (September 7th, 2022)
Designing more sophisticated journeys that provide engaging, personalized experiences for each user isn't something that should be rushed. To support you as you try out ideas, collaborate with colleagues and sketch out flows, you can now save a journey no matter whether details are filled in, your paths are connected or your canvas looks pretty!
When you save a journey that isn't complete, we'll outline what is still to be done but save it anyway. On the list screen, we'll indicate if a journey isn't complete and, on reopening it, we'll remind you of things to take a look at.
So, what are you waiting for? Your journey sketchpad awaits... play, test, brainstorm and then, when you're ready, finalize your journey so it's ready for publishing!
Journey Activity Log (August 25th, 2022)
Journey Designer provides a number of ways to review decisions taken and action performed within a journey. In addition to real-time analytics that provides a summary of audience-level behavior, you can deep dive into the experience of an individual user using the Activity Log. This is particularly helpful when you are building, testing or reviewing a journey.
To access the Activity Log, click on the "Log" icon in the left-hand menu and select "Activity Log". You can review recent activity across all users, during a specific time window or drill down to an individual user by searching for them by name, email or user id. The Activity Log will provide a summary of the decisions taken and actions performed and, for each item listed, you can click through for further details.
Journey Routing (June 21st, 2022)
For customers building more advanced journeys, we've adjusted what happens when a user travels through a journey and arrives at the same step multiple times:
- Start steps: A user already in a journey cannot join again.
We ignore any signals to add a user to a journey if they are already in it. However, a user can be in different journeys simultaneously and they can rejoin/restart a journey once they have left it. - Update steps: Users can only be moved to an Update step once.
Journeys can listen for secondary user activities, such as a purchase, and then move the user to the relevant Update step. For each Update step, we'll do this the first time the user performs the matching activity but we won't do it again if they repeat the same activity. - Other steps: Users can revisit other steps, if the journey map requires this.
If the journey map routes a user back to a step they have already been at, we'll process it as normal, using the latest information we have about the user. For instance, if they arrive at a decision step as a member of the required segment, they'll be routed to the "match" path. Later, if they are rerouted back to the same step but are no longer a member of the required segment, they'll be routed to the "no-match" path.
If you have any questions, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or our Support team.
Journey Revisions (June 9th, 2022)
To encourage experimentation, we're introducing a set of tools that give you the confidence to try things out, safe in the knowledge you can always get back to a previous version if you need to.
Journey Designer automatically keeps a record of changes people make to journeys, whenever they save one. In the Journey Revisions Log, you can now browse these historical versions of a journey and, for each version, see highlights of what was changed.
Should you want to revert to an earlier version of your journey, you'll find a convenient "Restore" button which will reset the current working version to be the same as the version you've selected. You can then either publish it right away to bring the live version in sync or use the restored version as the basis for further experiments and refinements.
Happy Experimentation!
Wait Until (May 25th, 2022)
Introducing our new “Wait Until” step, that lets you introduce more contextual, human-friendly scheduling into your journey.
With standard wait steps, users wait a concrete amount of time, for example, 24 hours or 2 days after arriving at a wait step. While extremely powerful, this does mean that exactly when the next action takes place is dependent on when the user began waiting. For example, a user who begins an onboarding journey at 11pm on a Friday might move to the next action 2 days later, at 11pm on a Sunday night... this may or may not be the best day or the best time of day to move forward.
With "Wait Until" steps, you can now use more human-friendly scheduling. For instance, you could setup the step to wait until 5pm, until tomorrow at 9am, Wednesday at midday, and so on. It's perfect for having a user join a journey at any time but move forward to the next step at the right time for the next action. For example, you might want to send a user a list of lovely country walks on Friday at 3pm, rather than simply 24 hours after they joined a journey.
Ready to give it a go? Edit your journey and head to the "+" menu. You'll find "Wait Until" listed right there, alongside all of our other action, decision and wait steps.
Countdown Step (April 20th, 2022)
Introducing our new “Countdown” step, that helps you engage a user as they get closer to a target date or event. It’s perfect for journeys that need to countdown to a date or event that is important to individual users, like their birthday, an anniversary or a hotel/flight booking. To use countdown steps, you will need to choose how the target date is determined, which you can do on the Journey Settings tab. Then it’s simply a matter of adding one or more countdown steps to your journey and choosing relevant wait periods e.g. “2 weeks before target date” or “3 days before target date”. Users arriving at a countdown step will be held there until the appropriate time before the target date or event. They will then continue along the journey path as normal.
Journey Simulation Enhancements: EDP User (April 20th, 2022)
Introducing enhanced Journey Simulation & Testing. In addition to simulating scenarios based on the segment membership of a simulated user, you can now also choose real EDP users and run them through the simulation. Furthermore, you can now choose to test the journey actions that your users encounter while traveling through the journey simulation. This will help you better understand the behaviour of your journey with real or test users and ensure that all journey actions are working as intended (e.g. send email, grant offer).
Advanced Decision Step (April 7th, 2022)
Decisioning in journeys is now more powerful and flexible, allowing you to direct users down different paths based on sophisticated rules. This helps you ensure your journey intelligently adapts to the needs of each and every user, helping build a more valuable and personal relationship with each person.
Using the Advanced Decision step you can construct your own rules to evaluate each user passing through the journey. The outcome will decide which path each user takes. You can construct your expression using Member Attributes, User Activities and Journey Attributes and combine them with arithmetic, relational and logical operators.
To get started, add an Advanced Decision Step to a journey. You’ll find a handy “How To” guide right there with instructions and example expressions.
Journey Validation (April 07th, 2022)
We have improved validation so that you can quickly and easily identify any problematic elements in a journey map. All problematic elements in a journey will now be highlighted with a warning icon next to them, helping you understand any issues and ready your journey in record time.
Journey Activity Logs (March 30th, 2022)
Want to find out your journey participants' current and historical interactions with your journey? With this release you will be able to view journey activities for the past 30 days for all your journey participants or the participant of your choice. You can also view activities & actions between your chosen dates.
Using Journey Activity Logs you get the confidence that the journey is operating as per your design by offering an accurate sequence and detailed view of all journey activities. Click on the "Activity Logs" tab available via the "Journey Logs" menu, third icon from the bottom on the navigation bar to access this new capability.
Journey Cloning (March 01st, 2022)
We are constantly looking to find ways to improve your operational efficiency. Journey Cloning provides you with the quickest way to duplicate an existing journey and use it as the starting point for a new one. It copies over the configuration as well as content references so it's easy to focus on just the changes you need for your new use-case. You'll find the clone option next to each journey in My Journeys.
Journey Health Check & Campaign Selectors (January 25th, 2022)
Welcome to our first release of 2022. We hope you've enjoyed everything new in Journey Designer this past year. It's easier to be productive when you're confident about your journey designs and how they have been set up. With this release, we have made it really easy to review the health status of all your journey assets and dependencies; we call it, "Journey Health Check". You can access it via Journey Editor by clicking on the medical bag icon, fourth from the bottom.
We have also rolled out campaign selectors with this release making it easier to search, browse & select messaging campaigns without having to leave the Journey Designer application.
Advanced Welcome Journey, Improved Decision Metrics & Online Help (December 23rd, 2021)
We’re excited to share some great new features with our final release of 2021. With this release, we have added a new Journey Template, “Advanced Welcome Journey”, to the Journey Library. It serves as a more sophisticated version of the Onboarding journey. This journey aims to promote interaction with your brand by targeting consumers that have just been acquired. You can use this journey to get your consumers engaged and opted-in straight away, which will in turn help drive future purchases and engagement.
With this release, we have further improved our Journey Metrics capabilities. Now you can analyze the impact a decision step has on the outcome of your journey. For users who have already completed their journey, you can see how they flowed through your chosen decision step and which exit they took at the end of their journey. Clicking on any decision step in a journey will quantitatively showcase how the journey audience splits across each decision branch towards their respective exit steps. This can help you understand the relative performance of each decision branch in driving your desired outcome.
Finally, this release also makes it easier for you to access help. We have replaced static PDF-based companion guides with dynamic online content that stays updated in real-time as new capabilities and features roll out. You can access online help by clicking on the question mark icon in the top right corner of the screen.
🎅🏼 At this special time of year, we'd like to express our sincerest appreciation for you – our customer – for your continued support. May your holidays and New Year be filled with joy! 🎄
Source and Destination Journey Metrics (November 09th, 2021)
For each action and wait step in your journey, you can now explore where users arrived from and where they went next. This can be particularly useful in understanding the impact of actions on user behavior and to what extent a step helps move users towards your preferred goal. The metrics are updated in real-time and you can use the date filters to understand the impact of changes to your journey. Explore the metrics for your journey by heading to the Journey Metrics section and then clicking on an action or wait step.
A/B Split Decision Step (August 19th, 2021)
With this release, we have introduced a new decision step called A/B Split Decision. This enables you to control the percentage of users that are sent down each journey path either by specifying a numeric percentage value or by using a slider. With our follow-on release, you will be able to analyze outcomes and, as result, gain insight into the performance of each journey path.
Self Service Journeys (August 02nd, 2021)
Today’s consumers want so much more and their expectations to be treated as an individual by brands are at an all-time high. As such, there's a need to create personalized experiences tailored to each consumer so that they feel special and important. With this in mind, we are excited to announce the release of Self-Service Journeys.
With Self-Service Journeys, we have made it much easier for marketers to design, build and launch sophisticated multi-step journeys. You don’t need to be a developer or a designer to use Journey Designer. With Self-Service Journeys, you can readily create and design ideal customer experiences using an easy-to-use drag-and-drop user interface and in a few simple clicks.
This release of Self Service Journeys will allow you to:
- Build new journeys from scratch
You can start building marketing flows using a blank canvas by clicking on the “+” icon on the top right corner of “My Journeys”. This will allow you to simply drag-and-drop any number of steps and in any order you like to build marketing flows that are relevant to your customers’ needs.
- Build new journeys using any standard journey template
Alternatively, you can choose the “Start from a library template” option to use any of our existing journey templates from the library as a starting point. This will create a brand new instance of the journey template, ready for you to modify as per your needs.
- Modify existing journeys
You can also make changes to any of your existing journeys. You can add or remove steps and change the flow of your marketing experience by unlocking the canvas (bottom left). Please remember to republish your journey to ensure your changes are available to customers.
We have also made sure that the process of building journeys is intuitive and helps you along the way:
- Basic Journey Validation
You can now feel assured that the journey you build will have all the necessary components it needs to work. As you build your journey, Journey Designer will provide meaningful and easy-to-understand guidance when it identifies issues in your journey map.
- Contextual Help
As you interact with steps and connections, will also provide relevant hints to help you perform the required operations e.g. it will inform you of keyboard shortcuts to delete a journey connection or how to create an anchor point to reshape a connection path.
- Journey Step Connection Enhancements
We have also made it easy for marketers to organise and structure their journey maps by allowing them to:
- Reshape connections
- Add connection labels
- Set a connection’s label position
If you’d like to find out more, please take a look at our Introducing Journey Designer article.
Under-the-hood improvements (July 13th, 2021)
- Identifying and storing changes made to a journey map as a Journey Revision.
- Updating how journey metrics track users in a wait step. Instead of only counting users exiting from a wait step, we now also count the number of users who enter a wait step so that we can improve visibility in Journey Metrics.
- Instead of relying solely on a user’s profile for their locale information, we will use a user’s browsers’ locale data to determine language choice in the Journey Designer console
Run multiple journeys simultaneously (June 23rd, 2021)
With this release, users can run multiple journeys of the same type simultaneously. The platform will warn you if there’s a chance that more than one journey might be listening to the same activity. We've also added support for Japanese. Our console is now available in Japanese as well as English! We’ll be adding more languages in the coming months. Finally, we’ve also improved how we calculate Journey Metrics for the wait step. Users will now be counted as they enter the wait as opposed to counting them only after they exited the wait step.
Journey Logs (June 17th, 2021)
We have added new details to the Journey Logs screen. In addition to User Activity logs that let you see an individual user’s progress through the journey, you can now see a list of Journey Revisions including changes to your journey and workflow events, like publishing.
We have also improved the warning messaging used for operations like “Delete”, “Stop” and “Publish”. The updated messages more clearly indicate the outcome for each of these operations.
Journey Time Series Metrics (May 04th, 2021)
We've introduced a date-range selector on the Journey Metrics tab. The date-range selector allows you to view journey metrics between dates of your choice. You can specify a date range yourself or choose a predefined shortcut like “Yesterday” or “Last 7 Days”. To avoid confusion, Journey Metrics will take into consideration your local time zone.
In this release, we’ve also made it easier to switch between Example Data and Live Data for Journey Metrics. By default, live metrics will automatically refresh every 2 mins but will increase or decrease its refresh rate depending on how busy your journey is. When we’re automatically refreshing the metrics, you’ll see a LIVE label on the top right corner of the screen.
Journey Simulation (March 25th, 2021)
With this release, we are introducing a Journey Simulation tab in the Journey Editor. The Simulator will help you preview how a user will travel through a journey and all its individual steps, allowing you to validate that the journey works, the way you have intended it to. You can also test how different characteristics such as a user’s segment will affect the user’s experience and the path they will take.
In addition to that, Journey Simulator allows you to interact with different activities along the journey, allowing you to trigger ad-hoc user actions (e.g. purchase or empty cart) that may impact the route the end-user may take at the end.
Predictive Winback Journey (February 17th, 2021)
With our latest Journey Designer release, we have added a new journey called “Predictive Winback” to our library of journeys. This journey is a more sophisticated variant of the existing Winback Journey that incorporates data models powered by Machine Learning (ML) within the EDP.
As with the base Winback Journey, the goal of the Predictive Winback journey is to entice a disengaged consumer or member to resume their relationship with your product or brand. Machine Learning model identify consumers with a high probability of unengaging and grants them offers, based on their value to the business.
Support for EDP Business Units (January 18th, 2021)
You can now deploy independent journeys for each of your EDP Business Units. Journey Designer accounts can be mapped to EDP Business Units and, in such cases, each journey will be available only to those interacting with that business unit and will only process activities related to that business unit (for example, reacting only to abandoned carts for one of your brands).
Reach out to your account team if you'd like to find out more.
Journey Operational Logging (January 11th, 2021)
Using the new logging tab in Journey Designer, you can now access detailed information about journey publishing and deployment, individual decisions and actions taken for each user and any errors encountered. You can search for an EDP Member to filter actions and see a detailed breakdown of their route through the journey and identify if they are still in the journey or have exited. Useful when testing your journeys, checking in on progress and handling any operational or support requests.
Journey Metrics (November 29th, 2020)
We've introduced a new metrics tab to Journey Designer. It provides a visual overview of the journey with core metrics overlaid so that you can check on the volume of users entering the journey, passing through each step, and exiting with negative, neutral and positive outcomes. The visualization automatically updates as new information is received so that you can watch progress and confirm everything is moving along as expected after launch or making changes.
The Swiss-Army Knife of Journey Steps (November 9, 2020)
Introducing our latest Journey step, the Custom Action. Custom Actions let you define your own actions for the journey to perform, allowing you to integrate third-party services or custom processes in EDP. They allow you to edit the marketing details within Journey Designer itself which are then processed by a custom Activity Trigger in EDP. The Activity Trigger is able to handle the technical integration of a third-party and other technical requirements.
Reach out to your account team if you'd like to find out more.
Journey Designer arrives in the App Switcher (August 14, 2020)
There's a great deal to talk about and we look forward to introducing you to the full power of Journey Designer right here in the CES Help Center. We'll highlight newly published content in this article, so check back regularly.
In the meantime:
- If you've already licensed Journey Designer:
- Open the Cheetah App Switcher in the top-left of your console screen
- Click on the Journey Designer tile to switch and start exploring!
- Check out the Journey Designer User Guide
- Get an Overview of the Standard Journeys
- Explore each journey in more detail with our series of Companion Guides
To find out more about Journey Designer, existing customers should reach out to their account teams. If you're not a Cheetah Digital customer yet, don't worry, we're here to help: talk to an expert.
Thanks!
The Journey Designer Team.