IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding the parts of a journey

Choosing a tool to map your customer journey

Preparing the journey components

When you've been marketing online for a while, you start to notice that you're dedicating a large part of your day to routine tasks. These tasks might not be straightforward enough to create a simple, linear program in Automation Studio (see Chapter 10), but they are predictable and based on logic.

For example, when a person signs up to receive your newsletter, you might send her an email asking her to confirm her email address and phone number. If the person responds within three days, you send a thank-you message with information about how to get to the website where she can control her subscription.

If the person doesn't respond in three days, though, you send her a reminder and start the three-day waiting period over again. If she replies, you send the thank-you message. If not, remind again. You don't want to send reminder emails every three days forever, of course. If the subscriber doesn't respond after two of them, you probably want to try something else.

When you write the logic like this, you can see how you aren't just talking about a series of emails. This process flow also has waiting periods, decision points, and different messages that subscribers might or might not receive, based on their behavior. Two subscribers who both enter this process flow could go down different branches in the logic, depending on their behavior, and end up having different experiences.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud calls this kind of process flow a journey, and Journey Builder is the Marketing Cloud app where you can assemble those actions, decision points, and waiting periods into process flows that automate your routine tasks and clear your schedule for more important things.

Journeys can be simple or sophisticated, but they all require forethought and planning. In this chapter, we discuss the concepts you need to understand before you start, as well as what you need to do to get ready to build a journey. In Chapter 17, we discuss how to use the Journey Builder app to implement the process flows that you design in this chapter.

Understanding Journeys

A journey is a process flow that controls how and when Marketing Cloud sends messages to your subscribers. All messages in a journey relate to each other because a journey describes how a subscriber moves through a process, such as becoming a new customer or celebrating an anniversary as part of your loyalty program.

The experience of going through a journey isn't necessarily the same for every subscriber who enters it. You intentionally define different branches of the process flow to create an appropriate experience for different subscribers. Even though each subscriber probably goes down only one branch and never sees what the other branches do, you design the entire journey — branches, waiting periods, messages — based on the logic you use to control your messaging.

Subscribers do not need to enter a journey at the same time. For example, if you were messaging subscribers manually to thank them for an order, you would probably wait to send the thank-you message at the end of the day so you could send just one message to the entire batch of customers who ordered that day. With a journey, though, you can set it up so that customers enter the journey at any time and progress through it at their own pace. They could get their thank-you message right away without having to wait for others to get their orders in.

Subscribers also don't need to stay in the journey for the same amount of time. Depending on the journey steps, subscribers can exit the journey once they reach a decision point, if that's what makes sense according to your process logic.

For example, a common and simple kind of journey to create is a welcome series. In a welcome series, you send a few messages, each a few days apart. The messages welcome a new subscriber, such as someone who just joined your rewards program or your newsletter mailing list. In this example, you might create the following:

• An initial email to welcome the new participant in your rewards program
• A second email to invite the new participant to join other programs you offer
• A third email to offer a discount

Figure 16-1 shows what a welcome series journey might look like in Journey Builder.

When you create this journey, you instruct the system to have subscribers enter the welcome series journey when they appear in the audience that contains the members of your rewards program. Then, you have the journey do the following:

• Send the initial email immediately.
• Wait three days.
• Send the second email.
• Wait another three days.
• Send the third email.

After the system sends the three emails, the subscriber exits the journey. After a subscriber finishes the journey, you can have him enter another journey right away, but you don't have to. A subscriber who exits a journey can simply remain in your system, waiting until you decide to add him to another journey sometime in the future.

The kinds of journeys that you set up will depend on your company's marketing efforts. However, most online marketers set up several common journeys. See Chapter 18 for ideas to help you get started.

Parts of a Journey

A journey that you create in Journey Builder looks like a flowchart, as you can see in Figure 16-2. It has a starting point and arrows indicating what actions happen in what order. When the journey comes to a decision point, it can break into branches, where different subscribers can go down different paths.

The journeys you create can include the following types of components:

• Entry sources
• Messages
• Splits
• Joins
• Waits
• Customer updates

We discuss each of these journey components in detail in the following sections.

If you also use Salesforce Sales and Services Cloud as your sales and service software tool, you can perform the following actions in the Sales and Services Cloud in the course of your journeys:

• Create a task.
• Create an opportunity.
• Create a lead.
• Create a contact.
• Open a case.
• Add a campaign member.
• Add an account.
• Create an object activity.
• Convert a lead.

The integration with Salesforce Sales and Services Cloud is powerful, but it is outside the scope of this book. If you use both of these Salesforce tools together, check out the Marketing Cloud documentation for more information on how to use these activities.

Entry sources

The entry source feeds subscribers into the journey. Every journey must have an entry source; otherwise, no one will ever go through the process flow that you create. An entry source can be any of the following:

• Audience: When the system adds a subscriber to an audience, that subscriber can also enter the journey.

  The word audience in this context is different than in previous chapters. In those chapters, audience means a special kind of sendable data extension that comes from Audience Builder (see Chapter 8). Here, however, audience refers to any sendable data extension (see Chapter 6).

• API event: You can use the Marketing Cloud API to create a bit of code that adds the subscriber to a journey. The API code you write can work from your website, your mobile app, or any other place where your subscribers interact with you online.
• CloudPages: If you include a form on a web page or social media page that you create through CloudPages, you can set it up so that anyone who completes that form enters the journey. Figure 16-3 shows a web form that you could use as an entry source. See Chapter 15 for information about CloudPages.
• Salesforce data: If you also use Salesforce Sales and Services Cloud, you can pull information you already have about subscribers in Salesforce to select subscribers to enter your journey.
• Event: A particular date adds a subscriber to the journey. For example, you can use the event entry source to create a Happy Birthday journey that subscribers enter on their birthday.

Splits

A split is a decision point. When a subscriber reaches the split in the journey, the system determines along which branch the subscriber should continue. You can split your journey according to three different types of information:

• Decision split: This kind of split looks at a piece of information you have collected about the subscriber and chooses the correct path from there. For example, you could create different paths for subscribers who live on each continent. Each time a subscriber reached that split in the journey, the system would look at the field that contains the subscriber's continent. The subscriber would proceed along the appropriate branch according to that data.
• Random split: When you set up a random split, you indicate the percentage of the audience that you want to proceed along each branch. When a subscriber reaches this kind of split, the system chooses a branch based on the percentages you indicated.
• Engagement split: An engagement split considers whether the subscriber has engaged with a particular message. Subscribers who clicked a link in your newsletter, for example, could go down one branch, while those who did not would go down the other branch.

You can create complex queries that use data from more than one data extension (database table; see Chapter 6) to determine which subscribers enter the journey or as the decision split criteria. To make the fields from multiple data extensions available to use this way, you need to map the data extensions to the contact model in Contact Builder (see Chapter 8) as part of an attribute group, as shown in Figure 16-4.

Although this kind of data manipulation might be beyond the scope of your first few journeys, knowing the importance of using Contact Builder when you set up your data model might make later journeys easier to build.

Considerations before Starting

The Journey Builder app makes setting up sophisticated automation easy, but you still have to do the hard work of designing the automations. After you have an idea for a journey you want to create, you'll want to think about the following topics and prepare before you get into the Journey Builder app to start building.

Beginning to Map a Customer Journey

A visual map of how subscribers will flow through a journey can be a useful tool. It helps you to visualize all the different branches involved and determine the data you need.

For a simple journey, just laying out the messages, splits, and waits in a numbered or bulleted list might be enough. When the journey is short and straightforward, a simple list can help you understand how you'll translate your journey to the canvas.

If your journey contains several branches, joins, and different exits, though, you'll probably want to create a map. A paper sketch or a whiteboard is the preferred tool for artistic types who like to put pen to paper. These tools are perfectly acceptable, especially if you're the only one who needs to review the journey map.

If you're the kind of person who prefers a computer mouse to a dry erase marker, or if you need to email the flowchart to people throughout your company, you might want to use flowchart software. Microsoft Visio is a powerful flowchart tool, and your company might already have it under license. If not, check out, Lucid Chart, an online tool that is free to use, as long as you stick to the basic version. Figure 16-5 shows a journey mapped out in Lucid Chart.

Whether you're working on a hard copy or an electronic copy of the map, you should draw all the message sends, splits, joints, waits, and customer updates. From this flowchart, you can identify all the items you need for your journey checklist.

Journey Preparation Checklist

Every good journey starts with preparation. You wouldn't start a hike through the forest without making sure you had everything first; it would be a hassle to have to stop and go back for your water, camera, or favorite trail mix. In the same way, you want to make sure you have all the components ready before you start the work to build your journey. That way, you won't have to stop in the middle and lose momentum.

Use the following checklist as starting point. Add your own items to the list as you create more journeys and uncover areas for which you need to remember to plan:

• Create the messages you need to create, and update any existing messages that you plan to use in the journey, if needed.
• Populate the data that the journey needs. Decision splits use subscriber data fields, and messages can also include subscriber data. Your entry sources could also require certain data.
• Create the data extensions that the journey will use. See Chapter 6 for instruction on creating data extensions.
• If you want to tie data from more than a single data extension together to use as part of a journey, remember to configure it in Contact Builder. See Chapter 8 for more information about Contact Builder.

After you've thought through your journey, created all the components you need, and assembled the data that the journey will use, creating the journey in Journey Builder will be simple. In the next chapter, we go through the tools in Journey Builder that turn your plans into automation reality.