Journeys are personalized and automated campaigns based on specific events and actions done by contacts who interact with your brand, for example an abandoned cart, a purchase, a subscription to a list, etc. Journeys are triggered in real-time so an API integration is needed to fully benefit from this feature. As soon as you publish your journey, contacts meeting the conditions will enter it.
Journey is currently only available to a selection of our clients and will be available to all users early 2023.
Creating a journey based on the abandoned cart value
Creating a journey based on the gender
Creating a post-purchase journey D+15
Managing email frequency
What are the versions?
Draining or stopping contacts?
Delay and wait until
How to use repeatability and why is it important?
How to test a journey
Common questions
Quick overview
Journey is a new module in Campaigns, as shown below, you will be prompted with several choices which correspond to the most commonly used campaigns (abandoned cart, post-purchase, welcome). Once you enter a name, you will be able to apply some conditions to your journey as well as some actions!
Journeys are not archived as standard "one-shot" campaigns can be.
Creating a journey based on the abandoned cart value
Use case: you want to create two different flows. One to people who abandon between 0 and 200€ including a standard email to return and purchase, and one that includes an incentive to people who abandon over 200€ worth of products. Indeed, your clients have different purchasing powers. Therefore, you might communicate with them differently and push different messages or different products and services.
How to proceed?
1. Create a first journey for abandoners between 0 and 200€:
2. Create a second journey for abandoners over 200€:
Creating a journey based on the gender of my contacts
Use case: you want to create three different flows: one for women, one for men, and one for others. You will need to apply two different conditions with the conditional split:
You can see here we've added two different conditions, one for women, and one for men, and contacts who do not meet any of those two conditions will receive a different email in the third branch "everyone else".
This type of tree can be applied to your multi-language journeys as well.
Creating a post-purchase journey D+15
Use case: you want to create a post-purchase journey by sending an email 15 days after the initial purchase and the first purchase confirmation. This works well for collecting feedback from customers, giving them tips on how to maintain their products, or even laying the groundwork for a second purchase.
How to proceed with the journey?
Managing email frequency
Use case: you want to send the confirmation email to your contacts who have just purchased one of your products. You then would like to suggest some complementary products they may be interested in two days later. The same contact then goes ahead and buys a new product on your website, but you do not want this contact to receive the second marketing email.
You can set up a condition within Journey so that contacts will only receive this type of marketing email once by setting up a category. The category will be added to the condition and to the email design as shown in the video below:
Step 1: After adding your desired wait time, add a condition in your journey: “number of emails received” is more than 1, less than 2 days ago, and then enter your category. This means that contacts who are matching all of the criteria will exit your journey and not receive the marketing email if this is the second time they are entering the journey.
Step 2: for contacts who do not match all of the conditions (this means they have not yet received your marketing email) add the email design and enter the category.
We recommend that you always add a campaign category to your designs to be able to associate them with actions (for example, clicking on an email). By default, the action immediately following a design will not automatically include clicks resulting from that design, but all clicks contained in all emails. The campaign category must also be filled in equally in both fields (design and action).
What are versions?
Versions are created when you duplicate your journey with the intent of editing it. If your journey has been published and you want to edit it, you will need to duplicate it, therefore creating a new version of it. You can have many versions of the same journey but only one published and one version being edited at a time. A version is a bit like a parallel journey of an existing one.
Example: you have published version 1 of a journey and need to make some modifications. Instead of stopping it, and therefore, stopping the contacts already present in the journey, you just duplicate the version and edit it in parallel. It will automatically create version 2 as a draft that would let you make modifications to the journey without affecting contacts in version 1.
You can always go back to a previous version in Journey > History.
Draining or stopping contacts?
When you want to publish a new version or stop a journey, you will need to decide what to do with the contacts who have entered it. This is because you cannot have two published versions of the same journey at the same time. Two options are therefore available for those contacts:
- If you decide to drain the contacts, you are effectively blocking the entry point without affecting contacts who are currently in the journey. Once all contacts have finished the journey, it will be finished and no additional contacts will enter it. This is useful if you only want to make some edits in your journey and are not concerned by removing contacts who have already entered it.
- If you decide to stop the contacts in the journey, you are blocking the entry point AND removing all contacts who are currently in that journey. This is useful if you have made a mistake in your journey (for example, you added the wrong design or there is a mistake in the conditions, in the timing of the action, etc.) and want to press the "panic button".
Delay and wait until
In your journey conditions, you will have the option to set up a “delay” and “wait until” action.
Their use is quite different and here we have outlined a use case for each of them.
Delay
It will be used when you want to have some time between two actions. For example, you want to trigger an email being sent exactly two hours after an abandoned cart has been created by one of your contacts.
Wait until
It will be used when you want to wait for a specific time or day of the week.
- For example, you are importing your data during the night at 2 am, and you don’t want your contacts to receive your email after an import is being made, therefore, you set up for the email to be triggered only from 8 am every day.
- Another use case could be if you want your emails to be sent out only during weekdays, between 09:00 and 17:00 (as shown below).
What is the journey repeatability and why is it important?
When setting up your journey, you will have to choose between three repeatability options. This setting is intended so that you can make sure contacts enter a journey only when needed.
Repeatability |
When to use it? |
Multiple times |
When your contacts should be able to enter a journey several times, for example buying a product. |
Once |
When your contacts will only do this interaction once, for example when creating an account once with your brand. |
Only after exiting |
In the case of abandoned carts, your contacts will never have two abandoned carts at the same time whereas they could have multiple receipts at the same. |
How to test a journey
If you want to test the journey before launching it to your customers, you can test it by adding the condition "email equals" and then insert your email address as shown in the example below. This means that only you will enter the journey when you abandon a cart.
We recommend using an abandoned cart campaign to test a journey as it will be easier to reproduce this journey directly on your website.
You have made a mistake and want to switch the conditions from being a "yes" to a "no" (yes, my contacts meet those criteria or no, they do not meet them)? It is possible with the "flip" button placed on the tree of the journey!
Common questions
Q: What is the difference between journey and campaigns in "Specific"?
A: Journey is purely based on events and not on "batch" sending. This means you do not need to create a filter before in Target (and you will not have the possibility to add your filters in a journey) but can directly apply conditions within your journey to create a flow.
Q: How many drafts at a time can I create?
A: You can only have one published journey and one draft at a time for each journey.
Q: Can I create a design directly in Journey?
A: No, but you have the option to be redirected to the Email Designer and hit the refresh button once your design is ready. It will then be shown in the list.
Q: Can I exclude contacts in a journey?
A: Yes, you can do so by using a "no branch" in your journey tree as an exclusion.