Introduction

 

Journey Builder is a powerful resource within Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It allows the user to set up the communication process from beginning to end with total control of its actions, the time the actions need to be triggered, and the possibility to have communication flows based off behavioral data.

 

Read below for a summary on what Journey Builder can offer to users and some of its key elements.

 

What Journey Builder can offer you

 

Email sends can either increase or decrease in complexity depending on the customer’s needs as well as the complexity of your approach.

 

While there are scenarios for which their goals can be fulfilled by using User-Initiated send (think of a single-email send campaign that is based off data stored in Data Extensions), the more complex the scenario, the more likely you would find  Journey Builder to be useful. Not only does Journey Builder support multi-email sends within the same flow, but it also includes the possibility to create rich communication flows that can appeal to many audiences, regardless of their specificity. Such tools include communication activities like email and SMS sends, as well as flow control activities like decision splits, engagement splits, and wait steps.

 

Setting up Journey Builder

 

As rich as Journey Builder is, its setup is very straightforward. Let’s review its key features and how they work within a journey.

 

Journey Builder’s key features are divided into the following categories:

 

Entry sources

 

An entry source is the source of the population from which contacts will get injected into the journey. There are several types of audiences; among the more commonly used are Audiences and Salesforce Data.

For Audiences, its two main categories – Email Studio Audience and Automation Studio Audience – both make use of the same resources: Data Extensions and scheduling. In the case of Email Studio Audience, a given Data Extension will need to be selected as the entry source, and from there you decide which records are to be looked up for injection into the journey (new records only versus old records) upon scheduling. In similar fashion, the same outcome can be accomplished by making use of a scheduled automation (which needs to include a Data Extension as its data source and must work under a given schedule), thus making the Entry source setup even shorter.

One key element when setting up the entry source for the journey is that the user will be enabled to enter a Contact Filter criteria, which translates into determining which of the contacts stored in the Entry Sources will make it into the journey. This is done through the fulfilling of a certain criteria that is set up based off the attributes available in the aforementioned entry source.

Activities

 

Activities are intended for communication purposes and include Send Push and Send Email.
In the case of the Send Email activity, and while Journey Builder will automatically inherit all the email’s default settings, there is also the possibility of overriding these to making changes to emails but specifically within the journey’s environment to not making any definite changes to the source emails. This is an extremely helpful resource that makes for the flexibility offered by Journey Builder.
Among the email’s properties that can be changed, there is its subject line, delivery configuration, and subscriber management.

 

Flow control

 

This is a configuration entry that allows for making decisions upon the during the journey’s flow, and based off data related to the subscriber’s behavior that can be found in the entry source. Main entries for the flow control activities include decision splits (decisions made upon the value assigned to a given attribute), engagement splits (whether the subscriber has either opened and email or clicked on a link), join (in case a split has been used, so as to return to the main flow) and wait steps (which enables the user to set up thresholds among activities to be performed throughout the journey’s flow).

For example: by using the engagement split, all those subscribers who have not opened a survey email will be sent a reminder to complete it. Then, since they need to go back into the main flow, a Join Activity can be used.

 

Another example could be that by depending on a person’s age group, the very first email that is part of a given journey’s flow will be different. Such scenario can be accomplished by using a decision split and setting up the age criteria.

Additional tools

 

Journey Builder is also capable of taking advantage of the integration between Marketing Cloud and other Cloud systems such as Sales and Services. There is a bidirectional communication that allows for Journey Builder to pull data from such resources, as well as making changes to information stored there, in a way of maintaining the data consistency across all Salesforce features.

Conclusion

 

Journey Builder is a tool capable of providing any user with the required resources to build a communication flow, that becomes suitable for any company regardless of its size of the complexity of the communication scenario.

 

Don’t need to go with the flow, just go on the Journey that suits you best.

 

Devs United offers a boutique of custom Journey Builder activities to enhance your journey, implemented by our team of professionals. For even more information, Contact us!