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At the heart of any successful company is its workforce, and the way employees perceive their value within an organization significantly impacts their overall experience. One powerful method to demonstrate appreciation and foster engagement is by customizing their journey within the company, aligning with their individual needs and timelines. In this article, we delve into the concept of Journey Automation, a tool designed to automate personalized communication sequences, enriching the employee experience and driving meaningful engagement.

Before You Start

This article assumes you are signed in to Creator Studio and have a role with permissions to create journeys. You will learn the difference between campaigns and journeys and how to navigate the Journeys page in Creator Studio. For detailed guidance on creating and managing journeys, refer to the articles below:

Starting a Journey
Adding Journey Steps
Journey Management
Journey Member Visibility
Journey Reporting
Using Audience Attributes and Date Operators for Journey Automation
Journey Insights
Journey Use Cases

Understanding Journeys

Journey Automation is a versatile platform for Brand Super Admins to orchestrate individualized communication flows effortlessly. By seamlessly stringing together content, journeys enable administrators to extend next-level personalized content to every user who enters a journey. Before delving into the specifics, it's essential to differentiate between a campaign and a journey.

Campaign

• A singular, mass communication endeavor encompassing content, targeting (audience and/or topic), and delivery parameters.
• Primarily used for broadcasting group messages, such as company updates or newsletters, as well as posting to topics.

Journey

• Comprises one or more campaigns interconnected via event triggers and decision trees, facilitating tailored 1:1 communication experiences.
• Content is the only part of the campaign or template pulled into the journey. All Deliver page settings associated with the campaign or templates are ignored because the journey defines the audience and schedule.
• Empowers administrators to craft personalized journeys for individual employees, spanning various touchpoints like onboarding, promotions, training, and more.

Key components of Journeys

• Communication: Thoughtfully curate the content included in each communication step.
• Events: Initiate journeys based on specific data or user events such as registration or start date.
• Rules: Incorporate split logic, delays, and audience filters to tailor the journey flow.

Journeys Page

The Journeys page offers a comprehensive overview of all active, draft, and archived journeys, enabling easy monitoring and management. To access the Journeys page in Creator Studio, click the Journeys tab on the left-hand navigation menu.

 

On the Journeys page, every row provides an overview of each journey: name, date created, creator, status (active or draft), and the number of members currently in the journey. Here, you can search for Journeys in the list by the journey name, making it easy to find the one you are looking for. You can also use the filters to narrow your search even further. Clicking on a journey lets you view the journey flowchart and modify configurations for its individual steps. Clicking on a journey in an active state will also let you drill into journey metrics and journey engagement on a per-step basis. Additionally, clicking on the vertical ellipses also allows you to view and edit journeys, as well as archive or stop journeys according to your community's needs. Click Create on the left navigation menu and then select Journey or click the + Create Journey button on the Journeys page to create a new journey.

Filter Views

You will notice two tabs on the Journeys page: Current and Archived.

Current

Current contains a list of all journeys that are in the Active, Active with Draft, or Draft states (basically everything that is not archived). The filters here allow you to filter by:

• State: You can filter the list to only show Active or Draft as an example. So, if you wanted to just see active journeys, you could do so. Within the state filter, you will notice the following states:
  • Draft - This will list all journeys that are currently in a draft state.
  • Active - This will list all journeys that are currently in the Active state or Active with Draft state.
  • Processing - This will list all journeys that you have "Activated" but may still be "processing." For instance, if you add a lot of content with multiple videos, we have to process those videos. If you publish the journey before those videos have finished processing, the journey will enter this processing state, and then will automatically move to the Active state once processing is complete.
• Author: Filtering by author will list journeys created by the selected user.
• Created Date: This will allow you to use a calendar picker to select the time frame for when the journey was created.

Archived

Archived contains a list of all journeys that you have explicitly archived and no longer want in view. Only journeys that are in the Draft state can be archived. If a journey has completed running, you must "Stop" the journey in order to archive it. The filters here allow you to filter by:

• Author: Filtering by author will list journeys created by the selected user.
• Created Date: This will allow you to use a calendar picker to select the time frame for when the journey was created.

Journey States

• Draft: Journeys in a Draft state are not "on" in any way. A journey is in Draft state typically when you are building it out for the first time. A journey can also be in a Draft state after you "Stop Journey."
• Active: A journey is in an Active state after you have published it. Depending on the journey type (Recurring or Event Based), people can continue to qualify for a journey in its active state. One Time journeys will also be in an Active state, but remember, it is possible that it has not yet run if it has been scheduled for a future time, or members are flowing through it. Members will only be able to qualify for this journey at the time it runs based on what you set as the schedule.
• Active with Draft: An Active with Draft journey means that the journey is still running and nothing has changed for members in the journey. Additionally, new members will continue to qualify. In this scenario, there is just a duplicate draft version of what is active that you can edit. You are able to edit pieces of content, wait step duration, and qualification criteria while it is in a draft state, and then you can publish if you choose, and it will overwrite the version that is currently active. Any journey members will be uninterrupted and will remain exactly where they are in the journey. For instance, let's assume:

• You have Communication A, followed by a wait step, followed by Communication B.
• The wait step is 5 days.
• There are 2 people in that step with 3 days left.
• You replaced Communication B with Communication C.
• You publish the draft and overwrite the currently active version.
• The 2 people in the wait step will receive Communication C when they exit the wait step in 3 days.

This is what enables us to support updating content that needs to be updated in live journeys. You can also simply delete that draft from the menu on the journey list page, and it will go from an "Active with Draft" state to just an "Active" state if you wish to discard your changes. In this case, it will be like a draft was never even created, and it will continue to run as previously built.