Introduction to building a journey

In this video, we’ll introduce you to the basics of building a journey in Adobe Journey Optimizer. We’ll introduce the journey canvas, describe the different activities available for you to use in your journeys, and show you the process of building a simple journey step-by-step. Here in the Journey Optimizer home page, when I click on Journeys in the left nav, I’m taken to a list of existing journeys. This is where you can view and manage all the journeys that have been created in your organization. You have filters on the left that can help you narrow down the list and find the specific journey that you’re looking for. For each of the journeys on the list, I can click on the journey’s name to open it in the journey canvas. Clicking on the ellipsis button here, I have options to view the report for a live journey, duplicate that journey if I want to create a new journey based on this existing one, close or stop a live journey, delete the journey, add it to a package, or edit the tags. The options that are available here will depend on the journey status, specifically whether it’s in draft mode, live, or has been closed or stopped. To create a new journey, click Create Journey in the upper right corner. This takes me to a blank journey canvas where I can start by giving the journey a name and edit some of its general properties, such as whether individuals can go through the journey more than once, time zone settings, optional start and end dates, and timeout and error settings when reading data, executing messages, and other actions within a journey. Also, note that you can click on the hamburger icon to close the left nav in Journey Optimizer and give yourself more room to work. On the left side of the canvas, you have a palette of available activities that you can use to build a journey by dragging and dropping the desired activity into the canvas. These activities fall into three categories, event activities, orchestration activities, and action activities. Let’s talk about each of these in more detail. Event activities are individual behavioral events or other person-specific events, such as a mobile app user entering a geofence around one of your brick-and-mortar stores, or a web user purchasing a product. You can configure the specific events that you want Journey Optimizer to listen for under Configurations in the left navigation. Once you’ve finished configuring these events, they’ll show up here in the Activity palette in the Journey canvas. You can set any of these events as a starting point of a journey, or you can listen for specific events later in a journey to advance the individual down different paths. For example, I could set my journey to start when a user purchases something. Then, I could listen for the subsequent event of a user joining the silver level of our customer loyalty program. For that subsequent event, I can set a timeout of, say, 25 days and then check the box to include a timeout path. So now in my journey, I have two alternate paths for this event where I can set a certain message or other actions that should be triggered when the person completes the ticket purchase, or an alternate path where I can trigger a different message or action if the person hasn’t joined the silver level loyalty group after 25 days. In addition to person-specific events, Journey Optimizer can also listen to business events that do not pertain to a specific person but could still be used to trigger a message to a relevant audience. For example, a flight delay could trigger a message to an audience that contains the passengers of that flight. Orchestration activities Orchestration activities allow you to control the experience flow within a journey. For example, the Read Audience activity is used to indicate the specific audience that you want to address with your journey. So, you can start a journey with a Read Audience activity and specify the audience that you want to target, say, users in California. Then, you can specify the schedule on which that journey should start, which could be as soon as possible, once, daily, weekly, or monthly, at times and dates that you specify. So, between the individual events that we discussed earlier and the different ways of initiating an audience-based journey, you have a powerful set of options for setting up the start of a journey for both real-time one-to-one and audience-based use cases. Orchestration activities also include conditions which allow you to tailor a journey to each individual based on their customer profile, contextual data from an event, or data from other external sources that you can access in real-time. For example, I can check whether the individuals in this journey have opted into email or SMS and create separate branches for these two groups.

You can also use this activity to create conditions based on time or dates, or to create random percentage splits to test different messages or experiences within a certain audience. There’s also a Wait activity that you can use to control the timing and sequence of events within a journey. Finally, we have Action activities. This includes the built-in Message action to send email or push notifications to Journey Optimizer’s native messaging services, as well as a built-in function for making updates to a customer’s profile based on what’s happened in the journey. You can also configure additional custom actions to execute API calls to third-party services. These custom actions can be used to add other messaging channels or touchpoints that you can orchestrate in the Journey Canvas. So, now you’ve seen the Journey Canvas and the different activities that you have available to build a basic journey, but keep in mind that this was just an introduction. In other videos, we’ll show you more specific and complete use cases based on the different types of journeys that you can develop in the Journey Optimizer Canvas. Thanks for watching.