Getting started

Considerations before you begin

Some items you might want to have prepared before you begin building your journey are:

• Your business goal
• What you want to communicate and any email templates you're planning on using
• Segments to include in entry criteria, exit criteria, and any steps you want to include - jot down the names of those segments.

You can always step out of your journey drafting to work on these items. With Journeys, your draft auto-saves!

What's involved?

In general, to create a journey you'll:

• Give your journey a name and some basic details
• Create entry and exit criteria for contacts
• Add steps to branch off those criteria, and in some cases experiment, join, or add delays
• Perform actions, like sending email
• Review your journey for validation errors
• Publish your journey
• Return to your journey to review, edit, and publish new versions as needed

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One more thing!

Before you jump in for the first time, be sure to review the navigation and steps overviews below ⬇️

Navigation

New journey

1. From the left navigation, expand Campaigns then click Journeys:
2. Click Create Journey.

Existing journey

1. From the left navigation, expand Campaigns then click Journeys.
2. Search for and select a journey.
3. To edit the journey, click Edit Draft:

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Edit and Review mode

There are two ways to interact with journeys:

• Edit: Use this to build your journey and make changes to the structure, actions etc.
• Review mode: Use this to review the settings without any risk of accidentally making a change. Users who only have view permissions can still inspect all the steps and their corresponding settings. You can also use this mode to take lifecycle actions like publish, stop, copy etc.

Because you are likely to design differently in Journeys based on the new editor, you can't convert a Journeys Classic journey into a Journeys version.

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Where is the save button?

The changes that you make are auto-saved. Steps can be added and saved even with missing fields. This means that you can sketch out a journey by, for instance, adding and naming actions before you have your templates and subject lines ready. You can then add those later on. Validations will ensure that all required fields are there before you can publish the journey.

Steps Overview

Journeys consist of steps, which are added by clicking on the + sign. You then get to pick which type of step to add. There are three different step categories:

• Delays: control when contacts advance, including the time of day.
• Splits: split contacts into two or more paths. There are two kinds: branching and experiment splits. Joins let you bring contacts together into a single path after a split.
• Actions: take an action, like sending an email or pushing an SMS.

• You can insert delay and action steps between existing steps. The + sign will appear when you hover over the line connecting the steps.
• Choose no action if you're looking to make some space in your Journey layout.

Every step has a Name (required) and Note (optional). You can't have two blocks with the same name. Notes are for internal use, so you can keep track of what your goal is with a block, share something with a coworker, etc.

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Pro Tip

You can re-use delays and steps.

• From a step box, click the drop down arrow and choose Copy Step the select a location to place the copy.
• From a delay, click the drop down arrow and choose Copy Link.

You can also copy a link step to send to share with a coworker, so they can easily find the exact step for a specific version. Click the link line, then click Copy Link.
If you need to make changes to a live Journey step, you can do that! Click here to learn how.