Interacting with customers on a 1-to-1 customer experience platform is important because it emphasizes personalized interactions to foster customer loyalty and better marketing investment returns. Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a useful tool for creating complex and adaptable customer journeys.
What is Journey Builder?
Marketing Cloud Journey Builder is a tool that allows users to create personalized campaigns based on their contacts’ activities and data across different channels. It is a useful tool for creating complex and adaptable customer journeys.
Journey Builder manages the customer lifecycle by customizing interactions based on real-time input, customer needs, preferences, and demographics. Journey Builder provides valuable insights into customer behavior by using event triggers like downloading a product fact sheet and abandoning a shopping cart. As interactions increase, the level of detail in understanding the customer grows. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and ultimately increases sales and revenues.
Complex Customer Journeys Can Be Easy
Journey Builder facilitates the creation of complex and adaptable customer journeys by providing an intuitive interface for designing customer journeys. It offers a wide range of customizable automation tools. Decision splits and personalized messaging options allow marketers to map out and automate complicated workflows based on customer interactions and behaviors.
With its user-friendly interface and powerful automation capabilities, Journey Builder simplifies the process of creating and managing intricate workflows, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and customer engagement.
Three Pillars of Journey Builder
To create a customer journey, three main pillars need to be considered: entry source, activities, and flow control.
The entry source requires pre-filtered data to avoid contact communication spam or duplication. Activities should be tested to determine the best strategy for the customer’s preference in information dissemination. Lastly, flow control needs a decided journey cadence, quantity, and frequency to ensure the audience experiences the same interactive journey.
Here are the best practices for interaction with Journey Builder pillars.
Entry Source
To ensure successful customer journeys in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, it is essential to follow best practices for entry sources. The entry source is the starting point for a customer’s journey.
The best practices for entry sources include selecting the appropriate entry event for the journey, setting the criteria for the entry event, and filtering the data to ensure only relevant contacts enter the journey.
To ensure the accurate processing of contacts and prevent spamming or duplicate communication, it is recommended not to utilize the same entry source data extension for multiple journeys. Instead, create a separate, pre-filtered copy of the data extension for each journey.
Activities
According to activities in Journey Builder should be tested to determine the best strategy for information dissemination. The Path Optimizer activity enables testing of up to 10 variations of a journey path to determine the best-performing path.
Additionally, activities should be divided into sections or modules, and wait activities should only be used when necessary. It’s also important to track customer engagement to measure the effectiveness of the journey.
Flow Control
Flow control includes using decision splits to direct customers down different paths based on their behavior. Leveraging engagement splits, you can see if a customer is still interested in the journey. Whereas goals enable customer progress tracking. They are using exits to get rid of customers who have failed.
Additionally, it’s important to regularly review and optimize your flow to ensure it’s effective and efficient, and to test different variations to see what works best for your customers.
Journey Builder and Automation Studio Comparison
However, both tools manage data, have automation capabilities, and integrate with other Marketing Cloud components, they have distinct roles.
Automation Studio primarily focuses on performing Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tasks, while Journey Builder aims to create personalized, individualized journeys for prospect communications. Automation Studio enables automated email sending and straightforward data and file imports, catering to specific needs accordingly.
Get the most out of Journey Builder
To get the most out of Journey Builder, it’s important to plan ahead by defining your journey’s goal, target audience, and the studio you will use. The data source chosen for the Entry Source can greatly impact the insights and analysis the journey produces. It’s of course important to follow best practices for activities and flow control.
By following these best practices, you can maximize the potential of Journey Builder and create impactful, personalized customer journeys that drive engagement and deliver results.
