Journeys are a great way to automatically send messages to your users when they reach important stages in the customer lifecycle. Whether you want to send a cart reminder email, happy birthday message, or promo code, journeys can do it all!
Message tiles send your users a message when they reach that stage of the journey. There are six kinds of message tiles:
- Email - Sends an email to the user's email inbox
- SMS - Sends a text message to the user's phone
- Push - Sends a push notification to the user's phone or tablet
- Web push - Sends a web push notification to the user's browser
- In-app - Sends an in-app message to your mobile app or website
- Channel optimization - Sends the message on the channel where each user is most likely to engage (based on past engagement data)
- Embedded message — Displays an embedded message in your app or website to users who pass through the tile.
Read on to learn how to set up your journey's message tiles.
In this article
How campaigns work in journeys
When you add a message tile to a journey, it creates a new campaign. (It's not currently possible to add an existing campaign to a journey.) Because journeys send the message when a user arrives in the message tile, all campaigns that you build in a journey are triggered campaigns.
Once your journey is live, users who reach a message tile will receive the campaign on the channel you've set it up for.
After you've published a journey, you can edit its campaigns at any time, and the journey doesn't need to be re-published for your updates to be live. As soon as you save an updated campaign, your changes go into effect.
NOTE
Just like regular campaigns, the campaigns that you set up in a journey support
locales! When each user
arrives in the message tile, Iterable checks their user profile for the
locale field and sends the corresponding localized version of the campaign.
Setting up message tiles
Drag a message tile onto the Studio canvas and double-click it to open the tile settings menu. You can tweak these settings to make sure each user receives the campaign in the right place and at the right time. (These settings vary a bit for each channel.)
Email tiles
| Setting | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | Give your new email campaign a name. |
| Content | Add content to your message. Click Choose a template to attach and edit one of your existing email templates. |
| Quiet Hours | Turn on Quiet Hours to prevent this campaign from being sent during certain hours of the day in each user's time zone. |
| Send Time Optimization | Turn on Send Time Optimization for this campaign to have Iterable select the ideal delivery time for each user. |
| Ignore Frequency Cap | Disable Frequency Management when this campaign sends. (Marketing messages only.) |
| Conversion events | Select the event or events that you want to track as conversions for this campaign. |
Attribute only conversion events with explicitly set campaignId field | If you select this option, incoming events must have a campaignId field that matches your campaign's ID to count as a conversion. |
| Attribute any conversion events received within set period | If you select this option, any incoming events that arrive within your specified time frame after the campaign is sent will count as conversions. If multiple campaigns use the same conversion event, the conversion is assigned to the campaign that was sent most recently. |
| Create A/B experiment | Create an experiment for this campaign to test different subject lines, sender/from names, preheader text, and more. |
SMS tiles
NOTE
To send SMS messages from a journey, you must have an SMS provider set up for your project.
| Setting | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | Give your new SMS campaign a name. |
| Content | Add content to your message. Click Choose a template to attach and edit one of your existing SMS templates. |
| Quiet Hours | Turn on Quiet Hours to prevent this campaign from being sent during certain hours of the day in each user's time zone. |
| Ignore Frequency Cap | Disable Frequency Management when this campaign sends. (Marketing messages only.) |
| Conversion events | Select the event or events that you want to track as conversions for this campaign. |
Attribute only conversion events with explicitly set campaignId field | If you select this option, incoming events must have a campaignId field that matches your campaign's ID to count as a conversion. |
| Attribute any conversion events received within set period | If you select this option, any incoming events that arrive within your specified time frame after the campaign is sent will count as conversions. If multiple campaigns use the same conversion event, the conversion is assigned to the campaign that was sent most recently. |
| Create A/B experiment | Create an experiment for this campaign to test different subject lines, sender/from names, preheader text, and more. |
Push tiles
| Setting | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | Give your new push campaign a name. |
| Content | Add content to your message. Click Choose a template to attach and edit one of your existing push notification templates. |
| Quiet Hours | Turn on Quiet Hours to prevent this campaign from being sent during certain hours of the day in each user's time zone. |
| Send Time Optimization | Turn on Send Time Optimization for this campaign to have Iterable select the ideal delivery time for each user. |
| Ignore Frequency Cap | Disable Frequency Management when this campaign sends. (Marketing messages only.) |
| Destination | Select the app or apps where you want to deliver the push notification. All mobile apps is selected by default, but you can click Custom to select only some of your apps. |
| Conversion events | Select the event or events that you want to track as conversions for this campaign. |
Attribute only conversion events with explicitly set campaignId field | If you select this option, incoming events must have a campaignId field that matches your campaign's ID to count as a conversion. |
| Attribute any conversion events received within set period | If you select this option, any incoming events that arrive within your specified time frame after the campaign is sent will count as conversions. If multiple campaigns use the same conversion event, the conversion is assigned to the campaign that was sent most recently. |
| Create A/B experiment | Create an experiment for this campaign to test different subject lines, sender/from names, preheader text, and more. |
In-app tiles
| Setting | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | Give your new in-app campaign a name. |
| Content | Add content to your message. Click Choose a template to attach and edit one of your existing in-app message templates. |
| Quiet Hours | Turn on Quiet Hours to prevent this campaign from being sent during certain hours of the day in each user's time zone. |
| Send Time Optimization | Turn on Send Time Optimization for this campaign to have Iterable select the ideal delivery time for each user. |
| Destination | Select the apps and websites where you want to deliver the in-app notification. All mobile apps is selected by default, but you can change this to All websites, Everything (all of your apps and websites), or choose Custom to select only some of your apps/websites. |
| Display priority | Set the level of urgency for this campaign. Messages with the highest display priority ranking are delivered to your users first. |
| Conversion events | Select the event or events that you want to track as conversions for this campaign. |
Attribute only conversion events with explicitly set campaignId field | If you select this option, incoming events must have a campaignId field that matches your campaign's ID to count as a conversion. |
| Attribute any conversion events received within set period | If you select this option, any incoming events that arrive within your specified time frame after the campaign is sent will count as conversions. If multiple campaigns use the same conversion event, the conversion is assigned to the campaign that was sent most recently. |
| Create A/B experiment | Create an experiment for this campaign to test different subject lines, sender/from names, preheader text, and more. |
Web push tiles
| Setting | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | Give your new web push campaign a name. |
| Content | Add content to your message. Click Choose a template to attach and edit one of your existing web push notification templates. |
| Quiet Hours | Turn on Quiet Hours to prevent this campaign from being sent during certain hours of the day in each user's time zone. |
| Conversion events | Select the event or events that you want to track as conversions for this campaign. |
Attribute only conversion events with explicitly set campaignId field | If you select this option, incoming events must have a campaignId field that matches your campaign's ID to count as a conversion. |
| Attribute any conversion events received within set period | If you select this option, any incoming events that arrive within your specified time frame after the campaign is sent will count as conversions. If multiple campaigns use the same conversion event, the conversion is assigned to the campaign that was sent most recently. |
| Create A/B experiment | Create an experiment for this campaign to test different subject lines, sender/from names, preheader text, and more. |
Channel Optimization tiles
Want to send a campaign to each user on their preferred channel? Channel Optimization tiles use past engagement data to determine where each user is most likely to engage. When each user arrives in the tile, Iterable determines which channel a user has engaged with the most, and then sends the message to that channel.
NOTE
Right now, Channel Optimization tiles only work for email, SMS, and push campaigns.
| Setting | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Send channels | Select the channels you want Iterable to choose from when deciding where to send this message. |
| Unable to determine user channel preference | Sometimes Iterable won't have enough or the right kind of data to determine which channel a user prefers. Use this section to prioritize fallback channel(s) or tell Iterable to choose one for you. |
Once you've configured and saved these two settings, you'll set up the campaigns for each channel within the tile as usual.
Embedded Message tiles
Embedded Message tiles display an embedded message in your app or website to users who pass through the tile.
| Setting | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | Give your new embedded message campaign a name. |
| Placement | Select the placement within your website or app where the embedded message should be displayed. |
| Content | Add content to your message. Click Choose a template to attach and edit one of your existing embedded message templates. |
| Display priority | Determines which campaign should be displayed when a user is eligible for multiple active embedded message campaigns. Drag the campaigns to set the display priority order for the placement. |
| Display until | Determines how long the campaign should be displayed. Specify the date and/or user profile update that should end the campaign for each user. (Journey is off or archived is selected by default, since embedded messages can only be sent from a journey while the journey is live.) |
NOTE
All users who pass through an Embedded Message tile are eligible to see the associated embedded message. However, the Display Priority and Display Until criteria determine if and for how long the message is displayed to each user.
Sending journey campaigns
When you're finished setting up a message tile, click Create campaign to save the tile settings and create the new campaign.
Campaigns stay in the Ready state until you publish and turn on the journey.
Once you do, eligible users will start arriving in your message tiles and
receiving campaigns. Once a journey campaign has been sent to at least one user,
its status changes to Running.
Analyzing campaign performance in journeys
Once your journey is live, you'll see campaign performance metrics show up on your message tiles. To learn how to customize which metrics appear on a journey's message tiles, see Monitoring Journey Engagement.
To see more in-depth performance data for your journey's campaigns, click View Journey Insights.
Want to learn more?
For more information about some of the topics in this article, check out this Iterable Academy course. Iterable Academy is open to everyone — you don't need to be an Iterable customer!