Studio makes it easy for you to build joyful customer journeys. This article explains the required steps for building a journey from start to finish.
In this article
Required permissions
To create, edit, or copy a journey, you'll need the Draft Journeys, Campaigns, and Experiments permission.
To delete a draft of a journey, you'll need the Manage and Publish Journeys permission.
Steps for building a journey
Step 1: Create a new journey
Go to Messaging > Journeys and click New Journey.
Give your journey a descriptive name so you and your team can easily identify it later.
Step 2: Set a conversion goal
BETA FEATURE
As of May 2024, journey conversion goals are a beta feature available to select Iterable customers. If you're interested in using the beta version of this feature, talk to your customer success manager.
When you create a new journey, you have the option of setting a conversion goal for it. The journey's conversion goal is the desired action you want users to take as a result of going through the journey. For example, maybe you want users to complete checkout for an item they have in their cart or write a product review for an item they recently purchased.
Setting a journey conversion goal applies the relevant conversion event to all of the journey's campaigns and lets you track how well you're meeting your goal.
To learn more about setting a journey conversion goal, see Monitoring Journey Engagement.
Step 3: Define the audience and trigger
After creating a new journey, you'll need to choose which users should be added to the journey and how/when that happens. To do this, open the Start tile, and select one of the four entry source options:
- Event Occurs — Adds users to the journey when a specified event is added to their event history.
- Schedule — Adds users from a specific list on a regularly scheduled cadence.
- API Call — Adds users to the journey when they're included in a call to Iterable's POST /api/workflows/triggerWorkflow API endpoint.
- Other Journey — Adds users to the journey when they reach a Send to Journey tile in a different journey.
To learn more about these settings, see Journey Setup: The Start Tile and Adding Users to Journeys.
Step 4: Set entry rules and limits
For finer-grained control over which users are added to a journey (and how many times), you can set additional eligibility criteria using entry rules and entry limits, such as how many times users can go through a particular journey in their lifetime.
To learn more about entry rules and entry limits, see Journey Setup: The Start Tile.
Step 5: Set up exit rules
Exit rules let you set up always-on checks that remove users at any stage of the journey as soon as they match your specified criteria. (Exit rules are different from filter tiles, which let you check whether users should be removed at a specific stage of the journey.)
To learn more about exit rules, see Removing Users from Journeys.
Step 6: Add your desired steps
Now it's time to build your journey, adding all the steps you want users to go through. To learn about each tile type and how to configure them for your use case, see the following support docs:
- Journey Setup: The Start Tile
- Journey Setup: Message Tiles
- Journey Setup: Delay Tiles
- Journey Setup: Filter Tiles
- Journey Setup: User Update Tiles
- Journey Setup: Integration Tiles
Step 7: Test the journey
Once you've finished adding and configuring your journey's steps, it's a good idea to test that everything is working correctly before you publish. This way, you can detect any potential issues before adding users to the journey.
To learn more, see Testing Journeys.
Step 8: Save and publish
When you're happy with your journey and confident things are working as expected, make sure you've saved your latest changes, then click Publish to turn the journey on. Eligible users will be added to the journey and start receiving messages from the associated campaigns.
In Published view, you can see your journey's performance data and turn the journey on or off, but you can't edit any of the journey's tiles, settings, or connections. To edit your journey, you'll need to switch back to Draft mode. To learn more, see Editing Journeys.
NOTE
You can't publish a journey if it contains a loop (a section of the journey that sends users back through a tile multiple times). If you need to perform a check more than once in a journey, consider using a Hold Until tile or exit rules.
Generating a journey with AI
NEW FEATURE
As of July 2024, Journey Assist is in rolling release and will be made available to all Iterable customers within the next few weeks. If you don’t see it yet, check back soon!
To quickly get started building a journey, let Journey Assist build it for you! In the Generate journey box, describe what kind of journey you want to create, or select one of the pre-set buttons to automatically fill in some text. When you're happy with your prompt text, click Generate and watch Journey Assist generate your journey's tiles, paths, and settings for you.
Once your tiles have been generated, you have three options:
- Keep the generated tiles
- Delete the generated tiles
- Edit your prompt text and generate replacement tiles
After you choose to keep your generated tiles, you can manually edit each tile's settings at any time.
Journey Assist is a great way to jump-start your work building journeys. Use it to quickly generate whole journeys or groups of tiles within a journey — Journey Assist can handle some of repetitive tasks of building a journey so you can build faster and more efficiently.
To learn more about how Journey Assist works, see Journey Assist.
NOTE
Just like any AI feature, Journey Assist may not generate exactly what you're looking for every time. Be sure to review any tiles you generate with Journey Assist before publishing a journey.
Want to learn more?
For more information about some of the topics in this article, check out these resources:
Support docs