Journey

What are Journeys?

Journey is a feature in Smartech that helps you create multi-channel automated workflows. These workflows can replace the repetitive marketing tasks like sending communication messages through different channels, checking the contacts’ reaction to content you send them, etc. Journey building is simple, easy to use, and requires no coding skills to build them. You can convert complex business cases to sequence of actions and conditions.

What is the use of Journeys?

Journeys help in:

• making your marketing activities fast
• making your efforts more effective and efficient
• organising your marketing activities

What are the essentials of Journeys in Smartech?

Journeys in Smartech comprises:

• The name of the Journey - any name that you want to give.
• Start Date - when should the journey start.
• End date - When should the journey come to an end.
• Starting point - on what condition should journey start.
• Actions - sending communication messages, updating attribute values, waiting, etc. are translated to action steps in thejourney.
• Conditions - decision boxes in the business workflow are translated to check conditions in Smartech

What is the starting point of a journey?

The first thing you need to do when you are set to create an journey is, define how your journey would start. In other words, what conditions would kick start the flow of actions that you have defined. In Smartech, any journey can start based on two ways: Trigger & Dataset.

Dataset

Dataset is the information related to, whether a Contact exists in a:

• List
• Segment
• Contact Master

If you want to start the journey based on this data, then select Dataset as your starting point.

For example, you wish to start a journey on all the contacts who are females and live in Mumbai, then you would choose Dataset as the starting point and say "If contact exists in segment."

Repeat Journey: Since the database is updated from time to time, the number of contacts who qualify to be in a dataset also varies with time. You can hence choose the repeat cycle duration.

Trigger

Trigger is a real-time event that can start the journey.
For example, as soon as a contact clicks a link in the email you had sent, start the journey workflow.

The triggers can be of many types:

• Contact Activity - Whenever a contact is added to Smartech, or any of the properties of are updated, the journey is triggered. For instance, as soon as someone signs up, the contact is added to the list. And this event would trigger the welcome series journey.
  If the contact's location attribute value is changed to "Mumbai", trigger the "Mumbai Offers" automation.
• Email Activity - When a contact opens an email that you sent, clicks a link in it, or the email got bounced, then the journey is triggered. For example, you sent an email with new products range, and the contact clicks the "books" category link in it, then trigger the "Books offers"journey.
• SMS Activity - Similar to email activity, when an SMS gets delivered to a contact, or fails to get delivered due to the number being on NDNC, the journey is triggered.
• Web Activity - In Smartech, you can track the website activities of contacts. Journey can start whenever a contacts does an activity on the website. For example, if he adds items to cart, but does not proceed to buying, then trigger "Cart abandonment"journey.
• Push Notification Activity - Journey is triggered based on whether the contacts received or did not receive the push notification, or opened the notification.

Frequency: You can select if you want the journey to get triggered each time the real-time event happens, or just when it happens for the first time.

What does Perform Action mean?

After you define how your journey would start, you can define what actions should Smartech perform on what conditions. To convert each step of the workflow in to an automation node, you can select either "Perform Action" or "Check If".

If you select Perform Action, you can specify different actions that Smartech would do automatically:

• Wait for a period - means Smartech would just wait for a certain amount of time or until a specific date and time. This option is useful in situations when you want to give some time to the contacts before you send the next communication. For example, if you send an email, then you would want to wait for a day and before sending another follow up email.
• Wait for an event - Smartech will wait for an event to happen before performing the next step. For example, you have sent an SMS about an offer, and clicking a link in the SMS would activate the offer. As soon as the contact clicks the link, another SMS should be sent. So, to set this up, you can use "Wait for an event" step.
• Send an Email/SMS/Voice/ Push Notification - Send any of these communication messages.
• Update Attribute - You can change the attribute value of the contacts.
• Webhook - when you select this, the contact information is directly updated in the CRM through webhooks. This option helps in easy update of your contact database.

What does Check If mean?

You can insert checks to decide the course of actions in the journey. If a contact has not opened the email, then send a voice call. This is termed as Check If in journey. You can check:

• Value of Attributes - Check the value of the attributes, and then proceed as per the condition matched. For example, if the Location of the contact is "Mumbai", then send offer A, else send offer B.
• Email/SMS/Push Notification/Browser Push Notification Activity - If the contact has received, not received, opened, clicked, etc. the email/SMS/push notification that you have sent earlier. Based on the contact's reaction, you can decide the further steps of the journey.
• Web Activity - In Smartech, you can define the web activities that you want to track. Here in journey, you can check whether the contact has done that activity and define further steps accordingly. For instance, if the contact has searched a certain product category, send related emails.

How to create a journey?

To create an journey:

• Log in to Smartech and go to Campaigns > Journeys > Create Journey.
• Provide the basic information in the boxes.
• Click Define to specify the start of the journey.
• Click the plus icon to add Perform Action or Check If steps as required.
• If you do not want to run the journey now, click Save as draft. Alternatively, if you want to run the journey now, click Save and Run. You can schedule your journey for a future time by selecting the start date & time accordingly.

You can reuse an existing automation by copying it.

What are the different statuses of a journey?

How to add webhook in journey?

To know about webhook in journey, click here .