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Salesforce Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud

What is Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder is an extensive tool that gives marketers the ability to create and automate customer journeys across email, mobile, social media, online, and advertising channels. Marketers may customize the client journey using Journey Builder by creating multi-step campaigns that are triggered by particular events or behaviors. This may be utilized to develop leads, welcome brand-new clients, engage dormant clients, and much more.

The content and audiences you create in Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Advertising Studio, Content Builder, and Audience Builder are used by Journey Builder, which is a part of Marketing Cloud.

How do I create a journey in Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud?

Setting up a new journey is easy. Before starting prepare your emails and the segment you want to reach. To create a campaign in Journey Builder, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to Marketing Cloud and select Journey Builder from the main navigation menu.
  2. Click on the “Create a Journey” button.
  3. Determine the type of journey you want to create.
  4. Choose a starting audience or event for your journey. This can be a list, a data extension, a Salesforce report, or a custom object.
  5. Configure the entry settings for your journey, including entry criteria and entry schedule.
  6. Add activities to your journey by dragging and dropping them onto the canvas. Activities can include email sends, SMS messages, mobile push notifications, advertising campaigns, and more. It’s also possible to create your own custom activities.
  7. Configure the settings for each activity, such as the message content, recipient list, timing, and frequency.
  8. Connect activities together using paths to create a flowchart that defines the journey’s logic by using flow control activities.
  9. Test and validate your journey using the Journey Validation feature.
  10. Configure the entry criteria. Should contacts be added to journey always or only after exiting?
  11. Activate your journey to start running it.

Different pillars

Entry Sources: This is where a customer journey in Journey Builder begins. A list, data extension, Salesforce report, or custom object that specifies the audience for the journey is referred to as an entry source. The trip for that person begins when a fresh record is added to the entry source.

Flow Control: The Journey Builder’s Flow Control activities assist in controlling the journey’s course. These actions can assist in transferring contacts from one branch of a trip to another or in waiting until a particular time before sending a message or carrying out another action. For instance, “wait till the contact opens an email” or “wait for a specified date before sending a message.”

Activities: Activities in Journey Builder are the building blocks that create the journey. There are many different types of activities available in Journey Builder, including:

  • Email Sends: This activity sends an email to the contact. 
  • SMS Sends: This action sends an SMS text message to the contact.
  • Wait: This action causes the voyage to stop for a predetermined period of time.
  • Decision Splits: This activity divides the journey into various directions based on factors you specify, such as contact information or previous interactions.
  • Update Contact: This procedure adds new information to a contact record in the Marketing Cloud database.
  • Salesforce Object: A Salesforce record is created, updated, or deleted during this activity.

Activities may be combined to design intricate journeys that include contacts in several channels and touch points.

The combination of Entry Sources, Flow Control, and Activities in Journey Builder provides marketers with a versatile and powerful digital marketing platform to build tailored, automated journeys across a variety of channels and touch points.

What are the benefits of Salesforce Journey Builder?

Salesforce Journey Builder is a tool for developing and managing customer journeys that may lead to improved engagement, loyalty, and income. Here are some of the primary advantages of utilizing Journey Builder:

  • Customized customer journeys: Journey Builder enables you to create tailored experiences for your consumers based on their behavior, preferences, and other data. This may help you produce relevant information, offers, and experiences that resonate with your consumers and drive conversions.
  • Multi-channel communication: With Journey Builder, you can communicate with consumers via email, SMS, social media, mobile applications, and more. This allows you to meet consumers where they are and provide a consistent, unified experience across all touch points.
  • Automated workflows: Journey Builder automates many of the processes involved in developing and managing customer journeys, such as delivering messages, updating customer data, and triggering actions depending on customer behavior. This saves time and money while ensuring that your travels are carried out effectively and consistently.
  • Real-time tracking and optimization: Journey Builder delivers real-time tracking and reporting on consumer behavior and journey performance. This enables you to find optimization possibilities and make data-driven decisions to enhance the client experience and generate outcomes.
  • Connection with other Salesforce products: Journey Builder interfaces with other Salesforce products, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, to produce a seamless customer experience throughout the whole customer journey. This enables you to fully utilize the Salesforce platform’s capabilities to promote engagement and revenue.
  • Seamless integration with Activation Studio. Create and manage your segment within Segment Designer and compare results.

Salesforce Journey Builder

Journey Builder & Activation Studio

When creating segments in Activation Studio, you can directly start you journey with on click. Activation Studio also measure the results and will compare this with the benchmark statistics. Learn more about journey tracking here. Activation Studio will increase the efficiency of your marketing team by offering a more marketer friendly workflow.

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Automation Studio Vs. Journey Builder

Automation Studio and Journey Builder are complementary tools that can be used together to create powerful marketing automation workflows. Automation Studio is more focused on data management and task automation, while Journey Builder is more focused on creating engaging, personalized customer journeys across multiple channels.

Here are some key differences between Automation Studio and Journey Builder:

  1. Purpose: Automation Studio is primarily used for automating repetitive tasks, while Journey Builder is used for creating and managing customer journeys.

  2. Workflow complexity: Automation Studio workflows tend to be simpler than Journey Builder journeys, which can involve multiple decision points and branching paths based on customer behavior.

  3. Channel support: While both tools support multiple channels, Journey Builder is more focused on creating cross-channel experiences, while Automation Studio is more focused on individual channels.

  4. Data management: Automation Studio is more focused on data management and processing, while Journey Builder is more focused on customer engagement and messaging.

Journey Activities

The foundation of a Journey Builder campaign are journey activities. There are many various journey activities available, like sending emails, getting push alerts on mobile devices, sending SMS messages, posting on social media, personalizing websites, and more. These activities may be used by marketers to design a unique customer journey that caters to the requirements of their target market.

Audience segmentation

The ability to segment your audience is one of the key features of Journey Builder. Using shared criteria, such as demographics, behavior, or interaction, segmentation is the practice of breaking up your audience into smaller groups. This enables you to send customized and pertinent messages to various audience categories, which may enhance engagement and conversions. Decision splits and data filters are only two of the segmentation techniques and features available in Journey Builder.

Marketing Cloud Journey Builder Best Practices

Marketing professionals should have the following recommended practices in mind when utilizing Journey Builder and Ad Studio:

  1. Prior to developing a journey or advertising campaign, it’s critical to establish clear goals and objectives. This will enable you to gauge the success of your campaign and choose the proper channels and activities.
  2. Segment your audience: To generate focused campaigns for various audience segments, use decision splits and other segmentation techniques. You’ll be able to send communications that are more pertinent and unique as a result.
  3. Test and improve: To raise the effectiveness of your efforts, use A/B testing and other optimization strategies. By doing so, you can determine what appeals to your audience the most and make informed choices.
  4. Results monitoring and analysis: To measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and pinpoint areas for development, use the analytics and reporting features in Journey Builder and Ad Studio.

Marketers can utilize Journey Builder and Ad Studio to create tailored, interesting client journeys that increase conversions and enhance the customer experience by adhering to these best practices.

Integration of the Ad Studio in Journey Builder

Salesforce Marketing Cloud also provides Ad Studio, a platform that enables marketers to design and manage online advertising campaigns, in addition to Journey Builder. Because Ad Studio and Journey Builder are integrated, marketers can leverage customer information and journey insights to enhance their ad targeting and boost the efficiency of their campaigns.

How do Marketing Cloud journeys connect to Salesforce?

Journey Builder is the heart of Marketing Cloud. Salesforce data is at the core. Via the Marketing Cloud Connector all data can be synced from Salesforce Sales or Service Cloud and be made available in Marketing Cloud. The data is available for segmentation and also for filtering or Decision Splits.

Sales and Service Cloud Activities

Journey Builder also has Salesforce Activities. Use these activities to perform these actions:

  • Create a lead when a Marketing Cloud contact enters a journey.
  • Update a lead based on engagement within a journey.
  • Create a CRM contact record when a Marketing Cloud contact reaches the activity.
  • Update a CRM contact record with Marketing Cloud contact data.
  • Update a custom object based on engagement within a journey.
  • Create a task when another object, such as a lead or contact, enters a journey.
  • Associate a case or task to an account.
    Update a task based on a contact or lead’s response in a journey.
  • Update a person or business account.

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