How to use Journeys

Overview

Journeys allow you to create tailored email experiences for your subscribers based on data specific to individual subscribers such as their sign-up date or engagement level.

Journeys can involve multiple steps, delays and criteria which means journeys can be flexibly configured to allow subscribers to enter only at the first step of the journey or part-way through.

You can use journeys for a variety of use cases such as:

Welcome series to welcome new subscribers to your newsletter and build subscriber loyalty
Re-engagement journeys to remind subscribers who are engaging less frequently of the value of your newsletter
Upsell journeys to nudge engaged subscribers to a premium subscription
Journeys for a future date such as a subscription anniversary or birthday to build subscriber loyalty

How to manage your journeys

You can navigate to journeys by clicking the arrow icon in the top navigation bar.

Journeys dashboard

The journeys dashboard will display all active and inactive journeys and the analytics per journey: emails delivered, open rate and click rate. By expanding the journey you can see the analytics for each journey step.

You can make a journey active or inactive by using the toggle to the left of the journey.

How to create email templates for journeys

You can flexibly create templates using the drag-and-drop template editor and use these within the journey. Personalised article content is not supported within journeys although you can add personalisation via merge tags such as first name.

To create the email templates for your journey expand the ‘Create’ button on the Campaign dashboard and click ‘From template’.

Here you can use the drag-and-drop builder to flexibly create the email templates for each step of your journey.

You can use merge tags to add personalisation such as the subscriber's first or last name.

Save the template and give it an appropriate name.

How to configure the send schedule

After creating the templates for the journey navigate to the journeys dashboard and click ‘Create new’. Here you can enter a unique name for your journey.

The frequency selector denotes the days of the week that the journey will run. Journeys can run once a day.

You can also select the send time and the time zone of the sender (not the recipient). Currently, send time optimisation is not available for journeys.

Including new or existing subscribers

The ‘Eligibility’ section allows you to specify if existing subscribers should be included in the journey or whether they should be excluded.

If existing subscribers are included,

All existing subscribers who qualify will be entered into the journey
All existing subscribers who qualify for the journey later will be entered into the journey
All new subscribers will be entered into the journey when they qualify for it

If existing subscribers are excluded,

Only new subscribers who register after the journey is created will be entered into the journey when they qualify for it

How to configure the journey steps

To configure the journey you can control:

The subject line for the email for the step
The criteria that determine whether a subscriber will be sent an email
The email template

Thereafter you can add a consequent step, or add a time-based delay between the steps.

Configuring the step

Click the 3-dot menu on the step to optionally rename the step (if required, this label is shown on the dashboard and might help when reviewing per-step analytics) and then enter the subject line for the email of that step.

The ‘Meets criteria’ section allows you to specify the criteria that will qualify subscribers for entry into the journey. You can access any subscriber data point via the criteria builder shown below. In this example, subscribers who have signed up within the last day will qualify.

The ‘Send template’ section allows you to select the template that will be sent as part of this step.

Adding a delay

After each step, you will be able to add an additional step or add a delay.

For consequent steps, the ‘Meets criteria’ is optional. Only subscribers who meet the criteria for the step will be sent the corresponding email.

If no preceding steps in the journey have a delay step then subscribers can join part-way through the journey if they qualify for the step.