Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder: How To Guide

Automating your marketing can reach your customers and help them with quicker, better, and expected responses. 

Journey Builder provides you with everything you need to attain these objectives easily. 

Today, we will focus on the Salesforce Journey Builder tool that manages customer journeys. 

Let you know that the customer journey is a process that facilitates the consumers or customers to interact with a brand, organization, or company. Marketing teams aim to offer the most satisfying customer journeys to catch up with their target audiences and attract them to build s relationship that goes ahead of purchasing a specific product or service. 

And here enters Journey Builder, which smoothens the way for crafting personalized and multi-channel journeys at all the stages of the customer’s relationship with the business. 

Difference between Salesforce Journey Builder and Automation Studio

The Automation Studio in Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows for some simple email automation, but its main purpose is to automate admin and data management tasks like importing files and transferring data.

Journey Builder, on the other hand, is intended for the creation of one on one personalised journeys for prospect communications.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder?

Salesforce Journey Builder is an intuitive marketing tool that allows you to interact with your customers across multiple channels on a 1-to-1 customer experience platform.

Journey Builder is a user-friendly tool and its main function is to drag and drop the most common actions so that you can tailor the customer journey to your goals. Those personalized and multi-channel processes can be as straightforward or complex as you like – from a simple confirmation email after purchase to complex follow-up and retargeting campaigns to secure customer loyalty.

It is the only part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud that allows you to easily and visually automate multiple marketing channels in one place, such as email and SMS.

Without Journey Builder:

• Emails are created and sent within Email Studio.
• SMS campaigns are created and sent in Mobile Studio.
• Ad activity is set up and activated in Ad Studio.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder Entry Source

Through Journey Builder entry source we can create a journey for customers entering point. Journey builder has six entry sources and every journey has to include an entry source.

• Data Extension                          
• API Event
• Audience
• Cloud Pages
• Salesforce Data
• Event

Journey Builder Activities

Journey Builder activities involve messages, decisions, updates, or a combination of these elements, which are drawn on a travel maker canvas. In a multi-stage journey, the activities you configure affect each contact until they reach a goal or end of the journey.

Message activity: This includes email, SMS, push notifications, or any other form of content sent to your contacts.

Flow Control Activities: Flow control activities are how you manage your contact experience throughout the journey.

Customer Update: This activity prompts the Marketing Cloud system to update the contact information in the data extension.

Sales and Service Cloud Activities: Use these activities within Journey Builder to interact with the Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud. These activities are available only to accounts that have the Marketing Cloud Connector installed.

Journey Builder Settings

Contact Entry

Contact entry mode decides whether the contact is eligible to enter the journey. Journey Builder offers three entry options to define when contacts can enter the journey.

Default Email Address and Mobile Number:

Set a default email address and mobile number for each contact before messaging on the go.

Goals in Journey Builder

Every goal is to measure the customer actions you want to promote.

Goals as Exit Criteria:

Goals can serve as exit criteria but are not required. You can configure a goal so that reaching it removes the contact from the journey.

Journey Testing & Validation

Validate the Journey Components:

Firstly, Save Journey, then click on validate to confirm that the settings, entry source, activities, goals and exit criteria are set up to work as planned. 

Journey Testing

Use Journey Builder’s testing features to confirm that Marketing Cloud Journey behaves as expected after activation. You can configure a test to simulate a journey with real contacts, When we use a data extension as the entry source. Classic test mode is available for any entry source.

Conclusion

In today’s mobile-first world, customers interact with hundreds of digital channels at any time. Thus, marketers need to hold a level of connectivity that is unique and assists them in knowing their customers better. 

Journey Builder helps meet all such essentials, offering an easy work-map for customer acquisition and targeted marketing.

If you need help with Salesforce CRM then our professional Salesforce developers are always available. Emizentech is a reliable Salesforce consulting company that has providing Salesforce development services to clients globally.