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Create a Customer Journey
Use Customer Journeys to automatically send targeted emails, tag contacts, and accomplish other important tasks.
About Customer Journeys
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Mailchimp’s customer journey feature helps you build dynamic, automated marketing paths for your contacts. Create a journey map with multiple starting points, branches, and unique actions so each of your contacts has a personalized experience.
In this article, you’ll learn about customer journeys.
Things to know
- This is a beta feature. We will continue to develop it as we collect feedback and make changes.
- Depending on your plan, you may have limited access to customer journey tools. To learn more, check out our pricing page.
- This article is about customer journey automation. To learn more about other email automation tools, read About Classic Automation.
Definitions
Here's some terms you will come across as you build your customer journey.
- Customer journey
An automated route that consists of different interactions a contact will trigger as they move through it, carving out their own unique path (based on what they do or don’t do along the way). - Customer journey map
A visual representation of all the possible paths a contact can take in a customer journey. - Starting point
The event or action that adds a contact to a journey. - Journey point
Any rule or action that follows a starting point in a customer journey. You’ll plot these on your journey map based on the interactions you want your contacts to have with your business. - Action
A type of journey point that tells our system to perform a specific task, like send an email or add a tag, when a contact reaches it in their journey. - Rule
A type of journey point that defines how and when a contact moves along a set path.
How it works
A customer journey is composed of specific starting points, actions, and rules that you set based on your marketing goals. To build your journey, you’ll choose and arrange these elements on a customer journey map.
After you design your journey map and activate it, any contact who matches a starting point condition will be added to the workflow. When a contact reaches a journey point action or rule, we automatically do the “work” for you.
For example, let's say you create a customer journey that includes the starting point “signs up,” the rule “delay for one week,” and the action “send email.” This means that any contact who signs up to your audience will receive an email after a one-week delay.
About starting points
A starting point is the event or action that adds a contact to a customer journey. When you create a new customer journey map, the first thing you’ll do is choose a starting point.
Each customer journey map can have up to 3 starting points. For example, you could have one starting point that adds contacts who are added to a specific group, and another starting point that adds contacts who buy a certain product. If a contact meets either condition, they’ll be added to the journey.
Add a filter
After you add a starting point, you can configure it further with a filter. Filters let you be more specific about who will start a journey. Add up to 5 filters to add contacts that best fit your customer journey’s purpose.
About journey points
After you choose your starting points, you’ll then add journey points. These are the actions and rules that do all the “work” in your workflow.
If you have an Essentials plan, you can add up to 4 journey points to your map. If you have a Standard plan or higher, you can add up to 100 journey points, including if/else branching rules.
Here are the different types of journey points.
| Journey point | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| If / Else | Rule | We’ll split contacts down one of two branching paths based on conditions you choose. You can include up to 5 conditions for your contacts to meet. This journey point is available with a Standard plan or higher. |
| Wait | Rule | We'll prevent contacts from continuing down the path until they meet a condition that you choose. You can include up to 3 wait actions in one journey map. |
| Delay | Rule | We’ll prevent contacts from continuing down the path for a period of time that you choose. |
| Send email | Action | We’ll send your contacts an email that you design. |
| Add or remove a tag | Action | We'll add or remove a tag to contacts. |
All the actions and rules you can use are in the side panel in the journey builder. If you need to move the side panel out of the way, click Hide. Whenever you’re ready to use the side panel again, click Show Actions.
View and manage journeys
The Customer Journeys page is where you’ll create, view, and manage your customer journeys and other automations. To access this page, click the Automations drop-down and choose Customer Journeys.
If you’ve built a single email automation or classic automations, you’ll also see them on this page. Customer Journeys have the label Journey.
Journey status
We display a label to indicate your journey or automation status, so you can quickly tell whether things are working as expected. Here are the possible status conditions for a customer journey.
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Draft | Your customer journey hasn't started. |
| Active | Your customer journey is live, and contacts are moving through it as they meet the conditions you’ve set. To edit your journey, you'll need to pause it first. |
| Paused | Your customer journey is paused. |
Explore ways to use customer journeys
If you don’t yet have a specific journey in mind for your contacts, navigate to the Customer Journeys page and click the Explore tab for inspiration.
Here, you'll see some options to get you started.
Get started
Now that you know how customer journeys work, here are some resources to help you build your own.
Create a customer journey
Our detailed Create a Customer Journey article walks you through each step of the process.
Learn about starting points
Learn more about all our available starting points and how they work in our article All the Starting Points.