Create a Customer Journey

Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder helps you create unique, automated marketing workflows for your contacts. Use Customer Journeys to add tags, send targeted emails, and accomplish other important tasks for you.

In this article, you’ll learn how to create a Customer Journey.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you begin this process.

• Depending on your pricing plan, you may have limited access to Customer Journey tools. To learn more, check out our pricing page. To change your plan type, visit the plans page in your account.
• To learn more about customer journeys, how they work, and your pricing plan’s capabilities, check out About Customer Journeys.
• Our pre-built journey maps use default starting points, along with default rules and actions. To learn more, check out Use Pre-built Journey Maps.
• This article shows you how to build a Customer Journey automation. To learn more about other email automation tools, check out Create a Classic Automation.

Create a Customer Journey

You’ll create and manage your Customer Journey map on the Customer Journeys homepage. You can build a new journey from scratch, or choose from a variety of pre-built maps. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a new journey map.

To create a Customer Journey map, follow these steps.

1. Click Automations icon, then click Overview.
   
2. Click Build from scratch.
   
3. Enter a Name for your journey, then click the drop-down to choose an Audience.
4. Click Start Building.

Good job! Now that you’ve created a journey, you can add starting points, actions, and rules that will determine each contact’s path. To do this, you’ll plot these points on a Customer Journey map. This map will help you visualize how contacts move along different paths.

A Customer Journey map can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. Review the different options, and choose only the ones that best suit your marketing needs.

Add a starting point

First, you’ll choose a starting point. This is the activity or event that adds a contact to a journey.

Each journey map can have up to 3 starting points. For example, if you have a Customer Journey for high-value contacts, you could choose to add people to it based on two different starting points: added tag “VIP” or added tag “top donor.”

To add your first starting point, follow these steps.

1. Click Choose A Starting Point.
   
2. Choose the starting point you want.
   To learn more about the different types of starting points, read All the Starting Points.
3. Choose the specific settings for your starting point type. For example, if you choose Signs up for Email, you’ll then choose whether to include imported contacts.
   
4. Optional: Click Filter who can enter this journey to use segmenting conditions to filter your starting point.
   
5. Click Save Starting Point.

Nice job! You chose the first starting point for your workflow.

If you have a Mailchimp Standard plan or higher, your journey map can have up to 3 starting points. To add another starting point, click Add starting point and repeat steps 2-5.

Add journey points

After you add a starting point, choose the rules and actions that make up your journey. These are called journey points. Try any combination of rules and actions to create a unique customer workflow that meets your marketing needs.

• If / Else
• Percentage split
• Wait for Trigger
• Time Delay
• Send email
• Send email with a survey
• Send SMS
• Webhook
• Group/Ungroup
• Tag/Untag
• Unsubscribe
• Update contact
• Archive contact

To add a journey point, hover your cursor over the plus icon (+) on the step where you want the branch to occur.

Then, click Add a journey point.

All of the actions, rules, and integrations are in the journey point panel in the Customer Journey Builder.

Activate your journey

To activate your Customer Journey, follow these steps.

1. When your Customer Journey map is ready, click Continue. If you added a marketing objective in your journey settings, you’ll instead click Turn On to activate your Customer Journey immediately.
2. Choose a marketing objective. This will help Mailchimp provide more personalized recommendations and reporting. You can edit this later in your Journey settings if necessary.
3. Click Turn On.

Nice work! Now, contacts will begin the Customer Journey as they meet the first starting point condition.

View stats and queue

On the Customer Journey homepage, you’ll see the number of contacts who have started a Customer Journey, are in progress in their journey, or have completed a journey. To view stats for a paused journey, click View Data.

Key stats will also appear on Tag and Email actions as contacts reach those journey points.

To view the complete report for an email, click the Report icon.

To view how many contacts have reached a journey point, click the three vertical dots and choose View Contact Queue.

We'll show a list of all the contacts who are currently on that specific step. When they meet the conditions for the next point in their journey, they'll move to the queue.

Next steps

After the journey is active, you may want to update or edit your journey map. To learn more, check out Edit a Customer Journey Map.