Create a customer journey
Customer journeys are processes where you engage with potential or existing customers. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys enables you to visualize and automate the journey that your contacts will take while interacting with your marketing initiatives. You can create flows that help guide the members of a selected marketing segment through a process of automated messaging, activity generation, interactive decision points, and more.
You can create customer journeys for lead-nurturing, sales engagement, events, customer onboarding, retention, and more. Journeys can be simple or complex. A simple journey could involve a single email while a complex journey could be a multi-faceted campaign that takes contacts down unique paths as they interact with your messaging.
Set up a customer journey
To view, edit, delete, or create a new customer journey, go to Outbound mMarketing > Marketing execution > Customer journeys.
To create a customer journey, select + New in the command bar.
Select a template or click Skip to start from scratch.
In Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, you can choose from a collection of sample templates or create your own templates. If you select to start from a template, it will establish the journey structure for you.
The pipelines that are provided by a template represent the form and logic of your campaign, but you'll still need to configure the details for the various tiles. For example, you will need to assign the specific marketing email message that should be sent by each email tile.
Note
When you create a new journey from a template, the template content is copied into your new message. The journey and template aren't linked, so when you edit the journey pipeline, the template won't change; likewise, any future changes that you make to a template won't affect existing journeys that were created by using it. For more information, see Create and manage customer journey templates.
Fill out key information about the journey.
Click the More header fields button at the side of the header to expose the Name and Start date fields while working on the Designer tab.
Name - Enter a descriptive name for your email. This is used to identify the journey in list views.
Start date and time - Select the date and time that you want the journey to start running.
Configure your customer journey.
When creating or editing your customer journey, you'll be working on the Designer tab. Here you’ll see the canvas where you’ll build up your campaign pipeline by adding tiles into a logical flow. Then, you’ll make configuration settings to establish what happens at each of these steps.
You can add tiles to the pipeline by selecting them from the in-place menu shown each time you select the + button on the canvas. The first tile in the pipeline establishes the target audience for the customer journey. This is what determines which contacts are sent down the pipeline.
When establishing your target audience, you have the option to choose from either a Segment, a Form Submitted, or Record Updated source lookup field.
A segment is a collection of contacts grouped according to a common attribute or explicit assignment.
If you choose to target your audience by the form submitted source type, all new or existing contacts who submit the form you select will be sent along the customer journey.
Use the record updated tile to monitor all records belonging to a specific entity, and then find the contact associated with any of those records that gets created, deleted, or updated while the journey is running. All contacts found by this tile will be sent along the customer journey.
For more information, see Audience.
After you establish the target audience, you can add tiles using the + button on the canvas or by selecting a tile element that already exists in your journey pipeline.
Each tile on your canvas will show properties specific to that tile type on the right side of the designer canvas. To configure a tile, select it, then define the details on the right. When you add a new tile, its settings tab is automatically activated so you can start configuring the tile right away.
Message tiles represent the content that your customer journey delivers to contacts as they traverse the pipeline. Message tiles include Send an email for now. Within an email tile, you can define a variety of details about the email, including:
Email elements: It's important to note that in some cases, your content will reference a link to a landing page, an upcoming event, or a form that you'll want to use for your condition logic in your customer journey. Although your email message includes a link to the landing page or event, the customer journey isn't aware of the link that you want to use, in which case you'll need to reference that dependency elements within the email elements section. Click + Add item, select the entity you want to reference (page, event, form, or Customer Voice survey), and then select the record.
Schedule - This section gives you the ability to define when this email can be delivered to your recipients (for example, specific days or times of the week.) There is also an automated scheduling feature in which artificial intelligence is applied to identify the days and times when each contact in your customer journey is most likely to be actively reading their email and then schedules message deliveries to each individual contact automatically based on the best time to email calculated by the AI for that contact. To apply this feature to your email, toggle Automated scheduling to enabled. For more information, see Create a customer journey that automatically sends messages at the optimal time.
Note
Before you can use automated scheduling, your admin must enable and configure it. If you don't see this feature in the Properties area of your email tile, ask your admin to enable automated scheduling for your site. For more information, see Enable and configure artificial intelligence features.
Expiration - This section gives you the ability to set expiration dates on your email if your journey includes content that is time sensitive. To set an expiration date for your email, toggle Email expiration to enabled then set the date and time. For more information see Set expiration dates for selected email tiles in a customer journey.
Branch tiles are used to split your target audience either by using the if/then tile in which contacts are held in your journey either until a defined condition is true, or until a defined amount of time expires and sends the contact down one of two paths or using the Split tile which adds a fork to the customer journey pipeline, sending a random selection of contacts along each available path. For more information, see Branches.
Wait/delay tiles hold contacts for an amount of time or until a designated time before sending the contacts to the next tile in your journey. For more information, see Wait/delay.
Action tiles give you access to options like creating a lead, running a workflow, or adding a contact to a LinkedIn campaign after they have reached a tile in your customer journey. For more information, see Actions.
Sales activities tiles generate a new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys activity related to that contact (or the company or organization they work for). The contact then proceeds immediately to the next step in the customer journey. The activities that you can use include an appointment, phone call, or task. For more information, see Sales activities.
Custom tiles provide similar capabilities to the standard tiles described earlier but are created by partners and third-party developers to extend the marketing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys. These custom tiles will appear in the designer if you've installed a partner-developed custom channel for customer journeys or have created and deployed your own custom channel for your Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys instance. For more information, see Custom tiles and Extend customer journeys using custom channels.
For a complete list of all available tiles and information about how to use them, see Customer journey tiles reference.
Swimlanes give you the ability to define multiple audiences within a single customer journey and send them down different paths based on demographic criteria or actions they complete. You can accomplish this by selecting the Add swimlane button where it will take you through the steps of creating another pipeline for your customer journey, starting with selecting your target audience.
Tip
You can also customize the designer canvas to your preferences with horizontal and vertical layout options. Though most people add and arrange tiles by selecting them from the in-place menu using a mouse, you can also add tiles without using the mouse at all. The optional input methods make the customer journey designer more adaptable to your working preferences while also making it more accessible for people who have trouble working with a mouse. For more information, see Add tile using the arrow keys.
Update additional settings.
From the General tab, review and update a few key settings as needed, including:
Target - Set each customer journey to target either contacts or accounts.
When you target contacts, the journey will treat each contact as an individual, without considering the company (account) that the contact works for.
When you target accounts, the journey can group contacts by the company (account) that each contact works for, which can affect the way that contacts are processed as they traverse the journey.
For more information, see Target contacts or accounts.
Set the minimum consent level.
If data protection is enabled for your instance, use this setting to control the minimum level of consent that each contact must have provided to be included on this journey. The level that you choose should depend on the types of operations that your journey will implement.
For more information, see Set the minimum consent level and Data protection and the GDPR.
Set the business-unit scope.
Business-unit scopes are an optional feature. When they are enabled for your instance, the General tab includes a Scope setting, which controls which contacts will be permitted to join the journey based on business-unit ownership.
For more information, see Set the business-unit scope and Use business units to control access to Customer Insights - Journeys records.
Set the execution schedule.
Start date - This field is required. Specify the start date and time that the customer journey should begin. You can't edit this field after the journey has gone live.
End date - This field is required. Specify the end date and time for the customer journey. You can edit this field after a journey has gone live.
Time zone - This field is required. The time zone defaults to the time zone defined with the marketing app settings. You can change this field as needed for each customer journey, but you can't edit this field after a journey has gone live.
Choose your content settings.
A customer journey uses a specific content-settings record. This means that all messages that are sent by that journey will use the same content settings.
By default, customer journeys are set to use the Default Content Settings record, so you will need to change this field if you want to use a different content setting record for your journey.
You can't change the content settings after the journey has gone live.
For more information, see Choose your content settings and Use content settings to set up repositories of standard and required values for email messages.
Manage recurring journey settings (if needed).
Usually, a journey takes each contact through its pipeline exactly once. However, you can also set up a recurring journey in which all contacts are reprocessed at regular intervals during the active period.
For more information, see Set up a recurring journey.
Add a suppression segment (if needed).
A journey's suppression segment contains a list of contacts that the journey won't send any messages to, even if those contacts are also included among the segments that are explicitly targeted by the journey, and even if those contacts are already partly through the journey.
You can use any existing segment as a suppression segment.
For more information, see Add a suppression segment.
Save your changes.
For more information, see Use customer journeys to create automated campaigns.
Check for errors and go live
Before you can go live with your customer journey, it must pass an error check. You can run an error check at any time by selecting Check for errors on the command bar. An error check is also automatically run each time you select Go live. When the specified start date arrives, the journey will start processing all contacts in its target segment.
Make edits to a live customer journey
While the journey is live, it is locked for editing. However, you can still make changes after the customer has gone live.
To edit a live customer journey, go to Outbound marketing > Marketing execution > Customer journeys, open the live customer journey that you want to edit, then select Edit on the command bar. Make the necessary changes and then select Save. The system will automatically check for errors and go live with the message.
Because of the nature of customer journeys, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys limits the ability to change the structure and flow of a customer journey. However, users can change and update certain tiles or other journey details, such as the end date. Be mindful when making major changes to the content of the journey. Changes will not be seen by customers that have already been processed through the tile.
You can also stop the customer journey by selecting Stop on the command bar. When a customer journey is in the Stopped status, it means that the journey was once live, and might have already processed some contacts, but is now stopped and therefore won't process any more contacts or take any other actions. The journey will automatically be stopped when the end date is passed. While the journey is stopped, you can edit and save the journey without going live. Select Go live again when ready.
For more information, see Go live to start running the journey and processing contacts and Go live with publishable entities and track their status.