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5 Step Guide to Successfully Implement Journey Builder

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Ameex Technologies

One of the most popular features from Salesforce Marketing Cloud stable, Journey Builder gives marketers the ability to guide their customers on 1:1 automated journey across channels including email, web, SMS, print, IOT devices, etc. 

As intuitive and easy-to-use Journey Builder is, we see marketing cloud administrators and users often struggle with orchestrating user journeys, track their interaction, deliver relevant message at the right time plus measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. 

We don’t blame it on the tool, Journey Builder is one the best customer experience management platform available in the market today. If you are new to Salesforce Marketing Cloud? or stuck with Journey Builder implementation? Or looking to implement Marketing cloud in the future? Here’s a quick 5 step guide that will help you get started with Journey Builder and optimize your existing campaigns.

Create a plan, stay focused and start small. 

Before creating a journey, start by answering these questions – What is the goal of this journey plan? Who are my users? What is the current state of customer experience? How are we tracking them today? How many messages should they receive? How can I help my user achieve their goals easier and faster? What are the preferred touchpoints? And so on. 

Avoid answering these questions all by yourself. Get relevant stakeholders to be part of your customer journey planning process. Bring your brand, campaign management, UX, analytics, sales, customer service and any other departments under one room including your trusted customer experience consulting partner to help create a journey plan that would help your users accomplish their goals which leads to achieving your marketing goals. 

Start off with 

  • Creating a simple journey plan so that you can experiment your approach and collect data to validate its effectiveness. For eg. Automating a welcome message after a user signs up for an account on your site with information or trigger subscription renewal reminders for existing customers a month before due date. 
  • Slowly start adding flow controls like decision splits or engagement splits and track how each sample records interacts with your content such as downloading a pdf, click on a link or opening an email, etc. to gather specific data based on the already predetermined use cases. 
  • Now go ahead and start creating journeys for complex uses cases and add more touchpoints to create an omni-channel experience for your users. 


But not without a solid data strategy

Your first build using sample contact records and content may work perfectly the way you wanted, but one of the biggest issues many implementations could go wrong is due to data. Data sources often exists in multiple locations and are disconnected across systems. 

Obvious start is to connect your CRM with Marketing Cloud and then extend it across data points to see a complete view of your customer interactions. Also, it is recommended to follow entry source best practices while creating data extensions, entry events, using APIs or even while adding contacts using automation studio. 

By doing this you can create audience segments, personalization, other journey builder tasks to maximize your journeys’ reach.  A solid data strategy doesn’t end with effective collection of data, it’s about giving marketers the ability to unearth actionable insights to maximize their campaign effectiveness.

Build content that aligns with the journey objective

While disconnected data is one of the biggest barriers, lack of content becomes a bottleneck for marketers to launch their campaigns quickly. An effective and dynamic content strategy should be in place to serve relevant content at the right time to inspire users towards your desired action. 

Define your audience, know their lifecycle and identify moments that matter to them so that you can create the right message for every stage of the journey. Start with answering to these questions 

  • Is there any existing content which can be used for this audience and journey?
  • What content do I need to create? 
  • What kind of content delights the end user and assists them solve their needs quickly? 

Building content assets takes more time than connecting data and creating journeys within journey builder. So, start developing those customer-focused content in parallel while you do those initial sample journey runs. 

Get the right team to connect all the dots

Success in any digital marketing strategy purely depends on having the right combination of marketing and technical skillsets. Identify those individuals who are willing to adapt and has the hunger to do something different and new. Set up a collaborative team of solid campaign specialists, content team with domain understanding, whole-brained and cross-discipline marketers, marketing cloud implementation specialist with assistance from your IT and Data specialists. Or you could also work with a Salesforce Marketing Cloud agency for guidance or to manage end-to-end implementation.

To Know more about Ameex, Contact us 

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