Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder

When it comes to delivering personalized experiences online, customers want fast, relevant communication. However, the content also needs to be consistently accurate and reliable to win a customer’s brand loyalty.

Journey Builder is one of those tools from Salesforce that is ideal for managing and automating marketing content. If you want to find out more about this tool trusted by marketers for engaging with customers via email, SMS systems, and social media channels, join us in the article below.

Let’s get started!

What is a Marketing Cloud Journey Builder?

Salesforce Journey Builder is a tool that works exceptionally well in Marketing Cloud.

With the power of Journey Builder in Salesforce, marketers can create personalized experiences for customers. To go faster to market, admins can automate these experiences so they are deployed without human interaction to many different communication channels, such as:

What makes Journey Builder a great tool for understanding customers better is that it can work with your customer data, which includes:

By using Salesforce Journey Builder, marketers can design creative engagement strategies faster than before for every point in the customer lifecycle.

Three Types of Journeys for SFMC Users

Here are three Journey Builder examples for you to check out so that you don’t miss out on digital ways of aligning communication across your messaging channels.

1. Multi-Step Journey

When marketers want to create a string of personalized interactions across their communication channels, they build a multi-step journey. It helps them guide customers through a special and custom experience. Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder tool supports marketers as they can easily identify and work with the following elements (that are based on customer behaviors) directly on their platform:

By choosing Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to support employees, businesses improve their overall actions and decisions to align to customer preferences. But how does this look in the real world?

A scenario could be that a marketing team wants to engage with leads who are showing particular interest in a product. In this case, they can send these leads emails containing recommendations of alternatives or even add-ons to elevate that particular product.

However, there are times when communication can be missed. If the lead ignores the email, the marketing team could try a second approach, like sending an SMS. This might be the lead’s preferred method of communication. So, by using Marketing Cloud for customer journeys, marketers can build automated processes for engaging with leads and customers in the ways they want.

2. Single Send Journey

At other times, marketers only need to create a one-step journey to engage with customers.

In this case, the marketer would create and send one message to a target audience. Journey Builder can also be used to streamline this task in direct marketing campaigns. It is no surprise that Journey Builder is commonly used to build and deliver the following marketing content to business contacts:

In real life, this could look like a marketing team using Journey Builder in Salesforce to craft a single-send journey with automation to help them quickly send a message to a list of customers. The email could state that they get a discount on a specific product.

Choosing to send this discount to customers who haven’t bought a product in the last 60 days would be an ideal way for the marketing team to approach and engage with them.

3. Transactional Send Journey

The transactional send journey is useful for sending a single message to a customer in real-time. It’s triggered by a specific customer or system event, like when a customer purchases a product. These types of messages communicate important and necessary information, such as:

Journey Builder can be used in this case to immediately send customers an email to ensure them they are updated about their orders. This customer experience is an expectation in the purchasing journey in our digital-first world. 

How Can I Build a Journey in Journey Builder?

Whether you need to craft a campaign using pre-made templates or are starting from scratch with unique requirements, you can do so with Salesforce Journey Builder. It’s a useful skill to have, so let’s take a look at the guide below to learn how to build a campaign with Journey Builder in Salesforce. 

1. Navigate to the Journeys Dashboard in Salesforce and click on the Create New Journey button. 
2. Select either Multi-Step Journey, Single Send Journey, or Transactional Send Journey. 
3. Provide a name and description for your new journey when prompted. 
4. Choose your entry source and configure the schedule. This step allows contacts to be added to the new journey. 
5. Drag the Send Email activity onto your canvas and configure it.
6. Drag an Add Wait activity onto your canvas and configure your timings. 
7. Drag an Add Split activity to create paths that each of your readers could take.
8. Drag a Join activity to the journey to bring contacts from different paths together. 
9. Activate the journey to set your configurations. 

And that’s how simple it is to use Journey Builder in Salesforce for marketing automation. 

Marketing Cloud Journey Builder Use Cases 

The experiences that marketers can create with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Journey Builder are essential for today’s digital-savvy customers. And on that note, here are two short use cases that can give you inspiration for how to create digital-first experiences that customers crave. 

1. Engage with Customers Who Abandon Carts

A business that has an e-commerce website for online shopping experiences can use Journey Builder to send out personalized emails to visitors who have forgotten items in a shopping cart. The email can also give the customer a discount on the items they had abandoned in their cart. This strategy can be used to motivate customers to return to the website and complete their purchase. 

2. Engage with New Customers

A digital onboarding process is a great way to introduce new customers to your brand and community. However, it can be a difficult process without automation in place. 

For this reason, a business can use Marketing Cloud and Journey Builder to create a welcome journey that supports new customers in the ecosystem. These new customers will get emails or even messages while using the company’s app to teach them how to follow systems and use tools and features easily.

What to Consider Before Using Journey Builder

Every marketer wants their campaigns to be successful. When they use Journey Builder they can analyze data to make seamless processes that are personalized for leads and customers. 

However, there are a few things to consider before jumping into Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud (SFMC) Journey Builder. Let’s take a look at four points to prepare marketing teams for using this tool for journey management.

1. Ensure that everyone on the marketing team understands the goal of the journey, such as retaining customers or acquiring new ones.
2. Take a look at your customer data in Salesforce and double check that it is reliable, accurate, and up-to-date. 
3. Segment your customer data based on your journey’s goal and get it ready for personalization and decision splits. 
4. Check that communication channels and Salesforce integrations are accurately set up and functioning as intended. 

With these points considered, the marketing team can now map their goals to the journey they want to create so that it always aligns with the objectives of the company and does not miss any targets by accident. 

Our Thoughts on Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Journey Builder

Thanks for reading our article on Journey Builder. In today’s world, where customers switch between devices and platforms, it’s essential to communicate with them everywhere and wherever they prefer.

For this reason, Journey Builder is an ideal tool to help marketing teams create personalized experiences for their customers across multiple communication channels, like SMS systems, social media platforms, and emails. 

In our article we covered what Journey Builder is, the types of customer journeys a marketing team can create with it, and a simple guide on how to quickly build a journey. To ground the effectiveness of Journey Builder in reality, we also provided some use cases for the tool along with some points to consider before building your first journey.

We hope we have inspired you on how to use marketing automation software to improve the loyalty of customers with elevated experiences.

See you soon!

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us