A Preliminary Guide to SFMC Journey Builder
The internet has created an unprecedented amount of potential and opportunity, but it has also caused disruptions that require companies to innovate. Marketers have a challenge on their hands – they need to market brands in new and creative ways while transforming the customer journey so it’s personal for everyone.
If you are an SFMC user, this is exactly where SFMC Journey Builder comes into the picture.
It’s never been easier to plan, execute, and measure your marketing campaigns in your CRM! So let’s dive deep into what it is and learn everything about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder.
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder?
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder is a one-stop shop for crafting and executing campaigns on social, web, mobile, and traditional marketing channels like email. It’s the fastest way to create tailored customer journeys that deliver personalized content across all digital touchpoints. From building out your campaign strategy to adding design elements like images or videos, SFMC Journey Builder has everything you need to make it happen.
What does it include?
SFMC Journey Builder includes a number of funnels, from marketing to sales. Each funnel has pre-built tasks that define how you create your customer journey. Tasks help Salesforce users reach their destination in the form of goals, lead conversion, or sales opportunities. It brings all your campaigns together to give companies deeper insights into both sales and marketing.
What can it do for me as a marketer?
Journey Builder makes it easier to discover your target audience and helps you understand their needs. It also helps you create personas of your most important customer segments. The tool can help you to understand what motivates them to take action, and how they make purchasing decisions. These insights are very useful for creating marketing strategies and messaging.
It launches personalized content across all digital channels based on the behavior of each customer. You can use tags to connect SFMC Journey Builder with your other systems and keep in touch with customers.
Top Features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder
Journey Builder offers the following features:
- Triggers and actions – The system triggers an event to start a journey when it detects that new or changed data has been added to the related record. The system also offers actions that apply when the journey is complete, when an error occurs during the journey or if a specific date arrives.
- Goals and success criteria – Journey Builder makes it possible to specify one or more goals for campaigns. You can set up success criteria in order to measure whether users have achieved those goals. For example, you might want to track the number of times that users visit a particular web page.
- Content – Journey Builder has a content library feature, in which it stores frequently used items such as email templates and social media messages. While creating a journey, you can select the item from the library instead of re-entering the item’s details.
- Reports – You can track the progress of journeys in real-time and also create reports for each specific campaign. The reports show how many users completed the journey, when they completed it, whether any errors occurred during the process, and other relevant information. In addition, you get access to support from Salesforce staff with expertise in the use of Journey Builder.
Other top features include:
- Quick and easy ways to create, edit, or delete content
- Ability to customize the type of content with fields from various objects
- Add cross-object records and actions to the journey on-the-fly
- Review your work in the Preview tab before publishing it to Salesforce
- Unlimited email notifications
- Customizable look and feel
- One-click integration with other Salesforce objects
- Generate customizable PDF reports
- Publish the journey to Salesforce and keep it up-to-date
Advantages of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder has various interesting and useful features. Here are some of the advantages that you will find if you start using it:
- You can execute your journey inside a sandbox environment so that it won’t affect any other component or page in your existing Salesforce community instance or org. In addition, you can also create your journey in an area that is totally isolated from other components.
- You can store different versions of your journeys that have been executed previously so that you can use them later.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder includes a customizable design interface, which allows you to fashion your journey so that it looks completely different from the journey of other users in the same community instance or org.
- You can easily create and execute a custom journey by using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder. If you haven’t created the journey yet, then this is the best tool for your needs.
- You can include various necessary sections in your journey that include activities performed by your visitors. For example, you can include the Get Started section so that new users start their journey with this particular step.
- This tool allows you to share your journey with other users. You can also define the access level of the user if you make a public journey.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder provides secure sharing. As far as you intend, you can allow other users to view or edit your journeys (even partially). In addition, if someone else tries to access the journey which you have made private, then they will be able to view it but won’t be able to change your journey.
- You can provide detailed help and guidance for each of the steps in your journey. If a user is not aware of these steps or modules, then he/she can always consult this information from Salesforce.
Tips for Using SFMC Journey Builder
The Journey Builder is a useful tool that allows you to plan and organize your own marketing campaigns. The ability to create comprehensive journeys with several different steps can be applied for many different situations, connecting users via various means including social media, emails, SMS messages, or automated phone calls.
When running a campaign, it’s important to understand which touchpoints will reach your audience and convert them into actual leads. By structuring your journey you can test the results, follow up with the contacts, modify or expand them in order to make sure you achieve all of your goals.
Here are some important tips for using SFMC Journey Builder:
- Consider What You Will Offer as a Reward – Make sure you think about what you want to offer as a reward for the journey. There are many features available within Journey Builder where you can design your own microsite or landing page, and send emails/SMS messages directly to contacts based on their activity in the journey.
Tip: When selecting your activity rewards, make sure that they are relevant to the journey.
- Don’t Delay – The Journey Builder allows you to set up a reward even before users complete the previous step. You won’t have to wait for them to finish one thing in order for them to get started with another. They will be able to take part in the entire journey.
- Automate Your Journeys – Automation can provide better response times and grow your business by reaching more people. In addition to automating every aspect of the journey, you’ll also have the ability to split contacts into various groups so that you can easily identify what is working and what isn’t when it comes to segments.
This will ultimately allow you to improve your campaigns over time as well as learn what your audience likes.
- Map your Journey In Advance – The Journey Builder is intuitive and visual, making it easy to assemble a plan for your Journeys. If you are not sure how to start a Journey, it is best if you first map out your entire process in an easy-to-read diagram. The rest of the team will be able to understand what exactly needs to be done, even if they do not have technical knowledge of SFMC. This helps the team to avoid being overwhelmed by large builds from scratch.
- Keep Tabs on Your Journeys Performance
If used well, Journey Builder can also help you better understand how to use multiple channels together in order to create a successful marketing strategy. One way to see if your Journeys are working is setting Goals, which can be set up based on the changing attribute for contact. For example, the status of a contact can change to ‘customer’, thus reflecting that they have converted into customers overtime after going through an online journey.
That’s not all!
We also got in touch with some leading SFMC experts around the world to help you understand the best journey builder practices. You can find an elaborate infographic that we have created on the topic on this link.
Parting Words
The SFMC Journey Builder can be a powerful way to create marketing campaigns that are more personalized and relevant for your customers. But it’s not an easy tool to use, especially if you’re new to the platform or don’t have much experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud in general. You can always take expert guidance in such cases.
