A journey is a set of actions that have been defined to reach a certain goal. If the user performs or doesn't perform such actions on your website, based on that, communication triggers can be configured. They will receive the messages via different channels, thus influencing them to make conversions and reach the goal.

Types Of Journeys

Onboarding journey: A user onboarding process starts when someone subscribes to your services or installs your app. You can create an onboarding journey to engage users on different channels to educate them about your brand and services. Here you can engage them on different channels as and when they use them.

Promotional journeys: You can build promotional journeys to fetch the attention of the users towards your brands. You can engage users through promotional campaigns at different channels.

Re-engage journeys: The re-engagement journeys play an important role in fetching your users back to your app or website as they leave your website or leave the carts.

NotifyVisitors journey builder enables you to create campaigns and engage users with them based on their actions and stages. The main objective of the journey builder is to create an omnichannel message experience.

NotifyVisitors offers three ways to configure journeys viz.

1. Workflow

2. Sequence

3. Transactional Send

Apart from these three journeys, NotifyVisitors also provides predefined journeys. These journeys will help you get started quickly as you do not need to create a journey manually. These journeys are already built and can be customized as per your requirements.

How To Create A Journey In NotifyVisitors

The journey consists of 4 stages. Let's understand with the help of a brief example.

Triggers: Triggers signify the users' entry points as they start the journey. For instance, users entered into your journey when they viewed your page which means they triggered an event. 

Actions: Actions are something that will happen once users enter the journey. It can be triggering a campaign and allow you to further engage them through personalized campaigns such as email, SMS, and push notifications.

Since they have triggered an event by viewing your page, you can send them a web push notification that includes an offer to keep them engaged.

Conditions: Conditions are the checkpoints to redefine user experience based on users' changing preferences and their real-time interactions on the app, campaigns, or website. This stage does not apply to the sequence journey.

Now, you have to add conditions to make your journey work smoothly. For instance, here you have added a condition that you will send him offers only when he is a Premium Customer Type.

Flow control: Flow control evaluates the duration over which users go through a journey and how the journey can be ended if the user reaches the goal before hitting all the stages or if the user is taking too long to go through all the stages. You can use "Stop flow" or "Wait for a date " to control such flow. For instance, suppose the offer starts from a particular date, so the notification will be sent on that particular date.

The first step in creating a journey is defining the "entry criteria" of the users. You can define a condition according to which only those users will enter the journey who will align with it. This step contains the triggers, entry points, and conditions that set the context of the journey experience. Next, determine actions and other journey settings to get started with it.

How To Configure Additional Settings In Journeys

You can configure certain additional settings while creating journeys by clicking on the button titled 'Setting' which is highlighted in the screenshot provided below.

Once you click on this button, a new pop-up titled 'Journey Setting' would appear on-screen wherein you can configure the following additional settings for your journeys: -

Journey RunTime: The very first setting while creating a journey is to set the running time of the journey. The runtime can be set if you want to run a journey for a specific period of time. Keep it empty if you want it to run indefinitely.

Re-Enter: Select the checkbox option to allow the users to re-enter the journey, in case they have either completed or exited the journey previously.

Journey Timeout: Define a specific time frame up until when the user will remain in the journey, before the user completes the end goal. The Journey Timeout can be set in terms of hours or days from the journey's initial commencement. 30 hours / 30 days is the default value for Journey Timeout.  

Note: It is mandatory to specify / configure the Journey Timeout.

How to allow users to re-enter the journey: -

You might be aware of the fact that users can only be qualified only for once to enter the journey. But the Re-Enter setting enables you to optionally re-enter the users when they have exited from the journey and only if they are matching the criteria that you have specified. 

⇢ For example, If a user has added a product to the cart and does not make a purchase. You will wait for, let's say, the first day you will observe the user's behaviour. After 1 day if he doesn’t purchase, you will send him a discount offer on the product to nudge him to purchase. Once he purchases the product, he will be exited from the journey as per the default set-up of the journey.

On the contrary, if the user adds a product again to the cart subsequently after the first purchase and you want to engage him with the discount offers. Then, you can choose to select the above option to allow the users to re-enter the journey.

Exit triggers: The exit triggers are the conditions that help you identify that the users’ preferences have changed and the journey is no longer valid for the users.

Note: Make sure you are not sending out-of-context messages to the users while configuring the exit triggers for the user journeys.

How to set the following exit trigger: -

• Click on add exit trigger.

• Select the event trigger type: When the user performs the event.

• Select event: Here we have selected the homepage visit

• Option to choose specific attributes: You can select some specific event attributes based on which the exit trigger will work. It can be any system attribute like browser type, day, location, etc., of the event or some custom attribute that can be event-specific information.

By configuring this exit trigger, you can end the journey of the users who have visited the home page and who belong to the city. i.e. Delhi.

Goal Triggers:  Define the conversion event of the journey. i.e. your predefined goals. End the journey of the users who have completed the pre-defined goal. For example: Referring to the above use case where the users were abandoning the cart. Your end goal was to nudge the users to complete the purchase. Therefore, if the users complete your desired goal, you can end their journey and re-enter them if they match the entry criteria.

How to set up the Goal Triggers in the NotifyVisitors dashboard: -

• Select the event.

• Optionally add event attributes. i.e. medium, source, content, etc in context to the event.

• You can add multiple events.

Publish a journey: Once you have created a journey, you can activate it. Remember, it will only go live, the moment it is published.

Points to remember before publishing the journey: -

• Remember to configure all your steps.

• At least one of your triggers must be active.

• All blocks must be connected to at least one other block.

Implications of Publishing: -

• Once you publish your journey, you cannot edit it. Only certain steps are editable such as the content of the campaigns.

• You can view the stats of the journey only after it’s published.

• You can track any of the users with its user ID.

Pause journey: The said feature will enable you to pause a journey and therefore, the campaigns which you scheduled before pausing the journey will not be sent to the users.

Note: No new users will enter the journey or  messages will be sent to the users

Stop the journey: If you want to stop the journey, you get two options where you can either stop the journey immediately for everyone or you can just stop the new entries and proceed with the existing ones. Remember, once a journey is stopped, it can’t be resumed.

This is how you can create a journey in NotifyVisitors.