Start with a clear objective

Customer journeys provide a visual way to create predetermined but flexible paths toward a specific goal. They can help you design a more complete customer experience across different touchpoints and stages of the sales funnel. Your end goal will depend on your organization. It might be purchasing a product, signing up for a membership, scheduling a discovery call, or even helping existing customers learn how to use a product they have already purchased. One of the first best practices when creating a customer journey is having a clear objective. In this example, we'll build a journey around a product demonstration webinar. The campaign will handle outbound email communication from the initial invitation through registration, the webinar itself, and post-event follow-up.

Create your customer journey

In the Outbound Marketing area, navigate to Marketing Execution > Customer Journeys and create a new journey. You can begin with one of the available templates, such as a simple email blast or announcement, or start from scratch. Within a journey, you can configure information such as:

• Journey name
• Target audience
• Minimum consent
• Start and end dates
• Time zone
• Purpose and description
• Recurrence
• Suppression segment

Some settings cannot be changed after the journey goes live. For example, the start time and suppression segment become locked, so make sure you're confident in those settings before going live.

Use suppression segments when appropriate

A suppression segment lets you exclude a particular group of contacts from a customer journey. For example, you might maintain a segment of contacts whose emails have hard bounced in the past. Using that group as a suppression segment can keep those contacts out of the campaign and help protect your email sending reputation.

Know your audience

Another important best practice is knowing exactly who your audience is. Your audience determines what you send, when you send it, and how you communicate. For this webinar example, we'll target contacts who have visited the landing page for the new product. They've demonstrated interest, but aren't yet in the initial sales funnel. Choose the appropriate audience source type, such as:

• Segment
• Updated contact information
• Submitted form

For a segment-based audience, you can select your desired segment or subscription list and add additional conditions if needed. If you can't find the segment you're looking for, check the Segments area to make sure it is live. A segment must be live before it can be used in the campaign.

Build the journey with tiles

Tiles determine the individual steps of your customer journey. Select the plus sign on the canvas to see the available options. For this campaign, we'll begin with a Send an Email tile and select the webinar invitation email. The email must already be live. Draft emails won't appear as available options in the journey. You can also preview an email and add a description to the step. If the email contains a button linking to an event in Marketing, configure the appropriate email element for registration and attendance tracking.

Create conditional paths with If/Then tiles

An If/Then tile lets the journey branch according to a customer's behavior. Contacts who meet the condition proceed down the Yes path, while contacts who don't meet it proceed down the No path. For example, after sending the webinar invitation, you can check whether the recipient opened the email. Select has been opened as the condition and specify the amount of time the journey should wait before deciding whether the contact opened it. These conditional paths allow your campaign to adapt automatically to individual customer behavior.

Respond to event registration

Following the Yes branch for people who opened the email, add an Event tile and connect it to the appropriate webinar event in Dynamics 365 Marketing. Next, add another If/Then tile to determine whether the person registered for the event. Select has been registered and configure the amount of time the journey should wait for that action.

Follow up with registered contacts

For contacts who register, add another Send an Email tile for a registration confirmation. The confirmation email could include:

• Registration date and time
• A link to join the webinar
• Additional information about the product

You can then add a Wait Until tile to pause the journey until after the webinar. After the event, add another If/Then tile to determine whether the registrant attended. Contacts who attended can receive a thank-you email with a preorder discount code.

Plan for the people who take a different path

Not every customer will open the first email, register for the event, or attend. That's exactly why conditional paths are valuable. If someone registers but doesn't attend, you could send a "Sorry you couldn't make it" email containing a link to the webinar recording. If someone opens the original invitation but doesn't register, you could send a second invitation with slightly different messaging. From there, another If/Then tile could check whether the second email is opened. If the contact responds, they can continue through the registration path. If they don't, you can decide whether another attempt makes sense or whether their journey should end.

Don't go overboard with email

An important part of designing the journey is knowing when to stop. If someone receives two invitations and doesn't open either one, consider ending this particular campaign for that person instead of sending another message. That doesn't mean you're ending all outreach to the customer. You're simply ending their invitations to this specific webinar. Think about your own experience as an email recipient. Sometimes an additional reminder is helpful, but excessive messaging can become annoying and could even encourage someone to unsubscribe from future communications.

Let automation handle the individual paths

A customer journey with several branches may look complicated when you zoom out, but many of those branches represent variations of the same basic scenario. The advantage is that you only have to plan these decisions while designing the journey. Once it is live, Dynamics 365 Marketing can automatically react to each customer's behavior and move them through the paths you've defined.

Review everything before going live

Before making your journey live, check:

• Is the audience correct?
• Are all journey steps configured correctly?
• Do you need a suppression segment?
• Is the start date and time correct?
• Is the end date and time correct?

Remember that going live isn't necessarily the same as starting the journey. The Start date and time determine when the first step actually begins. For example, you could make the journey live today while setting its start date for next Tuesday. Nothing will happen until the scheduled start. It's a good idea to leave some time between going live and the journey's scheduled start. This provides some buffer and gives you an opportunity to catch a last-minute issue before the campaign begins.

Check for errors

When you make a journey live, Dynamics 365 Marketing performs an error check. You can also run this check while you're still building the journey. The error check can identify configuration problems such as a missing audience or missing start and end dates. Once you've reviewed your settings and resolved any errors, your journey is ready to automate the customer experience you've designed.