About Customer Journeys

Mailchimp’s Customer Journey feature helps you build dynamic, automated marketing paths for your contacts. Create a journey map with multiple starting points, branches, and unique actions so each of your contacts has a personalized experience.

In this article, you’ll learn about Customer Journeys.

Things to know

• Depending on your plan, you may have limited access to Customer Journey tools. To learn more, check out our pricing page.
• This article is about Customer Journey automation. To learn more about other email automation tools, read About Classic Automation.

Definitions

Here's some terms you will come across as you build your Customer Journey.

• Customer Journey
  An automated route that consists of different interactions a contact will trigger as they move through it, carving out their own unique path (based on what they do or don’t do along the way).
• Customer Journey map
  A visual representation of all the possible paths a contact can take in a Customer Journey.
• Starting point
  The event or action that adds a contact to a journey.
• Journey point
  Any rule or action that follows a starting point in a Customer Journey. You’ll plot these on your journey map based on the interactions you want your contacts to have with your business.
• Rule
  A type of journey point that defines how and when a contact moves along a set path.
• Action
  A type of journey point that tells our system to perform a specific task, like send an email or add a tag, when a contact reaches it in their journey.

How it works

A Customer Journey is composed of specific starting points, actions, and rules that you set based on your marketing goals. To build your journey, you’ll choose and arrange these elements on a Customer Journey map.

After you design your journey map and activate it, any contact who matches a starting point condition will be added to the workflow. When a contact reaches a journey point action or rule, we automatically do the “work” for you.

For example, let's say you create a Customer Journey that includes the starting point “signs up,” the rule “delay for one week,” and the action “send email.” This means that any contact who signs up to your audience will receive an email after a one-week delay.

About starting points

A starting point is the event or action that adds a contact to a Customer Journey. When you create a new Customer Journey map from scratch, the first thing you’ll do is choose a starting point. To learn about the different starting points, check out All the Starting Points.

Each Customer Journey map can have up to 3 starting points. For example, you could have one starting point that adds contacts who are added to a specific group, and another starting point that adds contacts who buy a certain product. If a contact meets either condition, they’ll be added to the journey.

Add a filter
When you add a starting point, you can configure it further with a filter. Filters let you be more specific about who will start a journey. Add up to 5 filters to add contacts that best fit your Customer Journey’s purpose.

About journey points

After you choose your starting points, you’ll then add journey points. These are the rules and actions that do all the “work” in your workflow.

If you have an Essentials plan, you can add up to 4 journey points to your map. If you have a Standard plan or higher, you can add up to 100 journey points, including if/else branching rules.

Here are the different types of journey points.

Access the side panel in the Customer Journey builder to add rules and actions. If you need to move the side panel out of the way, click Hide. Whenever you’re ready to use the side panel again, click Show Actions.

View and manage journeys

The Customer Journeys page is where you’ll create, view, and manage your Customer Journeys and other automations.

To access this page, click the Automations icon and choose Customer Journey. Then, click My Journeys. Use the drop-downs to filter by Audience, Status, or Objective.

If you’ve built any single-email automations or classic automations, you’ll also see them on this page with the label Email. Customer Journeys have the label Journey.

Journey status

We display a label to indicate your journey or automation status, so you can quickly tell whether things are working as expected. Here are the possible status conditions for a customer journey.

Explore ways to use Customer Journeys

If you don’t yet have a specific journey in mind for your contacts, navigate to the Customer Journeys page and click the Explore tab for inspiration.

Click the Category drop-down to see the different types of starting points and pre-built journeys you can choose from.

Get started

Now that you know how Customer Journeys work, here's a step-by-step resource to help you build your own.

Create a Customer Journey