In this article, we will delve into what Journey Builder is in the simplest way possible. It may seem complex, but we will break it down into different steps. You will quickly notice the great value that Journey Builder will provide you with, as its purpose is to communicate more with your subscribers while sending out fewer emails.

Before you begin, we recommend that you read Journey Builder - Introduction, where we briefly go through how to navigate within this part of the platform.

You will learn:

1. How Journey Builder works
2. How to personalize your emails
3. How switches work
4. Where to schedule your emails
5. How to add SMS
6. How to preview one or multiple emails at the same time

How it works

Journey Builder makes it easy for you to communicate more with your subscribers while sending out fewer emails. How does it work? You set up different types of flows in your "Journey". If you are an e-commerce business, you can have multiple "Flows", such as:

1. Birthday flow
2. Your campaigns
3. Win-back, to activate customers who haven't made a purchase in a while
4. Abandoned cart, to capture those who have added items to their cart but haven't completed a purchase
5. Product recommendations

Here is an example of how a Journey could look like. You can add as many emails as you want in each "Flow". Let's say a subscriber matches with several segments within this Journey, for example, their birthday is coming up, it's been a while since they made a purchase, and this week's newsletter is being sent out. Instead of sending 3 separate emails, all of these emails are sent in one. Below, we show the emails that the subscriber matched with the segments.

Below, you can see how the email looks like after the person has matched with the different segments. The first email is for the subscriber's birthday, then the weekly newsletter, and lastly, product recommendations.

You can use Journey Builder just to send out your campaigns if you want

Personalization in Journey Builder

For example, in this email we want it to say "Happy Birthday *first name*", what you do then is:

1. Click on "Custom fields" and choose "First name"
2. Here you can see how it looks in the actual email, but when it is sent to the customer it will show the person's first name.

You can add "First name" and other "Custom fields" wherever you want in the emails, it doesn't have to be just in the subject line.

Switches

A switch changes selected parts of your campaign. As shown in the image below, there is a "+" that you can click on, then you can add more variations of the same email. For example, if you want the same email but in different languages, you can

1. The first email we created was for our Swedish customers
2. The email is transferred and looks the same, and here we have to choose a segment. This might be what we want our Norwegian customers to receive, so you add the tag you have for your Norwegian customers, then make the changes you want in the email.
3. You can add multiple switches, if for example you have a customer base with multiple languages, you can add the languages you want

Where you schedule your campaigns

Here you set the time you want your emails to be sent out. Once you have set the time, all the emails in that "Journey" will be sent at the same time.

Add SMS to your Journey

On the left side there is a "+" sign where you can add emails, or SMS. Choose SMS and you can start creating them.

Preview one or more emails at the same time

If you want to preview an email, click on the eye in the campaign you want to look at, and then click on preview in the top right corner. If you want to preview multiple emails at the same time, click on the "Eye" in all the campaigns you want to look at, then click preview and you will be able to see a long email with all your selections included.