Creating a recurring journey

·

This post applies to Realtime Marketing, although Outbound Marketing also provides the possibility to create recurring Customer Journeys.

Within Journeys it is possible to set up automated emails, based on Segments (demographic, firmographic or behavioral data) or Triggers (for example a change in Dataverse, such as creating an Opportunity).

Sometimes a Segment-based Journey needs to repeat itself frequently, for example when dealing with expiring contracts or with birthdays. The latter one is what we will perform in this post. We will create a Journey which sends out an email to all contacts on their birthday.

To do this, we will need:

  • A dynamic Segment (since the Segment needs to be updated continuously)
  • An email containing the birthday message (and a coupon code for example)
  • A recurring Segment-based Journey

There are a three options when it comes to setting up the frequency of Segment-based Journeys:

  • A one-time journey with a static audience
  • A one-time journey where newly added audience members can start any time
  • A repeating journey where all audience members repeat the journey every:
    • x days
    • x weeks
    • x months

Creating the Segment

First, let’s create the Segment. Go to your Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys environment and go to Audience > Segments and create a new Segment.

We want to collect all contacts whose birthday is equal to today (which is a relative date). Now, it is important to know that this condition is a little bit different compared to other date-based conditions. For example, a contract expiration date is always in the future, which means that you can filter all contracts with an expiration date that is 6 months from now.

A birthday, however, is always in the past (i.e. 09-11-1994). So how can we create this condition? We cannot set the condition just to ‘Birthday is today’, since the birthday is in the past.

The answer is that, while creating the Segment and conditions, we should ignore the year. When selecting the field ‘Birthday’, the operator ‘Is’ and the relative date ‘Today’, we select the ‘Ignore year’ checkbox.

Save the Segment and click ‘Ready to use’.

Now we have Segment which collects all contacts whose birthday is today, ignoring the year which is in the past. It only looks at the day and month.

Creating the Email

Now we can create the Email. To do this, go to ‘Channels > Emails’

Obviously you can set up the email to your styling/content, but the example below is what we’re using for this scenario.

When the email creation is finished, click Save and ‘Ready to send’.

Creating the Journey

Now that the Segment and the Email are both defined, we can create a Journey. Go to Engagement > Journeys and create a new Segment-based Journey.

While creating the new Journey, we can select the Birthday Segment. After selecting the Segment we can define the frequency of the Journey. In this case it’s important to select the following option: “A repeating journey where all audience members repeat the journey every: 1 days”.

This will make the Journey repeat it self everyday, checking all audience members in the Segment and triggering all actions within the Journey.

When ready, click ‘Create’. Now we can define the actions that will be executed during the Journey.

For this Journey we will only send out an Email (the birthday email which we created earlier).

When the Email is selected, click ‘Publish’ on the top right of the Journey designer. Now the Journey will send out birthday emails to all contacts on their birthday!

That’s it! Please let me know if you have any comments or feedback regarding this post!

Comments

One response to “Creating a recurring journey”

  1. Renee Avatar

    Hi Marco, we had a big issue with recurring journeys and the change of winter to summertime. The journey was created in winter time, after the change to summer time mails were sent twice, what is your experience with that?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *