The Journey Designer is the tool that allows you to design a sequence for any of your campaigns. Through this you can define how many and what kind of stages (status) your campaign will include, then associate specific messages (stories) to each of them.
Through a series of conditions it is possible to shape each stage of the sequence according to the campaign's objectives. As a consequence, the stories associated to each stage will be displayed to the users based on their behavior/interaction with them.
This creates a non redundant flow of messages which will always be meaningful to each user. This is the basic principle of Message Sequencing or Sequential Retargeting.
Below a sample sequence execution following a consumer journey of 4 main stages (Aware - Engaged - Consideration - Advocacy).
IMPORTANT: It is key to appreciate how the consumer journey is a non-linear path. Every user goes from A to Z in a different way and not necessarily going through all the intermediate stages. The beauty of the Journey Designer is that users don't get stuck into stages they don't belong to. Everybody is unique and the Journey Designer can take into consideration everybody's unique behavior
Setting up a Sequence
- To access the Journey Designer, click on the "Journey Designer" tab in the navigation menu on the left.
- Click on the "Add Sequence" button on top to design a new sequence. Connected-Stories offers a series of default sequences ready to use and easy to implement. To learn more visit the Default Sequences section.
- To start, name your new sequence.
- Every sequence begins with a User Data that needs to be plugged into the different rules components. User Data represents the beginning of the consumer journey and that is where each user starts at every single impression.
3 Main Blocks for a Sequence:
The light and dark blue boxes represent a set of "questions" asked by the Journey Designer during the sequence. The answers to those "questions" shape the journey of the user within the campaign. Since each user is unique, the Journey Designer can provide a specific sequence customized for each user.
All blocks can be dragged and dropped to be positioned on the Journey Designer canvas. In order to save the sequence, you need to make sure all the blocks are properly connected to one another.
A. "If Then Else": This block allows you to set conditions and sub-conditions to further breakdown the sequence.
To insert an "If Then Else" block just drag and drop the block into your main framework.
Name the block.
Define the conditions. You can setup a block to have a true output if "All", "None", or "Any" of the conditions are met.
- Save your new block.
Each "If Then Else" block has an input and two outputs. To link blocks you need to drag and drop the arrow from a block to another one. If this is your first one, connect "User Data" block to it.
The 2 outputs are (a) "True" - green-labeled, and (b) "False" - red-labeled. They need to be connected to a respective block each representing an answer to the condition.
If you want the logic to keep going, the block needs to be connected to another "If Then Else" block or a "Switch Block", if not then it needs to be connected to a "Context block".
For a detailed list of all the conditions visit the Journey Designer's Conditions section.
Here a snapshot of an If then else block. In this case the condition is True if more than 25% of the video in the first story has been seen by the user.
B. "Switch": This block behaves like the "If Then Else" block with the only difference that outputs are unlimited.
C. "Stage": At the end of every logic rule, a "Stage" block needs to be connected.
- Drag and Drop the stage block in the main framework.
- Name the block according to the stage of the consumer journey in that specific sequence.
- The stage blocks are the ones that would be connected to the single stories. This allows the Journey Designer to understand which story to trigger at any point of the sequence.
Here, a video is played back (Video View %) and based on the % view of the user, other events are triggered.
After setting the Journey Designer, you can always go back and adjust the parts according to your furnished stories or changes in sequence.
You can save different versions of the same Journey Designer and easily switch from version A to version B without the need to build a new Journey Designer. This is particularly useful for those who intend to do any A/B testing during an ongoing campaign.
