Time-Smart Marketing: Import Journey & Automate Retries with Engage
Read the release notes from this feature: here
Carley: Welcome my name is Carley I’m from the marketing team at DESelect and I just want to say hello to everyone joining today and we’re going to be showcasing our new import journey and automate retries features with a live demo we just launched them today and I want to introduce Sal who is here virtually right next to me he’s our senior product manager and he’s going to be taking over and doing the demo from here so Sal if you want to say anything we can go ahead and get started.
Sal: Thank you Carley and hello everyone I’m Sal as Carley has already said, so I don’t think there’s any point repeating that allow me to share my screen and we can start with a quick slide deck. Can you see my screen? Okay cool so as Carley mentioned already, we are here to showcase the two new features we built, that is going to save marketers that use SFMC tremendous amount of time. This is me just in case if you didn’t know, and I want to go straight into it.
Sal: Have you know have you ever found yourself spending a lot of time setting up Journeys and activities only to find that your campaigns still don’t deliver the the results you expected and even with all the effort you put in into setting up your Journeys accurately success is still not guaranteed staggering 95% of marketers unaware of the critical need to optimize their communication frequency this lack of optimization then leads to 51% unsubscribes primarily due to inconsistent email frequency so it’s a concerning reality that demands attention.
But you are not alone in facing this challenge many marketers across various industries rely on the gut feeling when it comes to engagement frequency and that’s where DESelect Engage comes in. With engaging new features import journey and automate retries marketers using SFMC can seamlessly import uh all types of multiple Journeys directly from Journey Builder into Engage choose the retry criteria and gain full control over the communication frequency so let’s have a look at how importing journey and automating retry works and how that would give you more time to strategize create campaigns and most importantly understand how your campaigns uh are performing it’s and its effectiveness.
So I’m now going to switch to a journey Builder tab here’s a journey are prepared for the purpose of the de demo and as you can see it’s fully validated and it has three message components now previously before the launch of these features you would have to users would have to create their Journeys in Journey builder then they would have to apply the Engage saturation control in front of each decision split now you can imagine these this journey only has three message components three decision splits or two if you had lots and lots of decision splits that can be a very time consuming exercise but this was one of the steps and then the second step would be that the users would have to go to Engage and complete the create send action the amount of times they have the message component so in other words if you have three message components you need to create three sends that’s the repetitive action that that you have to complete if you have 50 message components in a journey you have to do it 50 times now you don’t have to do that again to go back to the journey right it doesn’t include any of the messaging Engage components, it simply has message components and the decision split and when do you want the the contacts to exit now I simply go back to Engage click on import journey and I search for the Journey that I want to import ours is called March promotion.
Sal: Once I select I head over to the next model now at this point you can select the components that you want to create the sends for. So for example I want to create sends for all of the three promotion emails that I have I simply check the master and it’s all selected for me if for any reason I want to refer to my journey I don’t have to go back to the Journey Builder and look for it I can just click on this link and it would redirect me to the journey that I’ve selected for import I’ll just let this load to confirm that this is the case you can see it here March promotion2024 we can close this again okay I’m back on the import Journey process I once I select the components I want to create the sends for I move on then I apply the send frequency my desired frequency here is I only want to sends it once but you can also send a recurring usually on weekly daily monthly basis specify the intervals for the demo purpose I’m going to go with once only.
Carley: Sal just to jump in really quick we cannot see the Engage screen at the moment we can just see Journey Builder oh my bad okay sorry before you went too far no just letting you know
Sal: I can recap no good that you stopped me. My my bad uh let me see okay I’m definitely sharing the entire desktop now so you can see all the tabs in my Chrome yes now we can see Engage and journey Builder right okay so very quickly to recap uh allow me to abandon this and then restart.
Sal: okay so this is a journey I prepared to import in the Journey Builder and I don’t do anything I don’t apply any of the Engage components I simply validate it and then head over to Engage Carley confirm you can still see my screen
Carley: all good perfect
Sal: okay so it all begins by clicking on import journey and searching for the relevant Journey ours is called March promotion once I select then I get all of the components message components that I want to create the send for um users have a choice you can select few or select all is entirely up to you and you don’t need to go to the journey Builder if you want to refer to your journey you simply click on the hyperlink this will be provided throughout the import process you and then once selected once the components have been selected I click on next and here I can define uh the send frequency um for the purpose of the demo I’m going to go with ones but in the recurring you can specify you can schedule your sends on daily weekly monthly basis and even specify the intervals you want um like I said I’m for the demo purpose I’m going to go with send once only.
Sal: And then again I can apply the desired saturation control I want I think this works for me I want to apply the saturation control and not let the logic impact the sends and then I give a campaign type uh of course this is a promotion one and the last step of the import journey is uh the automation of the retries so here you can just simply turn the toggle off and specify how long do you want to try or how many attempts you want to make and on the intervals like on which days you want to do it so I’m going to go with two tries every five days yeah and the text dynamically adapts itself so users can understand very clearly that you have one original attempt which is the actual send itself and then two attempts will be made between the 6th and the 16th at 5day interval and once this is done then all I have to do is click on import and the journey is imported this in itself is saving hours and hours of work for the marketers that use SFMC and have to create the sends in Engage this has been streamlined now so as a result you can see we have imported all of our sends and they are presented here with the overview of the sense itself if at this stage now I want to observe the journeys that I’ve imported I click on backspace and I will find all of the journeys that were imported who imported them and again if you want to check out the journey at indented level to see what sends were created out of that import you can always observe that again if you don’t uh you spot something or plans change you can always delete these sends very easily or you can also click on it and fine tune the the frequency the saturation type you want to apply or even change the attempts you want to make.
Sal: At this stage then I want to go back to the journey overview page because you saw two different Penguins – blue one and orange one I just want to very quickly explain like what happens when you import a journey if you click on the links provided under the blue penguin it will take you to I’m just waiting for it to load it will take you to the journey that you just imported which was overwritten and we added the watch component in there and I would explain in a second what it does but if you click on it as well is pretty self uh explanatory yeah the watch component here is is used to synchronize the journeys now the question might be like why would I need to synchronize the journey well the effect we wanted to have on the users is give them the freedom sorry I might have clicked on the wrong one I have this Zoom Banner at the top yeah this is the one I created so the effect we wanted to have on the users is always provide a journey that they can freely edit at any time without having to worry and deal with the saturation controls so you would see now if I go back again and I click on the link provided underneath the orange penguin you see the same Journey just waiting for it to load right okay so all of the Engage components I’ve added have been added now just to explain what happens because our journey the that we imported was in a draft mode the draft mode got overwritten and we added the Engage saturation controls to it we also created a new copy and added the watch component to it so this is basically if you now I go back to Engage.
Sal: I just want to show you the the tool tip if you click if you hover on the tool tip it clearly explains that these are the editable journeys you can edit this at any time and the changes as long as the watch component is not removed or deleted the changes would be reflected in the journey with the saturation control components in many ways you never have to deal with the saturation controls again you never have to apply them manually neither do you have to look at those Journeys that have the saturation controls as long as you keep the journeys with the watch components up to date then you can always always go and always make any changes having said that the only time you do want to go to the journey with the saturation control is when you want to activate them naturally these have saturation control so you want this to become into effect so that’s the the reason why we created this logic if you import a draft we overwrite it and create a copy you can also import an active Journey we would do the same we would create a copy and add the the watch component to it and we would also create another draft and add the saturation controls to it so these are the activateable uh not sorry these are the journeys you can activate um I think in terms of the demo that is about it the only thing I wanted to show is if I go back again to the journey with the watch component and I make any changes like for example I add okay I want to do another email I add an email component I select a very a message very quickly uh sorry wrong one my bad yeah I’ve added another email uh I’m just going to call it uh promotion fourth and I would save and validate this just waiting for it to validate okay so I made the changes to the journey that has the watch component and these changes will be reflected in the journey with uh the saturation controllers I may need to refresh allow me to do that here we are promotion fourth email has been added as well so the whole value of this is it saves SFMC marketers meticulous amount of work and error prone work as well and a lot of time and effort that goes into preparing the journeys and adding the decision splits in Engage component in front of decision splits and then having to create a send for each of the message component in a journey. If you have 10 20 50 Journeys a month that’s a lot of work there’s a lot of time that will be saved now because all you have to do is the initial Journey once created in a state you go to Engage and import that and that is about it.
Sal: Carley I think now we can open up if anyone has questions if they want to put them in the chat we can go ahead and answer some.
Carley: One is: Can I import a journey that already has Engage saturation or watch components?
Sal: Yeah that’s a good question. So um the answer is sadly no and it’s in in users favors as well so you don’t have to add the components um you just have to prepare your journey and make sure that there are no Engage components added to it head over to Engage and then import it as we import the journey we do this work for you so subsequently the the other effect is if you have a journey that you haven’t imported yet but have added the watch component or the saturation control component it would not go through the import similarly if you have imported a journey and as a result we’ve added these components you can not report those journeys so it’s actually in your favor not to do the hard work and let us do that.
Carley: Cool does anyone else have anything? We can always ask questions later but best to ask them right now with the expert right here.
Sal: I’m not sure if I’m an expert but thank you
Carley: I have one but before I read mine I will read one that someone else submitted.
Carley: When the journey with the saturation controls are activated what do we do with the journey copy?
Sal: Can you sorry can you repeat the question again so when the journey with the saturation controls are activated what do we do with the journey copy with the saturation control is active. So um the copy just remains you can always make changes uh and it would sync once you activate a journey which a saturation control then that becomes your main of course that then then you are subjected to SFMC limitation that you cannot amend an active Journey so you have to pause and and and make the changes but the whole part or the whole reason why you have this way of you know Imports like uh one with watch component and one with saturation is you can freely go make your changes and never have to look at or or worry about actually doing the saturation control um but that journey in itself is the one that you need to activate so the reason or what’s the main purpose for these Journeys with saturation control yeah you you activate them and once you activate them then that’s it there there’s nothing else to do after that.
Carley: There was another one that said can I import a Journey triggered through custom channels?
Sal: That’s a great question um so we do support custom channels as long as we have a data extension in in SFMC but for the first version of these features um we right now we only support the native SFMC channel so Journeys uh they were triggered through native SFMC channels but again again to retrade we do support custom channels as a whole and Engage but it’s um yeah this is not covered in in the first iteration or the first version of the these features.
Carley: Okay and final question unless anyone has some ones they want to submit um what would happen if I delete the Engage watch component?
Sal: Yeah that’s a great question um am I still screen sharing yes I am um so if you click on the Engage watch component it would it would give you the warning as well nice thing is that you can always go back um to where is it linked on Engage but yeah sadly it’s not advisable to delete or move it away from the end of the branches it would simply break the synchronization so if you by chance delete this and make the changes right these changes will not be reflected in the journey that has the saturation control and remember the ones with the saturation control are the ones that you want to activate so it’s always advisable not to delete or move it away from the end of the branch.
Carley: okay if that’s all the questions for now I guess we can wrap up the fastest webinar ever in a good way um thank you everyone for attending the recording will be available on our site and it will also be emailed to everyone um thank you again and have a great rest of your day.
