Journeys

Open Marketing → Journeys. A journey is a canvas: people enter it, wait, receive things, and branch depending on what they do.

1. 1Define who enters, and on what.
2. 2Lay out the steps — send, wait, branch.
3. 3Decide how somebody leaves, including when they convert.
4. 4Turn it on.

Journey or campaign? A campaign is one message to a list at a moment. A journey is a reaction to behaviour over time: a welcome series that adapts, a nurture flow that stops the moment someone books a meeting.

Always define the exit. The most common mistake is a journey with no way out, which carries on emailing somebody who has already replied, already bought, or already told a salesperson they are not interested. Every journey needs a conversion exit, and it needs to be the first thing you build rather than the last.

Keep the first version to three or four steps. A twelve-step flow with branches is impossible to reason about when it misbehaves, and it will misbehave. Get one path right, then add.

Test with yourself in it. Put your own address into the entry condition and walk the whole thing before real people do. Waits make this slow, which is exactly why people skip it and why it is worth doing.

Journey or workflow rule? A journey is marketing communication over time. A workflow rule is an internal reaction to a CRM event — assign this, notify that, create a task: Workflow automation. A journey that is really trying to make your own team do something should be a rule instead.

Journey or sales sequence? A sequence is a rep's own outreach cadence, sent from their mailbox: Sales sequences. Marketing journeys go out from the company.