Optimization of Journeys

Journeys are not only about designing a customer journey flow, but also analyzing your users' behavior, their interactions on the funnel, and detecting the bottlenecks if any. 

You can optimize your flow at each step to foresee the possible issues and improve them. Once you optimize your flow via seeing problems and interpreting the journey, it will perform better.

Separating journey flows into trackable flows

Some journeys might be too long to track and hard to evaluate. In such cases, you can split your journeys into smaller portions of journey flows based on milestones of your business cases.

For example, you are designing a cart abandonment journey flow. You check if the user made a purchase or not. If not, you send a message to them to engage them. If yes, you want to send a thank you or feedback survey. In that case, instead of handling two different cases in the same journey flow, you can have another post-purchase journey to send them a survey. So, you can easily track and evaluate the results of two different use cases.

Targeting users

Targeting a wide audience without any segmentation may not help you reach your goals as it would not be different than sending a bulk campaign. Your users may end up on the funnels with which they are not likely to interact, hence low conversions and user engagement.

You can follow these best practices to easily avoid such cases:

• Using the correct starter for your business cases

1. User Website Action: Segments and rules for only web site users
2. On Event: Event-based real-time starter. It takes users when they perform the specified action on the platforms (e.g. website, mobile app, or events passed from your end).
3. On Attribute Change: It takes users immediately when their attribute value is changed or gets a new value.
4. On Past Behavior: Deep segmentation based on users' past behaviors. Positive and negative cases together like ‘the users who added an item to their cart but have no purchase in last 2 days'.
5. On Dynamic Date: Targeting users according to their date type attribute or event parameter for cases like birthday, expiration date, etc. 

• Validate users via segmentation such as targeting only reachable users in addition to your segment
  

Waiting for users

Once you take users on the journey, they will start to proceed with the flow based on their behavior and actions. When you have checkpoints to understand if they have completed the desired goal, you need to give them some time to take this action.

Let’s say you are designing a cart abandonment journey. Considering your average purchase time after users add items to their cart, you can add a wait element in your journey to wait for your user to buy their items. If they do not buy their items within this period, you can check their actions and take another action on the flow.

Wait duration varies for each industry and use case. For example, if you are executing food delivery marketing, the wait duration should be a short time since food ordering is a fast process. When it comes to long-term-consuming products, wait duration can be longer.

Checking user behavior and actions

Checkpoints are nodes that enable you to lead your users to the correct path on the flow. You can interpret your flow, evaluate the number of users who complete the desired actions, get insights on the bottlenecks in your funnel.

You can check user behavior or actions to decide your next action on the flow.

If you are using check elements, you should add the wait element before the check element. If you do not expect any user attribute change or not expect the user to perform specific events during the journey, you do not need to use check elements. You can also add the same condition into the starter element.

Avoiding bothering users

Journeys are non-stop automated flows unless you pause them. If you do not set any user eligibility, users will keep re-entering the journey and receive the same messages. You can use the following features to avoid such cases:

• User eligibility
• Journey entry capping

Avoiding losing users on the flow

Users can drop from the journey when they are not reachable on the channel they arrive at. You can check their reachability before leading users to a specific channel. In this case, only reachable users will proceed to the respective channel element. You can lead those who are not reachable to other channels.

In this way, you can create alternative interactions with users to avoid losing users on the flow and increase your conversion possibility.

See more on Check Reachability here.

Selecting the correct channel

This is a big dilemma in selecting channels to create interaction with users. Architect considers each user's past behavior, and provides Next Best Channel to automate your decisions. You can easily add Next Best Channel before adding the channel element, and evaluate the numbers after launching your journey.

Based on the channel stats, you can also evaluate how many users reach a specific channel element, and easily interpret how that channel performs. 

You can also use the A/B split option to select the correct channel. You can use this element to compare two different channels, and evaluate the results based on A/B split statistics.

Optimizing personalizations

Your users meet the content first when you reach out to them through any kind of message. That’s why having a contextually convenient personalization of your message is quite important. You can use user attributes in your content or effective words in the subject line, or any dynamic content in your messages. 

Using the A/B split option, you can compare the effectiveness and performance of each content on the same or different channels.

Triggering big audiences

Architect allows you to trigger very big audiences ranging from 100K to 10M. When you are targeting a big audience, it might cause a delay due to processing the big volume of user data, querying the segment, finding the exact users, and returning a response to the journey.

You can follow these best practices to avoid such cases:

• Make users distributed to different paths after the starter element. Segmenting or checking user behavior on the flow will help you take the correct actions on them, and send more relevant messages to users.
• Always use a "wait" element between each element. This will help the journey handle the users on the flow more smoothly.

Triggering big audiences generally happens when you have non-action (negative) segmentation such as “targeting users who have not made a purchase over the 3 months”.  You can do this type of segmentation "On Past Behavior". You can always check the count of the audience (count bubble) based on your segment to see how many users will enter the journey if you would activate the journey now.

See below for one example for triggering big audiences: