Creating an Onboarding Scheduled Journey in Customer Intelligence 360

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How many apps do you currently have downloaded on your phone? I'll admit I have well over 50 at this point. I'm not sure what that says about my cell phone usage or my willingness to download any app for any business I support. However, it seems that in today's "mobile-obsessed" world, businesses without an app risk fading into the background. According to a blog post I read in Adobe for Business, 90% of smartphone users engage with apps daily, with about half opening an app more than 11 times each day. This is a big deal! And businesses need to find a way to introduce these apps to their customers. That's where Customer Intelligence 360 Scheduled Journeys come into play. Using a scheduled journey, businesses can easily reach out to their specified audience of customers and guide them on the journey to experiencing the immediate benefits of their app. In this post I'll walk you through the steps of creating an onboarding scheduled journey with the purpose of onboarding customers to an app for the SAS Hotel.

What's my Objective?

Before creating any type of customer journey you want to plan out your objectives.

What is the purpose of my journey?
What is my target goal?
How is that goal reached?
Who is my target customer?

These are all great questions to ask and they are questions that Customer Intelligence 360 makes answering very easy. You'll begin by using engagement metrics to define the purpose of your journey, the target goal, and how that goal may be reached.

Figure 1 - Engagement Metrics

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In Figure 1 I have chosen the journey's purpose to be onboarding, the target goal to be a volume of 10,000 and a new app login event as the measure of success.

When configuring your target goal, you'll have the option of choosing a measurement of volume, conversion rate, revenue, and value. The measurement you choose may depend upon the purpose of the journey. In this case, my goal is for 10,000 customers to download and log into my app, so I have chosen volume.

My success event, or the way I am capturing volume towards my goal, is a custom event using a mobile app action that captures when a customer logs into their app for the first time. Once they have logged into the app for the first time, we can safely count it towards our goal. I have also chosen not to remove customers from the journey after they have converted. This way I can continue to send them communications about features of the app and updates through this journey.

Journey Conditions

The next step in creating your scheduled journey is to configure journey conditions. Journey conditions are entry limits, holdout control groups, drop conditions and exit delays.

Figure 2 - Journey Conditions

Figure 2 shows entry limits have been configured to limit customers from reentering this journey, meaning they will only enter the journey once. Our audience is going to be made up of customers that have joined our mailing list in the last 30 days so the audience update may take care of that on its own, but we'll discuss that a little later. This journey also contains a holdout group of 10%. Remember, this group will be tracked in this journey, however, they will not receive any of the journey’s communications. This holdout group is to simply track whether these customers will download the app without the need for interaction. I also have an Email Opt-out drop condition configured. This means a customer will drop from the journey if they opt out of email communications. This drop condition is configured using an email opt out standard event.

Set a Schedule

Next, I set a recurring schedule. According to Figure 3, this journey will run every Monday at noon EST. Each time the journey runs our audience will also update. This audience update will provide a fresh list of customers, however, with our entry limits in place, only the new customers will enter the journey.

Figure 3 - Schedule

Audience

Scheduled journey's always begin with an audience. The audience I used for this scheduled journey consists of customers that have signed up for the SAS Hotel newsletter in the last 30 days. I have included city, email, first and last name, mailing list sign up date, phone number, and postal code as attributes. These attributes may be used as personalization variables or as conditions in my journey. (Figure 4)

Figure 4 - Audience

Email Node

First, I'll send an email to this audience thanking them for signing up for our newsletter and asking them to download our app (Figure 5). There are two major components of this email configuration that will come in handy later.

Figure 5

Link Tracking

The button customers will click on to download the app contains a call-to-action link bringing them to an app download page. This call-to-action link is being tracked with a link name of Download_App_Now (Figure 6). Meaning each click of this link is tracked and can be used as a condition in my journey.

Figure 6 - Link Tracking

Primary Metric

I also have two metrics set for this email, one for tracking email clicks and another tracking email opens. These will be used later in my journey in a split node.

Waits and Splits

Following the email node is a Wait node. After the email is sent to my audience everyone will move to the wait node where they will wait 7 days. This will give them time to see the email and take action.

The rest of their journey will depend on the action they take. The path will be determined using a split node (Figure 7).

The first path in this split node is for customers that downloaded and logged into the app. Remember the event I used as the success event? I'll use the same event as criteria for this path.

The second path will be for customers that clicked the download app link, but did not download the app. To configure this path, I'll use the Email Click touchpoint behavior from the email's primary metric. Then I'll set a condition to further specify that the link clicked must be the link titled Download_App_Now. This is the link I described earlier under Link Tracking.

The third path is for the remainder of customers. This will probably be the customers that did not open the email at all.

Figure 7 - Split Properties

Path 1 - Logged into App (Figure 8)

This first path is for customers that successfully downloaded and logged into the app for the first time. Since these customers have met the success event for this journey, I'll send them a What's App message thanking them for downloading the app and providing more information about the app. This path is the reason why I did not want customers to be dropped from the journey after they have met the criteria for the success event. I can use this journey to send them more information about the app now.

Once this path is complete, I'll end it with an End node and change the default buffer to zero days. Since these customers have already converted, there is no need to keep them in the journey.

Figure 8 - Path 1

Path 2 - Clicked Download App (Figure 9)

The next path is for customers that clicked the download app link, but still didn't download the app or didn't log into the app for the first time. These customers will first receive a reminder email. This email will remind them about downloading the app and provide more information about the app to entice them into downloading.

After the email I'll include a Wait node that will wait for 3 days.

Following the wait node is a split. This split is similar to the previous split but contains only two paths; one path is for customers that downloaded and logged into the app and the other is the remainder. The first path is configured the same as the first path in the previous split using the New App Download Login event.

Those customers that have downloaded and logged into the app will receive the same What's App message as the first path, thanking them for downloading the app and providing more information. Again, from here, I could continue to use this journey to communicate with these customers. Then I'll end this path with an end node with no buffer.

The customers in the remainder path are added to a Facebook Ads audience and then are moved to an end node. This end node has a seven day buffer, giving them time to still convert before being dropped from the journey.

Figure 9 - Path 2

Path 3 - Email Not Opened (Figure 10)

The final path in the first split is for the remainder of our customers that just didn't open the email at all or didn't make any clicks. This path is configured very similarly to Path 2. Except, these customers will first be sent a Bulk SMS message, reminding them about the app and providing a link to download. The rest of the path remains the same as path 2.

Figure 10 - Path 3

And there you have your completed onboarding journey! From here click Review to review your journey and make sure your journey is ready to activate. Customer Intelligence 360 will let you know if there are any issues, but if you followed these steps, you should be ready to go!

For more information about Scheduled Journeys see our new course titled Using Scheduled Journeys in SAS Customer Intellgence 360 to learn all about creating and using scheduled journeys. You can also visit the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 User's Guide and Administration Guide for more information!

Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.