Use Audiences to Define Success and Drop Conditions in SAS Customer Intelligence 360

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Introduction

Scheduled Journeys in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 help marketers orchestrate timely, controlled communications to known contacts. By combining audience targeting with scheduled touchpoints across channels, teams can guide customers through meaningful experiences that support campaign goals.

Starting in June 2026, marketers have a more flexible way to determine when a Journey has achieved its goal, or when a customer should be removed from it. Success and drop conditions can now be defined using Audience membership, making it easier to use customer data that already exists in your environment.

Background

Every Journey needs a clear definition of success. That definition depends on the purpose of the campaign. For a sales-focused campaign, success might be a purchase. For an acquisition campaign, it might be a mailing list subscription. In many cases, once a customer reaches that milestone, they should leave the Journey. In other cases, you may want them to remain in the Journey to follow up the success condition with a thank-you message, a loyalty offer, or a follow-up recommendation.

There are also moments when a customer should be removed from a Journey for reasons other than success. For example, if a customer unsubscribes or opts out, the Journey should respect that preference immediately. Drop conditions make it possible to handle those scenarios while keeping success tracking separate and accurate.

Traditionally, success and drop conditions were defined using Events. A purchase, for example, might have been captured with a Purchase View Event. Events remain useful, but they are not always the simplest option, especially when the same information already lives in your customer data.

With audience-based success and drop conditions, you can use Audience membership to identify customers who have met a goal or should be removed from a Journey. This gives marketers a practical, data-driven way to act on existing customer attributes, behavioral indicators, subscription flags, or other audience criteria.

How It Works

To define a success condition using an Audience, open the Engagement Metrics menu for a Scheduled Journey, select “Specify Success Conditions”, and choose the Audience that represents the desired outcome.

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This capability also applies to A/B Test Nodes within a Journey. These nodes typically inherit the success conditions of the parent Journey, but you can define a separate success condition when needed. That condition can also be based on Audience membership.

Drop conditions can use the same audience-based approach. This is especially useful when customer tables already include indicators such as unsubscribe, opt-out, suppression, eligibility, or compliance flags. In the Journey Conditions menu, select “Drop Conditions”, and then choose the Audience that identifies customers who should leave the Journey.

Important Considerations

For each Journey, you can select up to five Events and one Audience for success or drop evaluation. The first condition that occurs is treated as the condition that was met.

Audience-based success and drop conditions are evaluated whenever the referenced audience refreshes. When an Audience is used as a drop condition, the customer is removed from the Journey regardless of where they are in the flow.

When an Audience is used as a success condition and a customer is in more than one active Journey occurrence, success is attributed to the oldest occurrence.

As a best practice, refresh success Audiences before drop Audiences. This helps ensure that success is recorded before a customer is removed from the Journey.

If the Journey allows the same customer to re-enter, consider defining the success Audience as a rolling window, such as customers who purchased in the past 24 hours. This helps prevent an earlier purchase from being incorrectly attributed to a later Journey occurrence.

Learn More

For more details, please see the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 User Guide available here.

Success and drop conditions are also covered in more detail in the “Creating Scheduled Journeys with SAS Customer Intelligence 360” course, which is part of the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Learning Curriculum.

Thanks to Olaf Kratzsch and Mark Korey for their review and input.

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