Using Events in Scheduled Journeys
Make your journeys smarter, and more responsive.
Events are at the heart of SAS Customer Intelligence 360. They help you understand how your customers are interacting across channels - whether it's viewing a page on your website, clicking a link in an email, or making a purchase through a mobile app.
But events aren’t just for analytics - they’re powerful tools for action. In Scheduled Journeys, events play a vital role when used thoughtfully. Think of them as checkpoints or stops on a guided tour: they let you pause, observe, and respond based on what each customer is doing at every step.
In this section, we'll explore how events can shape the customer experience inside your scheduled journeys - from personalizing content to rerouting users based on behavior. Get ready to unlock the full potential of events and turn static journeys into dynamic conversations.
A Quick Reality Check: What Events Actually Know
Before we dive deeper, there’s something important to understand: most events are blissfully unaware of your Scheduled Journeys.
That’s right - when a customer takes an action (like completing a purchase in your mobile app), the resulting event - say, a “Purchase” event - only knows what happened, by who and maybe a few details like which product was bought. It doesn’t know why it happened. It’s not awa re that the user clicked a link in your “Abandoned Cart” email two hours earlier.
So, while events represent valuable customer actions and data, they don’t carry journey context by default. This can lead to confusion when you try to use these events to guide your journey logic.
But don’t worry - we’re here to smooth that out. In the next sections, we’ll show you how to use events effectively despite this limitation, and even turn it into a strategic advantage.
Making Events Relevant to Your Journey
If you plan to use events in your Scheduled Journeys, you’ll need a reliable way to tell whether an event is actually relevant to your journey’s purpose. Not every customer action belongs to every journey - so how do we tell the difference?
Let’s walk through an example.
Imagine you’re designing a journey to promote the sale of new tablets on your e-commerce site. You want to mark a success when someone completes a purchase - great! But here’s the challenge: the event that captures this action can’t realistically be called “Tablet Purchase Event”.
Well… technically, in CI 360, you could name it that. But that approach doesn’t scale when your site sells dozens of products - and you’ll likely end up with a flood of narrowly defined events. Not ideal.
Instead, you’ll probably have a more generic event, like “Web Purchase Event”, which collects key data points - including the Product Category. That’s your secret weapon. By adding a condition using this event attribute , your journey can react only to the purchases that matter (like tablets), and ignore the rest.
In short, while events describe what happened, event attributes help you determine why it matters to your journey.
If your events don’t already include these kinds of details - like product category, campaign source, or customer segment - make sure to add them. These attributes are your filter, your lens, your secret decoder ring. Without them, your Scheduled Journey has no way of knowing whether it should respond or simply move on.
A little planning during event design goes a long way toward creating journeys that feel personal, purposeful, and precise.
Using Events for Success and Drop
In a Scheduled Journey, you can configure a Success Event to indicate when a customer has achieved the goal of the journey - say, purchasing a tablet.
Let’s look at two versions of this:
You probably already know which one is the smarter choice, right?
That’s right - while the first version technically works, it’s a little too generous. If the customer buys a toothbrush, the journey would still celebrate it as a success. Great for dental hygiene... but not exactly what we were aiming for.
The second version is precise. It makes sure we only mark the journey as a success when the customer actually purchases a tablet - just as intended.
The same principles that apply to Success events also apply to Drop events - specificity matters.
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Pro Tip 💡
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Remember the principles of Success events remains true for Drop events as well.
Using Event attributes for Personalization (aka merge tags)
Just like in other parts of SAS CI360, you can use event attributes to personalize your communication within a Scheduled Journey. These attributes act like merge tags, allowing you to insert dynamic, customer-specific details into your messages.
It can be as simple as pulling in the product name from a product-view event:
“Still thinking about the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9?”
Or as advanced as incorporating a customer’s credit score from an external event:
“Pre-approved financing available for customers with scores over 750!”
Either way, event attributes bring a powerful personal touch. But before you start sprinkling them everywhere, here are a few things to keep in mind.
Event Occurrence
Events happen all the time - and as a marketer, you don’t really get to control when.
Customers interact with your website, mobile apps, and other channels whenever they choose. As a result, SAS CI360 may receive the same type of event multiple times - even within minutes. Think: five product views, three cart additions, two logins - all before breakfast.
This brings up an important question:
When you use an event attribute for personalization, which instance of that event is used?
If you’re pulling in a product name or a last viewed category, you want to make sure you’re referencing the right interaction - not something the customer did two weeks ago (or two minutes too early).
Thankfully, CI360 gives you control over this. Let’s explore how, as usual, with an example.
Let’s revisit that Tablet Promotion Journey we talked about.
You’ve already sent your first email, introducing an exciting new lineup of tablets. Now, imagine the customer clicks on one of those links - say, the iPad Pro. You wait two days (gotta give them some space to think, right?) and want to send a follow-up email - this time, with a personalized image of the exact tablet they clicked on.
To do that, you can use a Journey Placeholder attribute to hold the image URL.
This placeholder can then be mapped in the personalization section of your Scheduled Journey.
Quick check:
Do you have an event - like Web Product View - that captures the image URL when the customer views a product? If not, now’s the time to update your event design. You’ll need that data to pull off this personalization.
When mapping this event to your email placeholder, CI360 gives you two options for selecting the relevant event occurrence:
- After Entering the Journey – This filters in only those event instances that happened after the customer entered the journey. Great if your content and personalization depend on post-entry behavior.
- Relative – This lets you define a time window like "last 12 hours" or "last 2 days" It gives you finer control, especially if your personalization strategy is time-sensitive.
Now comes the fun part - choosing the instance to use if the same event was triggered multiple times.
Say the customer viewed an iPad on Day 1 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab on Day 2. Which one should appear in your follow-up email?
That depends entirely on your journey strategy:
- Most Recent: If your goal is to re-engage interest by showcasing the latest product they viewed, go with the most recent instance. It’s timely and responsive.
- First Instance: But if your journey is designed around nurturing their original interest - the first spark - then stick with the first instance. It keeps your messaging consistent.
Wrapping Up
Congratulations! You’ve just explored one of the most powerful - and sometimes overlooked - aspects of SAS CI 360: Events in Scheduled Journeys.
From understanding how events behave like neutral observers of customer actions, to using their attributes to personalize journeys and measure outcomes - you now know how to make events work with your journey instead of just around it.
CI 360 gives you the flexibility to tailor personalization based on how (and when) your customers interact. The more thoughtfully you design your event logic, the more meaningful - and effective - your personalization becomes.
