Think outside the box when using Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud

The feature has limitless potential for automating every step of the marketing and sales process.

Journey Builder excels at sending subscribers down custom communication paths — nurturing leads or maximizing value out of existing contacts. From a marketing automation standpoint, your options are limited only by your team’s imagination. But Journey Builder is much more than a tool for sending custom messages — it can play a powerful role in other areas as well.

In this post, we share a good example of how Journey Builder can be used to create an omnichannel sales experiment by creating custom tasks in Sales Cloud.

Use case

Let’s say your sales managers want to find the most efficient way to follow up with a lead in Salesforce CRM, and they want to conduct a test to see what’s more efficient: a call, an email, or the sales rep’s preference (business as usual.) A basic way to find out would be to give each rep a list of contacts to create equal numbers of tasks for each channel. So let’s say a rep has 30 contacts: they’d create 10 emails, make 10 calls, and choose 10 tasks.

Journey Builder can simplify this process by creating custom tasks for all channels for each sales rep. This will save time as all tasks will be created at the beginning of the test. Managers can also be confident that all reps will receive equal and consistent tasks, helping to validate the results.

Next, let’s walk through this use case by covering two topics: setting up the task creation activity and setting up the custom task journey.

Task creation functionality in Journey Builder

Native to Journey Builder in the Sales & Service Cloud section is the ability to add a task, whether through the Task button or through the Object Activity button. We’ve found that using Object Activity will provide the most consistent results over the individual task activity. Object Activity asks you to search for the task object first, and then it functions exactly like the Task activity.

Here’s a quick overview of the task setup in Journey Builder.

Select Action

Select Create New since these will be new tasks. Find and Update can also be useful for cases that require tasks to be updated automatically depending on a subscriber’s journey path.

Map Fields

In section 1, select the Assigned To ID or Salesforce User (you’ll need their user ID) to tell Journey Builder who that task will be assigned. For Name ID, you’ll want to designate whether the task is for a contact or a lead (you’ll need a Contact/Lead ID). And then in Subject, add how the task will be titled.

For section 2, fill in the required and additional fields to enable and customize each task:

- Call Date/Time: when you’d like the rep to follow up

- Due Date Only: when to complete the task

- Priority: low, medium, or high

- Status: select “In Progress” so that the task appears as a new task

To find required fields, select Task in Setup > Object Manager. Select Page Layouts; the fields marked with a red star are required. A task will not be generated unless all required fields are populated with a value in the Object Activity.

Within each field, select the data source:

- Contact data. Connect directly to Sales Cloud through the synched data extensions and attributes set up in Contact Builder.

- Journey data. Pull data from your entry data extension by navigating to the appropriate DE and choosing the correct data field for each task field.

Custom Task Journey Setup

1.) Build the data extension

Build a .csv file that includes at minimum the Contact ID and SF User ID and Action (marketing tactic). Include other fields to be used for personalization.

Next, build your data extension in Marketing Cloud.

Here are a few areas to consider when building:

- Select a send-able data extension. There won’t be any sending, only creating tasks. But a data extension must be send-able to be a Journey entry event.

- Be mindful in your field setup. Create the fields that match your .csv file field label syntax exactly. Choose the best field types and lengths. Set the Contact_ID field as the primary key to eliminate duplicates and prevent multiple reps from reaching out to the same contact.

• Relate the primary key to Contact_ID. If this was an email send, Marketing Cloud would look to the primary key or Contact_ID as the match to the subscriber in the database (all subscribers). This is best practice: even though in this use case an email won’t be sent, it’s best to associate your primary key to the subscriber key.

2.) The Task Journey Setup

Select the Data Extension Entry Event type, and navigate to the DE that you set up in the previous step. Add in a wait step to confirm all of the data in the DE loads into the Journey when it becomes active.

The Decision Split activity will create the different paths depending on the types of tasks to be generated.

Clicking into the activity, assign a name for the path, select the field in the data extension that will determine the path in this case (Action), and enter in the data point that will determine this path (Call, Email, etc.).

Here’s some advice on testing before you push live:

Don’t change the entry event data extension. Create a sample set of data to load into your data extension for testing. Then, clear it out and load in the final data when you are ready to go live. Changing the entry data extension for a journey has been proven to affect reliability.

Add a wait step to validate data before a key activity. Add a wait step before your decision split or any key activity to check that the data is loaded correctly. Give yourself five to 10 minutes to allow the data to populate in the wait step to verify that all of your subscribers are entered in the journey. If only part of the list came in, you can easily stop the journey and go back to check the data.

Confirm all paths. Build a test data set that will allow you to track every possible path in the journey. It’s easy to miss a field or setting while you are versioning out the object activities. Test every path and confirm that every task type is created in Sales Cloud.

Test in the test environment. Marketing Cloud doesn’t have a traditional test environment, so most companies have a separate business unit connected to their Sales Cloud test environment. A test business unit is pretty easy to stand up, and with the new Package Manager feature released in April, it’s very easy to move all parts of a journey from one environment to another.

And don’t forget to use Journey Builder to help facilitate the execution of the tasks generated for the team. Distributed marketing is a fantastic user-friendly tool for sales to complete the email or SMS tasks with just a few clicks.

Summary

The next time your team is in the discovery phase for a project, remember to think outside the box and explore how Journey Builder can help automate. The tool has limitless potential in every step of the marketing and sales process.

About Cervello, a Kearney company
Cervello, a Kearney company is a data and analytics consulting firm and part of Kearney, a leading management consulting firm. We help our leading clients win by offering unique expertise in data and analytics, and in the challenges associated with connecting data. We focus on performance management, customer and supplier relationships, and data monetization and products, serving functions from sales to finance. We are a Salesforce partner and help our clients implement, customize, and optimize the platform into the best solution for their needs.