#1 - Credit card renewals

If you find yourself having a hard time getting started there's two great questions to ask yourself. They'll help you start to design a journey.



How would someone enter this journey? There's four common ways for a profile to enter a journey



What components do I need to create the journey? Open a notepad and visualize what components you'll need to have to be able to create the journey. In this case:



Next, start by creating a journey try putting all activities on the canvas in a chronological order.

When building a journey it's important to be concious about how customers flow through the journey. Journeys in Adobe Journey Optimizer are per profile, instead of as a group like in most traditional marketing automation systems. This means that every profile runs though the journey alone and therefore every action on the canvas will be considering the individual rather than the mass.

In the past you likely selected a group of customers, then split this group based on some condition, excluded a few and then send an email to the remaining customers. In Adobe Journey Optimizer you'll instead build your journey asking yourself "If a customer does [something], I want them to [next step]". It might not sound like a big difference, but just imagine yourself how a "Wait"-activity would work in both of these scenarios.

So based on this change in perspective, how would your journey look?

There's templates and fragments available so you can quickly get a nice-looking email design. To add personlization to your email, you can use the -icon in the pop-up toolbar that shows when you're editing text.

If you're looking for the credit card information to show in your email, navigate to Profile attributes > _demopotemea > ING > Products > Credit card

The provided credit card image (in ING > Images > Email) is a Dynamic Media Template. This is an image that has parameters that allow you to modify the image.

Adobe Journey Optimizer's email designer recognizes Dynamic Media Templates and will adept the interface to allow easy input of the parameters.

Try adding the image, you'll notice the right-hand menu will list all parameters for the image. Using the -icon you can now personalize the parameter with the cardholder name!

In Adobe Journey Optimizer you can create custom (API) connections to external systems, these are called Custom actions. You can use these Custom actions in your journeys to call the external system to send and receive information in real-time! Some examples include:

Once a Custom action is configured it'll become available as an activity in your journeys in the actions-tab. For this exercise we've already configured a Custom action called callCenterFollowup. Obviously we don't have an actual call center available for the Hands-on Lab, that's why this Custom action will write it's responses to a Webhook. On this website  you'll be able to see all API calls made by custom actions during the Hands-on Lab.

The resulting journey should look something like the image below.

There's many ways you can build a journey like this. For example you could use fixed waiting periods of 7 days or you can calculate the wait time based on the actual expiration date of the credit card. Especially in cases where you use send time optimization you'll probably want to use calculated wait times as there will be a variance in the time that customer will receive the email, making the wait time not exactly 7 days! You can now run this journey in test mode to receive the emails and (if your test profile has a platinum card) send a follow-up request to the call center! An example of this journey is available, called [Example] Credit card renewal.