About journeys
Scheduled Journeys is available in Accelerator version 26.2.3. Contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) for more information.
Overview​
A journey is a scheduled, warehouse-backed orchestration flow that lets marketers design, automate, and measure personalized customer experiences across channels. Using a drag-and-drop canvas, you build a sequence tiles (delays, segments, and message activations) that users move through over time based on rules you define.
Journeys in Accelerator are built on the same direct native data warehouse connection that powers audiences and campaigns. Customer data stays in your environment. MessageGears reads from your warehouse to evaluate who enters a journey and writes journey state back to a table in your warehouse to track where each user is in the flow.
To start building, see Journeys prerequisites checklist and Create a journey.
How scheduled journeys work​
Scheduled journeys use a scheduled evaluation model. At the interval you configure (hourly, daily, weekly, or a custom schedule), Accelerator runs an evaluation cycle that does three things:
- Entry: Queries your audience and User Profile to identify new users who qualify to enter the journey
- Movement: Advances users who have completed a delay or are ready to progress to the next tile
- Store: Stores the updated state of all current journey members back to the Journey State Table in your data warehouse
There is a minimum 15-minute refresh window. Users progress through the journey at each scheduled evaluation rather than immediately when conditions change.
Key concepts​
Audience​
The audience determines which customers qualify for entry into a Journey. Audience membership rules are defined within the audience directly. A Journey only needs the Recipient IDs returned from the audience, which the Journey will join to the User Profile for customer attributes needed for in-journey segmentation and message activation.
For more information between Audience and User Profiles, see How User Profiles relate to Audiences.
User Profile​
A User Profile is an admin-configured customer attribute dictionary that defines which customer data fields are available throughout the journey flow. When a journey evaluates, it joins the User Profile data to the current journey members so that segment rules and message personalization have access to those attributes.
Each User Profile is backed by a query against your data warehouse. The query defines which attributes are available in the journey canvas. A User Profile is not the same as an audience. The audience determines who enters the journey; the User Profile determines what is known about those users once they are inside it.
For more information, see About user profiles.
Journey state table (Managed Data Schema)​
The Journey state table is a table MessageGears creates and maintains in your native data warehouse. It is the authoritative record of every user processed in a journey, including their current flow position, wait timing, re-entry history, and evaluation bookkeeping data.
Because the state table lives in your warehouse, it is subject to the same data governance and retention controls as your other data. MessageGears requires full access (create, read, write and delete) to this schema to operate journeys.
A separate Journey state table is created for each Journey, with the Managed Data Schema housing and managing all state tables. These tables are fully managed by the Accelerator instance directly. No changes should be made to state tables or the Managed Data Schema by your administrative users.
The Journey state table is provisioned through the Managed Data Schema configuration. For more information, see Managed data schema.
Evaluation cycle​
Each scheduled run of a journey is called an evaluation cycle. A cycle has three stages — Entry, Movement, and Write — and each stage can succeed or fail independently. If the Entry stage fails, no new users are enrolled but users already in the journey continue to progress. If the Write stage fails persistently, the journey may pause automatically.
You can review the history of recent evaluation cycles, including error details, from the journey canvas.
Tiles​
Tiles are the building blocks of the journey canvas. Each tile serves a single purpose. In journeys v1, the following tile types are available:
| Tile | Type | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Defines the Audience and User Profile for the journey. Every journey has exactly one entry tile. This tile is permanently anchored to the journey canvas. | |
| Activation | Sends an email to users who reach this tile. | |
| Push | Activation | Sends a push notification to users who reach this tile. |
| SMS | Activation | Sends an SMS message to users who reach this tile. |
| Multi-channel | Activation | Sends messages across email, push, and SMS channels in a single step. |
| Time delay | Movement | Pauses a user's progress for a configurable amount of time before they advance to the next tile. |
| Segment split | Movement | Branches users into paths based on attribute filter rules drawn from the User Profile. |
| Percent split | Movement | Branches users into paths based on randomized percentage splits. |
| Merge | Movement | Rejoins multiple branches into a single downstream path. |
Journey statuses​
The journey status tracks the operational condition of the journey:
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Draft | The journey is being built and has never beet activated. A journey can be edited in this status. |
| Live | Evaluations are running on schedule. |
| Paused | Evaluations are halted. Users in the journey remain in their current position until the journey is reactivated. A journey can be edited in this status. |
| Finished | The journey has ended and is no longer processing users. |
Prerequisites​
Before you can create or activate a journey, the following must be configured:
- Managed Data Schema must be set up with a schema designated for journey state tracking
- At least one User Profile must exist
- At least one audience with a RecipientId column must exist
- The audience, User Profile, and Managed Data Schema must all use the same database connection
- Users who will build journeys must be assigned the Journey Author role
For a complete walkthrough of everything required before your first journey, see Journeys prerequisites.