| Audience | Marketers and operations teams building multi-step workflows such as welcome series, winback programs, nurture tracks, and cross-channel lifecycle campaigns |
| Prerequisites |
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A journey is a scheduled, multi-step workflow in Customer Studio. Members enter when they join an audience or perform an event. On each run, Hightouch reevaluates your warehouse data to determine who enters, advances, or exits.
If your source isn't listed in the Lightning sync engine docs, journeys aren't currently supported for that source. If you see "This source does not support journeys" in the app, to confirm compatibility.
Overview
Audiences and journeys work together to determine who enters a workflow and what happens next.
- Audiences define groups of members.
- Journeys move members through a sequence of steps over time.
- Journey steps can delay members, branch based on conditions, send email or SMS messages, or sync member data to a destination.
For example, a member can enter a cart-abandonment journey after abandoning a cart. After two hours, they receive an email. If they purchase, they exit the journey. Otherwise, they receive another message the next day.
When to use a journey
If you only need to keep a group of members synced to a destination, sync an audience directly. Use a journey when the workflow changes over time based on timing, member behavior, or earlier steps.
Sync an audience directly when
| Use case | Example |
|---|---|
| You only need one activation step. | Keep everyone in your high-value customers audience synced to Meta Ads. |
| Audience membership already defines the full rule. | Sync everyone with churn risk = high to Salesforce. |
| Everyone should receive the same treatment. | Keep all members of a regional campaign audience synced to the same destination list. |
Build a journey when
| Use case | Example |
|---|---|
| Several actions happen over time. | Send a welcome email, wait three days, then send a reminder. |
| Members should take different paths. | Send different follow-ups depending on whether a trial user activated. |
| The workflow should stop when a goal is reached. | Exit a cart-abandonment journey when the member purchases. |
| Later steps depend on earlier ones. | Assign a coupon on one branch and use it in a later message. |
| You need to coordinate actions across time or channels. | Send an email, wait two days, check SMS eligibility, then send an SMS only to eligible members. |
How journeys run
Entry, advancement, exits, and destination actions happen only when the journey runs, not immediately when the underlying data changes.
What happens on each run
On each scheduled run, Hightouch:
- Adds members who meet the Start condition.
- Checks whether active members meet any exit criteria.
- Evaluates each member's current step and advances members whose conditions are met.
- Sends messages or runs destination syncs for members who reach those steps.
- Records journey progress for monitoring and reporting.
How the schedule affects timing
The schedule determines when Hightouch can detect a change and act on it:
- Delays — A one-day delay advances a member on the first run after 24 hours have elapsed. If the journey runs every six hours, the member waits between 24 and 30 hours.
- Exit criteria — If a member meets an exit condition between runs, they exit when the next run detects it.
- Hold until — The member advances on the first run that detects the condition.
- Destination syncs — Reaching a Send to destination step doesn't trigger a separate destination schedule; the sync runs when the journey processes that step.
If you need an action to happen immediately when an event occurs, account for the journey's evaluation schedule when designing the workflow.
How journey membership works
Counts can differ between the entry audience, the journey, individual steps, and the destination because each stage applies different conditions.
- Audience membership — who currently qualifies for the entry audience or event.
- Journey membership — who the journey has actually enrolled. Entry rules, exclusions, and re-entry limits narrow it, and a member stays enrolled until they finish or meet an exit condition, even if they later leave the entry audience.
- Step membership — who has reached a given step. Branches send members down different paths, and Time delay and Hold until steps hold members in place, so no single step sees everyone.
- Destination membership — who the destination actually received. Destination rules, consent, priority lists, and the destination's own suppression or deduplication can each remove members at sync time.
Don't expect these counts to match. Compare counts at the same stage: use entry rules and exclusions to understand journey enrollment, step conditions to understand path counts, and destination-side filters to explain delivery counts.
Get started
- Create a journey and configure who can enter.
- Add steps for delays, branches, messages, and destination syncs.
- Configure exit criteria and the journey schedule.
- Test and launch with a small cohort.
- Monitor and troubleshoot the active journey.
To control which audiences and journeys take precedence when a member qualifies for more than one, see priority lists.