Define Your Custom Activity
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify common Journey Builder activities.
- Evaluate your needs for a custom activity.
At the heart of Marketing Cloud Engagement is the customer journey. Journey Builder manages how contacts enter, interact with, and exit your customer journeys—and you can use it to plot a series of events and activities. This module guides you through the process of creating custom activities for Journey Builder. First, let’s review the ready-made activities available in the app before we go the custom route.
Ready-Made Journey Builder Activities
Journey Builder activities are categorized by the action the activities take. Here’s a closer look at each.
Message Activities
These activities send a specific type of message when a contact reaches a specific point in the journey. Journeys can include multiple messages, such as introduction, follow-up, or confirmation messages. You can even create a simple journey just to send a single message. Available messaging channels include:
- Email
- SMS
- In-app (mobile app)
- Push (mobile app)
- Inbox (mobile app)
- WhatsApp
- LINE
Split Activities
Split activities outline the potential paths a contact can take after they enter a journey. You can sort contacts randomly or use engagement history, decision filter criteria, and even Einstein to determine how your contacts proceed. You can send contacts down two or more separate paths. Plus, Journey Builder includes a join activity to bring your contacts back together when their separate paths are done.
Customer Update Activities
Customers can change addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and many other attributes at any time. To help you stay on top of these changes, Journey Builder offers activities that automatically update contact records in sendable data extensions whenever changes are made. These activities add the new values to existing records, or create a new contact record if one doesn’t already exist.
Sales and Service Cloud Activities
If you use Marketing Cloud Connect to bring in data from Sales and Service Cloud, Journey Builder can take that data and perform tasks with it. Use these activities to:
- Create a lead when a Marketing Cloud Engagement contact enters a journey.
- Update a lead based on engagement within a journey.
- Create a CRM contact record when a Marketing Cloud Engagement contact reaches the activity.
- Update a CRM contact record with Marketing Cloud Engagement contact data.
- Update a custom object based on engagement within a journey.
- Create a task when another object, such as a lead or contact, enters a journey.
- Associate a case or task to an account.
- Update a task based on a contact or lead’s response in a journey.
- Update a person or business account.
Other Activities
Journey Builder can evaluate various paths and send contacts down the most successful route. It can also create audiences for advertising or just wait until the time is right for the next marketing activity. All of the baked-in functionality Journey Builder provides can accomplish the vast majority of tasks.
Customize Your Experience
Everyone’s data needs are unique, even if there are similarities. Journey Builder handles most cases easily, but your use case may require some personal attention. For example, suppose you need to link Journey Builder to a nonstandard messaging service. Or maybe you want to tightly integrate your data system with Journey Builder so that custom triggers accomplish very specific tasks. That’s where the Journey Builder REST API and custom activities come into play. In the next unit, we talk about the steps you take to build your own custom activities.
Resources