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Use Behavioral Triggers in Marketing Cloud Engagement

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Include behavioral triggers in your journey.
  • Encourage shoppers to return to their abandoned cart.

Map Out the Journey

Technical marketer Michele is ready to use the content she created in the previous unit in a journey. The journey will send three email messages prompting users to come back to their abandoned carts and complete the purchase. She navigates over to Journey Builder to get started.

Choosing an abandoned cart data extension in Journey Builder

  1. Michele clicks Create New Journey and clicks Build in the Multi-Step Journey section.
  2. She drags the Data Extension entry source to the canvas.
  3. She clicks the entry source, then clicks Select Data Extension and selects the abandoned cart data extension. (This was automatically created and named as part of the process in the first unit.)
  4. She clicks Summary, then clicks Done to return to the journey.
  5. She clicks Schedule and chooses a recurring schedule that runs every hour.
  6. She clicks Contact Evaluation.
  7. She clicks Only new records added after journey activation in the Evaluate New Records Only section. This setting prevents customers from receiving email messages every hour after they abandon their carts. She wants them to come back, but she doesn’t want to lose them as customers because of too frequent emails.
  8. She clicks Summary.

As a best practice, we recommend that abandoned cart messages send at specific intervals: the day of the abandonment, the next day, and then a final message the week after the abandonment (for a total of three email messages). Michele takes this best practice to heart and organizes her journey this way.

  1. She drags an Email activity to the canvas, then clicks it and selects her first email message.
  2. She drags in a 1-day Wait activity.
  3. She drags another Email activity to the canvas, then clicks it and selects her second email message.
  4. She drags in another Wait activity, clicks it, and sets it to 5 days.
  5. Finally, she drags in her final Email activity, then clicks it and sets it to the final email message.

Journey containing alternating email activities and wait activities.

After Michele activates the journey, Marketing Cloud Engagement checks the abandoned cart data extension every hour, identifies any new contact records that were added, and starts them in the assigned journey. Michele can create multiple journeys based on different types of product records or personalize the messages to entice customers to return. 

This example shows the simplest way to set up an abandoned cart solution, but you can customize the data and messaging to meet your needs. You can even link this solution to Commerce Cloud and pull in information from there, or include Einstein Email Recommendations for products similar to the abandoned items. Salesforce provides many tools that can enhance the customer experience and turn an abandoned cart into a more fruitful endeavor for both you and your customers.

Resources

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