Email journeys
This page describes a term that no longer exists. A journey IS a campaign as of version 0.6.9 — there is only one term for newsletter and journey, and the difference is the question “how does it start?”. Everything below still holds, but lives entirely under “Campaigns”. This page will be removed with the next major step.
Overview
A campaign is one send to everyone. A journey is something else: several emails in sequence, with waiting periods in between, and from a certain point on different depending on what the recipient did. Whoever opened the first email gets a different second one than whoever ignored it.
Under the hood a journey is an automation — the same machine that runs every other process in the system. There is no second rule engine and no second send path. The journey view is a particular lens on the same steps; the expert view under automations shows them in full.
Core tasks
Create a journey. Name and description are enough. It starts switched off — otherwise it sends to an audience that has not been set at the moment of creation.
Define the entry — this is the most important step. There are three ways in, and they differ in speed:
- Tag. When the configured tag is assigned to a contact, lead or deal, that person is in the
journey immediately. This is the path people coming from Klicktipp or Quentn expect.
- Audience. Whoever falls into the configured audience is enrolled — checked once a day. An
audience is a query, not an event: it becomes true because someone types a field, submits a form or an import runs. There is no shared moment to listen for, so it is scanned rather than observed. If you do not want to wait, press "Scan audience now" in the list.
- By hand or through the interface. Enter individual addresses deliberately.
Build the steps. In the expert view: send email, wait, branch. The branch is the heart — it asks, for example, "did they open the email from step 1?" and sends yes and no down different paths. The journey view shows the result as a flow from top to bottom, with visible yes and no columns.
Read the numbers. Every card shows how many got that far, and how many received, opened and clicked the email. Only that makes visible where a journey peters out — the plain step list only shows what is supposed to happen.
Switch it on. The switch sits on the automation, not on the shell: there is exactly one answer to "is the journey running?".
Fields in detail
A journey is a campaign with continuous entry — its header fields live there: name, description, entry mode, entry tag, audience, re-entry term and exit rules. What makes the journey are its steps, and those sit on the automation, not on the campaign.
The journey editor therefore writes exactly two fields of the automation:
| Field | Required | Values / format | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
Step sequence steps | yes | list of steps | The flow. The list submitted replaces the previous one entirely — whoever sent a single step would delete all the others. Every move in the editor (insert, remove, change a wait, set a condition) therefore writes the whole flow back. |
Switched on active | no | yes/no | Whether the journey runs. The switch sits on the automation, not on the shell: there is exactly one answer to "is the journey running?". Before switching on, a checklist shows what is still missing. |
What a step contains
These entries are keys inside steps, not fields of their own:
| Item | Values / format | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Step type | message, wait, condition, action | What happens at this point. Message sends, wait pauses, condition branches, action changes something on the record (set a tag, create a task). |
| Wait | duration or point in time | How long until the next step. A real wait, not a polling loop: the participant stands still until it has passed. |
| Condition | condition tree | What the branch turns on — opened, clicked, purchased, tag set. Both branches continue; there is no silent dead end. |
| Message | subject, template, content | What is sent; edited on a page of its own. Structured like the dispatch. |
| Action | tag, task, data field | What happens in the system. That is how a marketing journey becomes a case in sales rather than just a mail. |
The dry run sends no mail at all: the engine runs through and shows what would have happened.
Not on this page
The journey writes to the same automation that the expert view edits. Its remaining fields are maintained and explained under automations:
| Field | Where it is maintained |
|---|---|
name, description, category, conditions, brandId | Automations — name, description, classification, preconditions, brand |
triggerType, triggerEvent, cronExpression, relativeConfig | Automations — the trigger. For a journey the campaign sets it: the entry tag, or the daily audience sweep. |
Settings & permissions
- Module
module.marketing. marketing.campaign.manage— create, edit, switch journeys on and off.- Sending runs through the same path as campaigns: consent and suppression are checked **per
address**, and a sending provider must be configured.
FAQ & troubleshooting
My journey does nothing. Two causes, in this order: it is switched off, or it has no entry path. The overview shows both in their own columns.
Somebody is in the journey twice. That can only happen if a re-entry period is set and had elapsed. Without a period every address is enrolled exactly once — guaranteed by a database constraint, not by a query that two concurrent runs could both pass.
Unsubscribed — does the journey keep going? No. An unsubscribe, a bounce or a complaint ends waiting runs hard. That is not configurable.
The journey cannot be shown as a flow. Then it contains jumps backwards or targets that do not exist. That is allowed, but not representable as a flow — a picture that is only mostly right would be worse than none when you are tracing a send sequence. The expert view shows it in full.
I changed the audience and nothing happens. The reconciliation runs once a day. "Scan audience now" pulls it forward immediately and reports how many were actually newly enrolled — "0 of 800" is the right answer when everyone is already in.