Post Registration Journey template (automatically communicate with newly registered participants)

What you’ll learn in this article:

• What a Journey template is
• How to automatically communicate with newly registered participants in Marketing Cloud 
• What you need to set up this Journey
• Additional ways to personalize your Journey, such as using an engagement split
• How to best resource the Race Roster for support 

What is a Journey template?

Like an email template, a Journey template is a great starting point in Journey Builder. A Journey template provides a foundation for the logic, data and communications that you will need to personalize for your organization, events and goals. A predefined Journey can be used as-is or modified further to meet your needs. 

How to find and use Journey templates in Marketing Cloud

To find Journey templates, navigate to Journey Builder and click the 'Templates' tab. Then on the right hand side beside ‘Salesforce Templates’ click on ‘My Templates’ to access the Race Roster Endurance Industry specific Journey templates. 

This is where we will find the Post Registration Journey template that we’ll be reviewing today.

What will this Journey template allow you to do?

The purpose of the Post Registration Journey template is to communicate with participants directly after they register for a specific event or sub event. Efficiently provide event details, virtual race instructions, or next step call-to-action communications to your participants in an automated fashion, after they register.

The Post Registration template is set up to push new contacts into the Journey at recurring intervals. This will allow new participants to enter the Journey as they register over a longer period of time. This can be personalized to the registration window for your event.

Considerations to personalize your Post Registration Journey:

Below are the things you’ll need to consider to set up this Journey template. The following 3 questions will help the Race Roster Team to assist you in the setup of your Journey, or to review that all elements are configured properly.

1. What audience are you wanting to include in your Post Registration Journey?

Here are some possible options:

• All participants for an event (EID)
• All participants for a specific sub event within an EID

Note: Please resource the Race Roster Team to assist in setting up this entry source data extension for your Journey, as it is essential that the data is automatically refreshing, in order to target newly registered participants.

Note: That it is not recommended to include multiple combinations of events and/or sub events within one Post Registration Journey due to the use case of one contact registering for multiple events and/or sub events. In this use case, the Journey will not know which event or sub event to resource.

2. At what schedule would you like your Journey to add new participants into the Journey? (Hint: the recurring time participants will be sent your email communication)
Here are some possible options:

• Daily at 12pm
• Every 12 hours, such as 8am and 8pm, daily

3. Are you planning on sending any sort of custom content in your emails?
Here are some possible options:

• Dynamic content
• Referral URL
• Referral Promo Code

If yes, some additional setup is required. Not to worry, the Race Roster Team will supply additional resources.

Once the above questions are examined, you’ll want to create your post registration email communication(s) in Email Studio. Did you know there are pre-built templates that you can customize and use in your email send? Watch this short video to see where you can access them.

Lastly, you need to set up your automated Post Registration Journey in Journey Builder. Watch this short video tutorial to see how to complete the process and get ready to welcome your participants to your event or sub event!

Level up with these additional considerations

Depending on the goals for your organization or event, you may have some additional things that you want to consider in your Post Registration Journey. Read on below for some common ideas to level up.

Perhaps you want to send additional emails to your newly registered participants. Don’t just send one email, but send multiple emails with a wait period of time between each send.

Perhaps you want to utilize an engagement split to see who opened or clicked your email. Use this as an opportunity to resend the email with a more engaging subject line to those who didn’t open the first iteration of your email.

Perhaps you want to segment your newly registered audience into different paths within the Journey to send more personalized emails. Utilize a decision split to do so. Be aware that configuring a decision split will require some admin support from Race Roster.

Note: It is not recommended to divide your Journey into different paths for each sub event within one Post Registration Journey due to the use case of one contact registering for multiple sub events at one time (with bundle functionality). In this use case, the Journey will not know which path the participant should flow down.

Perhaps you want to make changes or iterations to the flow or content of your Journey mid-way through your active Journey. To do so, launch a new version of your Journey. For example, you’ve set up 2 emails to go out and decide that after a certain date you only want the first email to be sent in your Journey. The solution here is to create another version of your Journey - so when new participants enter the second version of your Journey after a specific date, they will only receive the first email. This works well in cases where a promotion is only active for a certain period of time.

Note: That Journey versions are useful to revise a running Journey without interrupting the current population in the active Journey. Additionally, use versions for testing or optimizing a Journey over time.

How to best utilize the Race Roster Team for Support 

Journey Builder is a sophisticated tool and we want to ensure you’re comfortable using it to its full capacity. In addition to utilizing our Endurance Industry specific Journey templates, the written guides, and video tutorials, you may still want to resource Race Roster. Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you have any questions while working with Journey Builder.

Learn more about the Journey Builder tool with tutorial videos here.