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Guide to Salesforce Journey Builder (+ An Alternative Tool to Track Touchpoints)
Learn about Salesforce Journey Builder and generate greater visibility over your customer touchpoints and interactions.
Marketers are more determined than ever to gain a holistic view of the customer journey.
The data backs it up. In this study, marketers declared “creating a cohesive customer journey across channels and devices” a top priority and challenge.
Enter Salesforce Journey Builder.
With Journey Builder in Salesforce, marketers can create, automate, and optimise customer journeys to engage customers, build loyalty, and maximise growth.
Keep reading as we unpack the capabilities of Journey Builder in Salesforce and share other customer journey-tracking tools that can help you increase visibility over your sales and marketing effectiveness.
💡 Pro Tip
Salesforce Journey Builder is great for automating customer journeys across channels. However, it doesn’t track the journey before someone becomes a lead, leaving out important early touchpoints. Tools like Ruler Analytics can help fill this gap by tracking anonymous visitors’ interactions from the start. When a lead converts, Ruler sends this data to Salesforce, giving you a full view of the customer journey.
Book a demo to see how it tracks the customer journey, from the initial touchpoint to the final conversion.
Journey Builder is a robust marketing automation tool in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that empowers businesses to create, manage, and optimise personalised customer journeys.
These journeys can encompass a wide range of interactions, from initial contact to post-purchase engagement and beyond.
Journey Builder essentially acts as a visual canvas where you can design and automate multi-step marketing campaigns, delivering relevant content and messages to your customers at precisely the right moments.
Here are some of the benefits of using Salesforce Journey Builder:
💡 Pro Tip
Ruler’s Path Report goes beyond basic website tracking and shows you how visitors find your business and convert. It tracks where visitors come from (social media, ads, etc.), how long it takes them to convert and marketing’s influence on revenue. With this information, you can decide how to spend your marketing budget to drive the best return.
Learn more about Ruler’s Paths Report or book a demo to see the advantages.
Salesforce Journey Builder works by creating a visual representation of a customer journey. This journey can be divided into stages, and each stage can have multiple touchpoints and interactions. Touchpoints can be anything from an email campaign to a social media post to a website visit.
When a customer enters a journey, they are assigned to a specific stage. The next touchpoint that they receive will depend on their location in the journey and their interactions with the brand.
For example, a customer who has just signed up for a newsletter might receive a welcome email. If they then open the email and click on a link, they might be sent to a landing page with more information about the product or service.
There are three types of journeys that you can build in Salesforce Journey Builder:
Multi-step journeys in Salesforce are a type of journey that automates a series of customer interactions over time. These journeys can include multiple channels, such as email, social media, and SMS, and can be customised based on customer interactions or attributes.
Multi-step journeys are a powerful tool for marketers to use to engage with customers and achieve their marketing goals. They can be used to:
A single send journey in Salesforce is a type of journey that automates the sending of a single message to a target audience. It is a simple way to send a marketing email, transactional email, or notification to a group of contacts.
Single send journeys are typically used for sending:
Last up, we have Transactional Send Journey. These journeys are designed to automate the delivery of transactional messages, such as order confirmations or shipping notifications.
Unlike marketing or promotional emails, which aim to engage or persuade, transactional emails are not intended to sell or promote anything.
Journey Builder is a powerful tool for creating and managing customer journeys, but it’s limited in its ability to track customers’ pre-conversion.
Salesforce Journey Builder doesn’t consider the customer journey before a lead is created. This is a fundamental issue because the customer journey begins long before a conversion takes place.
Customers may visit your website multiple times, read your blog posts, and interact with your social media pages before they decide to make a purchase or convert into a lead.
Journey Builder can’t track these touchpoints, which means that you’re missing out on valuable insights about your marketing effectiveness.
However, there is good news. Marketers can use third-party tracking tools to fill in the gaps and gain a more complete understanding of their customers’ journey.
Take Ruler, for example.
Ruler tracks each customer’s journey from the first touchpoint, keeping tabs on details like session sources, page views, UTM tags, click IDs, and cookie data on a first-party basis.
As leads come in from forms, phone calls, or live chat, Ruler captures all that marketing data and sends it directly to your CRM and marketing tools, giving you a fuller picture of your leads and where they came from.
Once a lead converts to a customer, the revenue data flows back to Ruler.
This makes it easy to see which sources, campaigns, or keywords are driving results, so you can clearly measure your marketing impact on pipeline and revenue.
Plus, Ruler has impression modelling in addition to multi-touch attribution.
This helps capture those harder-to-track interactions, like ad views on Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, so you can get insight into customer behaviour from the top of the funnel down—not just from their clicks.
We’ve got a full guide on impression modelling if you want to dive in.
It shows how this approach can give you insight into your upper funnel efforts and how they influence the user journey and lead to conversions across channels like brand and direct search.
There you have it, our guide on Salesforce Journey Builder.
If you are looking for a tool to automate your marketing campaigns and track customer engagement across multiple channels, Salesforce Journey Builder is a great choice.
However, if you’re after a tool that can help you measure touchpoints pre-conversion, then you may want to consider a tool like Ruler.
It tracks anonymous visitors to your website using first-party data and builds a profile of their touchpoints and interactions over subsequent visits.
Whenever a lead converts, Ruler sends this data to Salesforce, giving you a more holistic view of the customer journey.
And, with its impression modelling, you get extra insight into what’s happening in the upper funnel and how it drives conversions further down.
Learn more about how Ruler Analytics enriches Salesforce with attribution and marketing touchpoint data by downloading our eBook. Or, book a demo to see Ruler in action.
