Salesforce Journey Builder
Salesforce Journey Builder is a feature of the company's Marketing Cloud that manages the customer life cycle: the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using and maintaining loyalty to a brand.
Salesforce conceptualizes the progression of interactions as a journey through customer relationship stages including reach, acquisition, conversion, retention and loyalty. Journey Builder is designed to allow marketers to customize interactions through those stages based on customer needs, desires and preferences, their demographics and real-time input from their behavior.
Journey Builder uses Event-driven triggers to respond to customers or prospective customers appropriately. Events can include anything relevant that the customer does: Downloading an app or a product fact sheet, abandoning a shopping cart, joining a loyalty program or triggering a beacon in a physical location. The software accesses information about the customer to guide the responses; those events and the responses to them are all part of the customer journey, which becomes longer and more detailed with every interaction. Triggers can automatically update the customer's contact data and establish "decision splits" to enable the appropriate action to take in real-time, based on the customer's behavior.
Journey Builder is also integrated with Salesforce's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to make the customer's experience seamless and ensure that information from any of the systems is shared with the others. That information sharing helps to ensure that responses to a customer's current situation are appropriate and efforts are not duplicated.
The approach behind Journey Builder is sometimes referred to as one-to-one marketing (1:1 marketing), a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy emphasizing personalized interactions with customers, which are thought to foster greater customer loyalty and better return on marketing investment. The automation of Journey Builder makes it easier to develop that personalized relationship for a large customer base.