Journey Builder setup guide

In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up the Journey Builder. We’ll walk you through the entire process. If you need any help, feel free to contact our Support Team, we're here for you.

What is Journey Builder?

Journey Builder is designed to allow marketers to customize interactions with their customers based on their needs, desires and preferences, demographics, and real-time input from their behavior.

Journey Builder uses event-driven triggers to respond to customers or prospective customers appropriately.

MessageBird's version of Journey Builder can be downloaded from the AppExchange. In this version, Journey Builder is enhanced with MessageBird's WhatsApp, SMS, and Viber channels — more channels are coming soon!

Create a new journey

Go to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud navigation page, hit Journey Builder from the top bar, and choose Journey Builder from the drop-down menu
Click on the Create New Journey button at the top-right of your screen, choose a MultiStep Journey, and click Build
Let’s start with choosing the entry source. Some customers use their data extensions, while others connect their Service or Sales cloud as an entry source. A data extension is a table that contains your data. If you need additional help with how to use the entry source in Journey Builder, check out this Salesforce guide.
In the activities section, you’ll see four channel icons:
- MB - WhatsApp Send: used for sending WA messages in the journey
- MB - SMS Send: used for sending SMS messages in the journey
- MB - Line Send: used for sending Line messages in the journey
- MB - Viber Send: used for sending Viber messages in the journey

Set up WhatsApp on Journey Builder

Step One: Configure MB - WhatsApp Send

Click on the MB - WhatApp Send icon on the left and drag and drop it in the journey. The following window will pop-up:
Choose a Channel — at the moment, you can choose only WhatsApp, but we will be adding more channels soon — a Template and Language. Your WhatsApp Templates are automatically synced with your MessageBird Dashboard
For the Recipient, choose the field from your Data Extension (or another entry source) that contains the phone numbers you want to send the message to. Keep in mind that the field for the phone number in your Data Extension (Entry Source) should be named exactly as in the screenshot – PhoneNumber. When you are creating a DataExtension, for the PhoneNumber field put Phone as a DataType
Time for setting variables for your WhatsApp Template – again pulled from the entry source
In the Default Value field, you should put the variable value that you want to use, in case your chosen field from the entry source is empty. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to confirm the settings and see the overview of the message

Step two: Use the WhatsApp Split Step

Use the WhatsApp Split step to set the next steps in your journey based on the status of the WhatsApp message. The possible statuses are: Delivered, Read, Received, Sent, Failed, Rejected, and Deleted.
And that’s it! After you have set the journey, click on Activate.

Set up SMS on Journey Builder

Step One: Configure MB - SMS Send

Click on the MB - SMS Send icon on the left and drag and drop it in the journey. The following window will pop-up:
Select the Originator and set the variables accordingly
Choose the fields from the Data extension that you want to use in the message and enter them in the Custom Text section. For example, {{Firstname}}
In the Message field, enter the body of the SMS message. Keep in mind that if you use a standard GSM 03.38 character set, single text messages are limited to 160 characters, including spaces. Using unicode for such languages as Russian, Arabic, or Chinese will restrict your message to a maximum of 70 characters per SMS

* Please note that some countries and carriers have special rules and regulations related to the SMS Originators.

Step two: Use the SMS Split Step

Use the SMS Split step to set the next steps in your journey based on the status of the SMS message. The possible statuses are: Delivered, Sent, Expired, and Delivery Failed
And that’s it! After you have set the journey, click on Activate

Set up Line on Journey Builder

Step One: Configure MB - Line Send

Click on the MB - Line Send icon on the left and drag and drop it in the journey. The following window will pop-up:
Choose the Line channel from the Channel drop-down menu
In the Message field, enter the text of your message. Using {{ParameterNumber}} you can customize the message to be sent by using values extracted directly from the Data Extension
Choose LineID from the Recipient drop-down menu. You will need to know the user's Line ID to send them a message (the Line ID is not the telephone number). The Line ID needs to be present in one of the columns of the data extension, the name of the column being configurable in the MessageBird integration settings. To get a customer's ID, the user must first engage with your company account, usually either via a QR code or a deep link

Step two: Use the Line Split Step

Use the Line Split step to set the next steps in your journey based on the status of the Line message
That's it! You're done!

Set up Viber on Journey Builder

Step One: Configure MB - Viber Send

Click on the MB - Viber Send icon on the left and drag and drop it in the journey. The following window will pop-up:
Choose the Viber channel from the Channel drop-down menu
In the Message field, enter the text of your message. Using {{ParameterNumber}} you can customize the message to be sent by using values extracted directly from the Data Extension. Currently you can only send Text and emojis via the Send step

Step two: Use the Viber Split Step

Use the Viber Split step to set the next steps in your journey based on the status of the Line message
Insert a wait period between the Send and Split event to allow for the message status to update
That's it! You're done!

NOTE: Due to how Viber works, your number will be approved to send messages in particular countries - so if your customers don't receive the message, check that your Viber account can send numbers to that particular country

Dealing with Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Protecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is a topic that is bound to come up in larger deployments, where multiple geographies and multiple legal requirements are involved.

One way of addressing data separation inside Salesforce Marketing Cloud is by creating PII and non-PII data extensions (DE), with only the non-PII DE being accessible inside the business unit

Example setup:

We separate PII DEs and Non-PII DEs for all journeys.
PII DEs are shared data extensions in the Parent BU that only limited users can access - in general, it contains ID, First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Mobile Number.
Non-PII DEs generally contain ID and profile/activity fields only.
For journey entry source, we use the journey's Non-PII DE
Target contacts: For email, we can send based on mapping the ID to the Subscriber Key and sending it to the email address.
Personalization: Typically in our emails, we use AMPscript to display the First Name from PII DE and hirer data from multiple tables (not necessarily only from the Entry DE)

Since we cannot use AMPscript, we must provide the same result, through a different mechanism.

LinkedEntities

Via the LinkedEntities feature you can now use non-PII data extensions as data input for your journeys and connect to PII data extensions at runtime via a naming convention.

How to configure LinkedEntities

Ingredients

• Non-PII Data Extension • PII Data Extension • Attribute Group • (MB Journey Builder updated packages)

The following steps are a prerequisite and are important in order to ensure the correct performance of the Contact Builder Integration.

Create the data connections

For both DEs (non-PII DE and PII DE), make them sendable and ensure they have the same primary key (columnName). In our case, it was contactKey1.1. Make them sendable and create a relationship between contact key field to the subscriber on Subscriber Key. Make sure they contain the primary key (contactKey) related to Subscriber Key in order for the relation to work
Go to Data Designer in Contact Builder. Create an Attribute Group, select the PII-DE, and connect Contact's ContactKey to the contact key field.

How to use LinkedEntities

Inside the selector for the field to read the value from, a new option will be available, {{LinkedEntity}}. This will allow you to specify from which connected entity to read up the PII information. This applies to both the Recipient field as any of the parameter fields.

In order for the system to find the value, make sure that you write the DE and field name correctly. The convention is the use {{DataEntityName.ColumnName}}