First Look: Completely redesigned customer journey canvas

Creating sophisticated, multistep campaigns can feel intimidating and time-consuming.

With the September 2020 release of Dynamics 365 Marketing, the customer journey canvas has been completely redesigned.

An enhanced UI, improved preview capabilities, a new view of journey insights, and more options to adjust the canvas view result in a more intuitive and efficient user experience

New capabilities

• Complete redesign of the canvas, making the experience of building customer journeys more intuitive. You no longer need to switch back and forth between the canvas and the toolbox while dragging elements onto the canvas. Now, you can build the whole journey directly on the canvas, using an in-place journey menu.
• Customize the canvas to your preferences with horizontal and vertical layout options.
• Improved visual journey insights
• (and more)

Example

In the below example I’ll walk you through the new experience – building a customer journey that

• Sends an email to contacts in a segment, with an invitation to visit a landing page
• Sends two follow up emails, based on recipient behavior

(the components – segment, emails, and landing page – have all been prepared in advance)

Step #1 –

Navigate to Customer Journeys in the sitemap and create a new journey, eg based on the template Simple email journey

This will present you for the the new design. Gone is the toolbox from where you had to drag tiles on to the canvas. You can now build the journey directly in the canvas

Click Set audience (1) to select a segment

Step #2 –

Click Choose an email (1) to choose an email

Having chosen the email, you will be presented with a nice preview of your email (1). The email contains a button that takes the recipient to a landing page.

In the previous design, you’d have to drag a landing page tile on to the email tile in order for triggers and more to fire.

In the new design you must scroll down to the Dependencies section (1) of the task pane, click Add Item (2), and point to the landing page (3)

Step #3 –

To add a trigger click the plus sign (1) below the email symbol to display a list of layout elements

In the list of layout elements select the If/then element (1) to insert the trigger

Click the trigger (1) to display the properties pane and define the trigger

In the properties pane select the landing page the source (1)

Select has been visited as the action, and e.g. 1 hour as the trigger for the Wait up to (until the contact is taken down the False path)

Step #4 –

Select the remaining mails (the one to send if a contact visits the page, and the one to send if a contact hasn’t visited the page after an hour)

Step #5 –

Go to the General page, name the journey, define start/end times, and go live

If you prefer to see you layout in a horizontal view instead of the vertical, simply click the new buttom in the top right corner (1)

The layout is switched

A contact receives the first email, and clicks the button to visit the landing page

The contact submits the landing page

The contact is taken down the True path of the journey and receives the follow-up email.

The tiles in the customer journey now displays the statistics of the journey

As always you can click a tile to see additional statistics.

Enjoy the new intuitive and efficient user experience

See also

• Build customer journeys more efficiently using the new canvas experience – link