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Introduction to Journeys

Welcome to Journeys—Customer.io’s messaging interface! The pages in this Getting Started section aim to introduce you to our platform. This page introduces the core concepts involved in working with Customer.io. The following pages dive deeper into each concept.

Journeys incorporates data from your customer touchpoints, helping you customize campaigns and send sophisticated, personalized messages that support and engage your audience.

How it all works

The image below illustrates what a well-rounded integration with Journeys looks like.

1. Your Product sends Real-time Data to Data Pipelines.
2. We’ll associate your real-time data with People and Objects. People are your leads, users, customers, etc that you want to send messages to. Objects are things that are important to your users, like an account they belong to.
3. Next, you Activate your data: populate Segments and build powerful campaigns that send personalized Messages to your audience.

When you’re fully set up, data will flow into Customer.io, triggering campaigns and messages, helping you automate customer communications!

People

In Journeys, everything revolves around people. In Customer.io, you represent a person with data:

• the things you know about them (attributesA key-value pair that you associate with a person or an object—like a person’s name, the date they were created in your workspace, or a company’s billing date etc. Use attributes to target people and personalize messages. Attributes are analogous to traits in Data Pipelines.)
• the things they do (eventsSomething that a person in your workspace did. Events can trigger campaigns, add people to segments, etc. You can access event properties in liquid with {{event.<property>}})
• the things they’re related to (objectAn object is a non-person entity that you can associate with one or more people—like a company, account, or online course. relationships)
• the campaigns they’re in and the messages they’ve received

You’ll find people and their associated data on the People page.

Objects

Objects are the things that are important to your people, like an account they belong to, online courses they enroll in, or homes they’re interested in purchasing. A change to an object and people’s relationships to objects can trigger campaigns. You’ll find objects under People on the left-hand menu.

Learn more about setting up objects here: Objects: how they work.

Segments

Segments are groups of people who match the same criteria. A segment can trigger campaigns, define recipient lists, represent conversion criteria, and more. To help you get started, we’ve pre-configured a few segments for you. If you go to the Segments page, you’ll see segments like “Paying Customers”, “Have not logged in recently” and “Unsubscribed”. Be sure to check those out!

Learn more about segmenting your users here: Getting Started: Segments

Campaigns, Broadcasts, and Transactional Messages

Campaigns and Broadcasts send email, SMS, push, and in-app messages to your people. But, beyond that, your campaign and broadcast workflows can send Slack messages, webhooks, update attributesA key-value pair that you associate with a person or an object—like a person’s name, the date they were created in your workspace, or a company’s billing date etc. Use attributes to target people and personalize messages. Attributes are analogous to traits in Data Pipelines., and more.

Transactional messages are emails that you send in response to your audience’s actions in your app.

Campaigns are the quintessential messaging automation workflow. They help you send one or more messages in a workflow sequence to people when they meet your trigger condition(s). You can trigger campaigns when people perform events, when they join Segments (e.g. they meet attribute conditions), and so on.

Campaigns are ideal for dripping content to people as they become eligible to receive it.

• Welcome and onboarding series
• Re-engagement series
• Behavioral messages (respond to actions people take in your app or on your website)

Broadcasts send a message to a list of recipients. Broadcast messages are queued to send to all the defined recipients at a time you specify.

Broadcasts are ideal for manually sending newsletters or programmatically triggering announcements in bulk, like:

• Newsletter messages
• Pre-scheduled announcements
• Promotions
• Periodic release notes
• Community alerts
• Event change notifications
• Product launches

Transactional messages help you respond directly to your audience’s actions in your app. Unlike broadcasts and campaigns, transactional messages are one-to-one interactions. Transactional messages are ideal for:

• Purchase receipts
• Registration confirmations
• Password resets
• Event reminders
• Shipping updates

Learn more about Campaigns and Broadcasts or Transactional Messages.

Integrations

Once you grasp the basics of Customer.io, you’ll want to plan your integration. With Data Pipelines, it’s easy to decide what data to send as well as how and when to send it. Data Pipelines also makes it easy to retrieve data from Customer.io.

And don’t worry - you can also use your preferred tools and sources to transit data through Customer.io. It’s up to you!