A journey recipe is a ready-made journey template plus the setup, changes and measurement that make it work for your business. Each template fills in the trigger, waits, decisions and emails, so you start from a working draft rather than a blank canvas. For how triggers, steps and exit rules behave, see How journeys work.
Start from a template
- Go to Journeys and choose New journey.
- On Choose where to start, find the template under Start from a template. Each card shows what starts it, its steps in order and, under Not sent yet, any event your workspace hasn’t sent so far.
- Select the card. The journey opens in the builder as an unsaved draft.
- Add a sender to each email, give every button its real link, and change anything you like. Then save it.
Nothing is saved or turned on until you choose to. To turn it on, follow Build a journey.
Templates are written with the standard event names, then use your own. If your key events say a purchase is Booking Completed rather than Order Completed, or checkout starts with your own event, the template reads yours.
Every template
| Template | What it does | What it needs | Recipe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome series | Three emails over a week for someone new from a signup form | A signup form | Welcome series |
| Form follow-up | A personal note the day after someone sends a form, at most once a month each | A contact, demo or download form | Pick the form in the trigger |
| Abandoned checkout | Two reminders, 4 hours and a day after checkout starts without an order | Checkout Started and your purchase event | Abandoned cart and checkout |
| Abandoned cart | One reminder 4 hours after a product goes into the cart | Product Added, Checkout Started and your purchase event | Abandoned cart and checkout |
| Browse abandonment | The product again an hour after someone looks at it | Product Viewed, Product Added, Checkout Started and your purchase event | Abandoned cart and checkout |
| Review request | A review request 14 days after an order | Your purchase event; refunds and cancellations end it | Change the wait to suit your delivery times |
| Post-purchase cross-sell | Best sellers a month after an order | Your purchase event; refunds and cancellations end it | Change the wait to suit how often people buy |
| Win-back | A note 90 days after a customer’s last purchase, and another two weeks later | Your purchase event | Win-back |
| Re-engagement | Asks quiet contacts whether they still want your emails, then sends a last email a week later | A segment of quiet contacts, such as the segment template Not engaged in 90 days | See below |
| Birthday | A note at 9:00 on each contact’s birthday, every year | A birthday date attribute |
Birthday |
| Trial ending | Reminders a week before and the day before a free trial ends | A trial_ends_at date attribute and your purchase event |
Trial ending |
The dashboard groups them under New contacts, Shopping, Existing customers, Engagement and Dates.
What each kind of data needs
- Forms work on every plan. See Create a signup form.
- Date attributes, such as
birthdayortrial_ends_at, work on every plan. They arrive by import, form, by hand or from your app. See Attributes. - Events such as Product Viewed, Checkout Started or a purchase come from your website or app, or from a connected payment provider. Tracking your own events is on every plan, within its monthly allowance; connecting Stripe is available on Starter and above. See E-commerce events and Connect an integration.
A template whose events you don’t send yet still opens, but it can’t start or end anyone’s run until those events arrive.
Measure a recipe
Judge every recipe by what people do, not by opens: some mail apps open email automatically, so an open doesn’t show that anyone read it.
- Clicks per email: the Steps table and Email outcomes by step on the journey’s Performance tab. See Journey results.
- Conversions and revenue: add a conversion goal on your purchase event, or the action you want. Available on Starter and above.
- Lift: put a Random split at the start with one path left empty as a holdout, then compare each path’s conversion rate. See Random split and holdout.
Re-engagement
The Re-engagement template starts when a contact enters a segment you choose. It asks Do you still want to hear from us?, waits 7 days, then uses a Contact filter that passes only people who neither opened nor clicked that first email. They get Our last email, unless you say otherwise; everyone else’s run ends. Contacts can enter again after 180 days.
Choose the segment under Segment before you turn it on. Once it has run, leave that segment out of your campaigns.
Because some mail apps open email automatically, a contact who never reads your email can count as opened and get no last email. Measure it by clicks and later conversions, not opens.