8 Ways To Use Standard Event Based Triggers In Your Realtime Journeys

There are three out of the box standard triggers that relate to Events in Customer Insights Journeys (D365 Marketing). One for an Event Registration Created, one for Event Registration Cancelled and one for an Event Check-In. When building your Journeys to cover an Event, all three can be used in a combination of ways and in different places. This post will walk through when they can be used to enter or exit a journey, on if/then branches, set wait time frames or to create custom goals. Let’s take a look!

1.Event Registration Created – If/Then Branch

First let’s consider a Journey run to your existing customers who are Contacts in a Segment. You send out an email but then you want to send a reminder a few weeks later to anyone who hasn’t registered. After the first email you can add in the step of ‘respond to an action’ which creates an if/then branch.

On the if then branch, do it based on a trigger being activated and search for the Marketing Event Registration Created trigger. The time limit can be set to 14 days to give someone time to register. Based on the branching logic above, if the trigger doesn’t fire that means they didn’t register so we can send them a reminder in 14 days.

However, what if you have more than one webinar you are running at once? We only want to trigger this if they register for the same event. To do this, click on the Add condition option below where you set the trigger on the branch condition above. Then click on the Marketing Event Reference relationship.

Then click on the very top item that shows in blue to condition on the Marketing Event Reference.

When we do this, the lookup option shows so you can set the specific Event without needing to mess about finding the ID of the Event or anything else. Brilliant! So now, if someone registers for the Event that we emailed our customers about and they do it within 14 days of getting the first email, we won’t email them a reminder, otherwise the customer will get a second email about the event.

2. Event Registration Created – Journey Trigger

This is the simplest and most common use for a trigger, as the starting point of a Journey. In this example, we can have someone go through our Event Registration Journey if an Event Registration record is created. If we leave the Marketing Event Reference empty, the journey would run for every single Event Registration record created rather than a specific Journey such as the Example RTM Event set below. Simple!

3. Event Registration Created – Custom Goal

We can also use triggers to create custom goals on a Journey. So consider setting a goal for your initial Journey where you send an invitation to your current customers for your upcoming webinar, say 20 or 30% of those people registering. Click on the Goal icon from the right side of the Journey to get started.

Select custom goal from the first dropdown. In the second one, it’s not so obvious, but click in the space at the bottom and type in the name of your goal, then click the plus button next to it.

Now we can pick the Marketing Event Registration Created trigger to say that the goal is met when this trigger is fired for a Contact going through the Journey. You can then set the percentage or number of people that are needed to meet the goal. You will then see how far the journey is along in meeting the goal and can view under the Analytics section when looking at Journey reports.

4. Event Registration Cancelled – Exit Trigger

Another option for triggers is to use them as alternate exists. The default exit for a Contact going through an Event related Journey would be for them to get through all of the steps laid out. However, we can also make them exit the Journey if a trigger occurs.

In this example on a Journey that is running after someone registers for an Event, we can exit them if the Marketing Event Registration Cancelled trigger is fired, and use the Marketing Event Reference relationship in the condition to set it to be specific for the same Event being used for the Journey. That way if someone cancels their registration, the Contact will no longer get any of the additional emails from the Journey.

5. Event Registration Check-in – If/Then Branch

In this scenario we can add to the end of a Journey that is triggered when someone registers. We can wait until an Event Check-in record is created, then send a follow up email after the event has finished to say thank you to them for attending!

On the top of the if/then branch, select the option to branch based on a trigger being activated, then pick the trigger of Marketing Event Check-in. You can then add in the condition using the Marketing Event Reference at the top level to use a lookup to find the same Event! Set the time limit for long you want to give the Contact to check-in. So if it’s an all day event, maybe you give them a day or 8 hours, vs maybe you give an hour or 2 for an online webinar.

6. Event Registration Check-in – Custom Goal

Similar to the Custom Goal for if someone registered for the event, we can add a custom goal to a Journey that is for the entire Event that triggers when someone registers. Our goal could be that 70% of the people who registered actually Check-in for the Event. We can add the custom goal, give it a name, then use the Marketing Event Check-in and set the percentage to be met to achieve our overall goal.

7. Event Triggers – Branch On Attributes

In this last example, we can add in a branch based on a specific value. Using the Event Start Date we can determine if the Event Start Date is tomorrow, then send an email if it is.

We can rename the top level of the branch to indicate the purpose, then rename each branch (or the one branch in my example), then decide what to do on each branch.

For the branch of ‘Event Is Tomorrow’ the condition is on an attribute, but we can pick that attribute from the trigger itself. Here we can see the Marketing Event Registration Created trigger is used to then go through to the Marketing Event Reference relationship and select the Event Start Date and see if it is Tomorrow.

8. Event Triggers – Wait Times

If you scroll back up to example 5 above, I have a wait time added in after an Event Check-in trigger is fired. This is an example of how you can use it. We may want to send a follow up thank you email to people who attended the event and therefore had a check-in, BUT we don’t want to send them that thank you until AFTER the event has finished. So let’s use a trigger to set how long to wait until the email goes out.

On the wait time, use the option for ‘until a time specified by a trigger’. From there, pick the Marketing event registration created trigger, then go through the Marketing Event Reference, and then pick the Event end date. From there, we can set that people will move on to the next step (the one where they are sent an email) 1 hour AFTER the Event end date. Perfect!

Any other suggestions?

Am I missing anything? Are you using the Event related triggers in any other way? I would love to hear about it in the comments below!