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Journey builder

The journey builder is the canvas where you design an automation: a set of steps laid out in order, connected by lines, that runs automatically for your contacts. You open it from any automation that's still a draft, and it stays available afterward so you can keep refining a journey once it's live.

Steps

  1. Open the canvas. From the Automations list, open a draft automation (or create a new one) to land directly on its canvas.
  2. Add steps from the palette. A rail along the side of the canvas holds every available step, grouped into a few categories:
    • Entry — how the journey starts (a contact action, a schedule, a manual trigger, an incoming request, or a whole segment at once).
    • Actions — things the journey does, like sending a message, updating a contact's details, or adding a tag.
    • Branch — points where contacts split down different paths based on a condition, an A/B split, or how they've engaged.
    • Timing — waits, delays until a specific time, and restricting sends to certain windows.
    • AI — steps that let the assistant make a decision or write a message on the fly for each contact.
    • Control — exiting, jumping to another step, or ending the journey, including a step that pauses for a human approval. Each of these is covered in more detail in its own guide — see Triggers, Actions, and Branching and timing.
  3. Place a step on the canvas. Drag a step from the palette onto the canvas, or click it to drop it in.
  4. Connect steps with lines. Draw a line from one step to the next to set the order contacts move through the journey. Some steps have more than one line out — a branch step, for example, has a separate line for each path a contact might take.
  5. Configure a step. Click any step on the canvas to open its settings in a panel alongside the canvas, where you fill in the details specific to that step — what to send, how long to wait, what condition to check, and so on.
  6. Let your changes save. Everything you do on the canvas saves automatically as you go, so you don't need a separate save action while you're working.
  7. Publish when ready. Publishing is a separate, explicit step that makes the journey live for contacts. You'll be asked to confirm, and the journey starts running as soon as you do — nothing you build on the canvas affects real contacts until that point.

Stopping a journey early

Some journeys need to stop for a contact partway through — most often "if they book a meeting, they should get no more emails from this sequence."

That is a journey-level setting, not a step. In the panel on the right of the canvas, set an Exit condition: when a contact matches it, they leave the journey wherever they currently are, including while waiting between emails. Use the Goal field for the conversion you're driving toward, and the exit condition for "they're no longer the right audience for this."

Do not try to build this as a second trigger that leads to its own exit step. A trigger's job is to bring contacts into a journey, so it can't interrupt a run already in progress, and a journey where some steps aren't connected to the rest can't be published. If you describe the behavior to the AI assistant in plain language ("stop emailing them once they book"), it sets the exit condition for you.

Tips

  • If a journey has run before, you can switch between its saved versions from a control near the top of the canvas to see what changed and when.
  • Use the search box at the top of the step palette to jump straight to a step by name instead of scrolling through every category.
  • Zoom out or use the canvas's auto-tidy behavior if a journey's layout gets hard to follow as it grows.

Where the AI assistant fits in

Next to the palette is a second tab for the AI assistant. Switch to it and describe what you want your journey to do in plain language — for example, "add a text reminder two days before the event, but only for contacts who haven't RSVP'd." The assistant proposes the steps and connections needed to do that, and you review the proposal before applying it to the canvas; you can also discard a proposal if it's not what you wanted. This is the same kind of AI session available elsewhere in the app — see Using AI sessions for how these conversations work in general.

Example prompts

A journey is easiest to describe as a trigger, then the steps in order, with the timing between them. You can also ask for a whole journey from scratch, not just an addition to one.

Trigger plus a single step

  • "create a journey that triggers on web form submit and sends an email auto responder"
  • "create a journey that triggers on contact update of the email field and sends a notification saying 'contact email was updated'"

Sequences with timing

  • "create a journey that triggers on form submit and starts a 3-email sequence with 2-day intervals"
  • "create a journey that triggers on form submit, sends an auto responder email, waits 5 days, then sends an SMS reminder"
  • "create a journey that will nurture a prospect for 8 weeks, sending 1 email per week. The journey starts with a segment."

Branching

  • "create a journey that branches on whether the contact has the tag 'webinar-attended': attendees get the recording plus a booking link, no-shows get the recording plus an on-demand invite"

Naming the exact pieces

  • "Build a journey: entry trigger = contact enters @[Segment name]; then one step that sends @[Template name]. Keep it minimal."

@[Name] stands for an @-mention — type @ to pick the real segment or template. Naming them explicitly is worth it: the assistant wires the step straight to that record instead of leaving it for you to fill in. See Pointing at your own data.

FAQ

Q: Do I have to connect every step manually, or can the assistant do it for me? A: Either works. You can draw every connection yourself, or describe the journey to the assistant and apply the steps and connections it proposes, then adjust anything by hand afterward.

Q: What happens if I close the canvas without publishing? A: Your changes are already saved as a draft, since the canvas saves automatically as you work. The journey simply won't affect any contacts until you come back and publish it.

Q: Can I go back and edit a journey after it's live? A: Yes. Reopen it from the Automations list and keep editing the canvas the same way; publishing again applies your changes. See the overview's FAQ on what happens to contacts already partway through a journey when you do this.