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Create an SMS Activity in Journey Builder

Use the SMS activity to power Journey Builder SMS sends to Marketing Cloud Engagement contacts in a journey.

To send an SMS from a journey, the normalized phone number (country code + phone number with no dashes or parentheses) is required in your data extension. The Locale field isn’t required to send an SMS from Journey Builder. The field type must be Phone.

• In Journey Builder, drag the SMS activity to the canvas.
• Click the SMS activity.
• Click New Message .
• To find hidden non-GSM characters like unicode straight quotes that can be included when pasting text from another source, select Highlight Non-GSM .

• To shorten a URL, click Shorten URL , paste your URL, and click Apply . If you use Google UTM parameters to track links, UTM parameters are applied when you shorten a URL.
• Preview the code type, if applicable.
• Click Save .
• If applicable, name your activity. Otherwise, your content name serves as your Activity Name and is visible in all reports.
• Click Message Configuration .
• Select the code you’re sending the message from.
• To acknowledge that you allow your customers to opt out, read and agree to the Opt-Out Availability Policy.
• If you choose to subscribe all contacts to a keyword, confirm subscriber opt-in. If users are already unsubscribed from a keyword, this action doesn’t resubscribe them.
• Set a send blockout window , if applicable.
• Click Advanced Options to review your Next Keyword, if applicable.
• Click Summary .
• For a subscriber-level preview for your message, click Subscriber Preview .
• Preview Mobile Subscriber Details
• Create an SMS Message in Content Builder

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What is Journey Builder?

Salesforce Journey Builder lets you better understand your customers, trigger activities based on their unique actions and align your messaging across channels.

Salesforce India

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With inputs from Sumit Sharma, Lead Solution Engineer

As today’s digital-savvy customers move between platforms and devices, brands mustoffer a personalised and enjoyable customer journey across channels to maximise client lifetime value. However, there are some questions you need to ask yourself to deliver cross-channel personalised experiences:

• Who is the customer?
• Where are they in their journey?
• Are you engaging with them meaningfully to build 1-to-1 relationships?

To answer these questions, you need an in-depth view of the customer journey, and must act on the changing demands of the customers.With the help of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder , you can get a unified view of all the interactions a customer has with your brand, and optimise end-to-end customer journeys.

What is a Journey Builder?

Salesforce Journey Builder gives you visibility into consumer interactions across all of your marketing channels, including email, mobile, social ads, and more. By connecting these different actions or conversations, you canunderstand the customer better, improve message building, design and automate campaigns, provide a seamless customer experience,and secure customer loyalty. In short, you candesign more effective customer journeys by tailoring interactions through the customer life cycle.

The different interactions that a customer can have with the brand at any point in the customer journey include:

• Clicking on an ad
• Opening an email
• Buying a product or availing of a service
• Returning a previously purchased product
• Conversing with a customer care representative
• Downloading a white paper
• Redeeming a coupon

How does Journey Builder work?

Journey Builder uses event-driven triggers to help you meaningfully react to prospects or customers. Events can be anything the customer does that is relevant, such as downloading an app or a product fact sheet, leaving a shopping cart unattended, enrolling in a loyalty programme, or activating a beacon in a physical location. These events and their reactions to them are all part of the customer journey, which grows longer and more detailed with each encounter. By accessing information about the consumer and their behaviour, the solution enables the right action to be taken in real-time.

Journey Builder includes handy features such as:

• Easy-to-use drag and drop interface
• Entry and filter criteriato help you move through steps quickly
• A variety of powerful add-ons, such as lead scoring for Salesforce Marketing Cloud by SalesWings or Litmus to assure email compatibility.

Want to see Journey Builder in action?

How does Journey Builder help you create a smooth customer experience?

1. guiding the customer journey.

Use valuable data from any source, including customer behavioural traits, browsing patterns, and purchase history, to create personalised messaging. Using these targeted messages, you can nudge the customerson their journey using ‘in-the-moment’ eventssuch as mobile app downloads, purchases or closed service cases.

2. Unifying messaging across channels

Journey Builder can be integrated with Salesforce Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Sales Cloud. This means that all the departments—sales, marketing, commerce, and service— are unified on one platform and are a part of the complete customer journey. This allows for a consistent experience and communication between different departments. This also enables seamless brand communication through all available channels — such as email, SMS, push notifications, ads, web landing pages, and apps — resulting in an exceptional cross-channel customer experience.

3. Adjusting to the customers’ changing needs

By setting and maintaining automated journey logic, you can anticipate changes in consumer behaviour and take proactive steps. For example, let’s say a long-time customer recently purchased a shirt from your website. You have the transaction history and know their preferences from previous purchases. Clearly, you will share recommendations and information about similar shirts with the customer. But the thing is, they have moved on! They are looking to buy a hat now, and unless you pick up on the right behavioural and browsing cues and understand this changed need, you will continue to show more shirts to them and miss out on a possible new sale. Journey Builder prevents this from happening.

Plus, use reporting for performance reviews and trend analysis to take appropriate action at the right time. You can also scale up your activities to create simple or complex customised journeys for millions of users.

4. Leveraging distributed marketing

Create a branded journey that is consistent with corporate brand guidelines across all email, advertising, and mobile media. Share consumer journeys with owners, franchisees, advisors etc and enable them to craft the right digital marketing strategies.

By creating a 1-to-1 customer experience, Salesforce Journey Builder enables you to construct both straightforward and complex customerjourneys, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and retention.

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How to Send SMS Messages Using Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Introduction:

In digital marketing, text messaging (SMS) is a highly effective channel for reaching your audience directly and personally. Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder empowers marketers to automate and customize SMS campaigns seamlessly. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the steps of sending SMS messages using Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, enabling you to engage your audience in a meaningful way.

Step 1: Log In to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Begin by logging in to your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account. Ensure you have the necessary permissions to create and manage journeys.

Step 2: Access Journey Builder

Navigate to Journey Builder by clicking on it in the left navigation menu. This is where you’ll design and execute your SMS campaigns.

Step 3: Create a New Journey

• In the Journey Builder dashboard, click the “Create New Journey” button.

Choose the type of journey you want to create. For SMS campaigns, select “Mobile.”

Step 4: Configure Journey Settings

• Give your journey a descriptive name.
• Select your entry sources, such as lists, data extensions, or API events. This determines how contacts enter the journey.

Define entry criteria based on specific data fields or behaviors. This ensures that the right audience is targeted.

Step 5: Define Journey Steps

• Drag and drop an “SMS Activity” onto the canvas.
• Configure the SMS activity by selecting the message you want to send. You can choose from existing templates or create a new SMS message.

Specify the sending behavior, such as sending immediately upon entry, at a specific date and time, or based on contact behavior.

Step 6: Personalize Your SMS (Optional)

For a more tailored experience, you can personalize your SMS messages. Use personalization strings to insert contact-specific information like names or previous purchase details.

Step 7: Implement Decision Splits (Optional)

To create different paths within the journey based on specific conditions or contact attributes, add decision splits. These allow for more customized and responsive SMS campaigns.

Step 8: Test Your Journey

Before launching your SMS campaign, thoroughly test it. Use the “Test” feature within Journey Builder to send test SMS messages and ensure that your journey is functioning as intended.

Step 9: Activate Your Journey

Once you’re confident in your journey setup, click the “Activate” button to make it live. Contacts who meet the entry criteria will start progressing through the journey, receiving SMS messages as specified.

Step 10: Monitor and Analyze

After activation, closely monitor the performance of your SMS campaign. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides reporting and analytics tools to track key metrics such as delivery rates, response rates, and conversions.

Exploring Marketing Cloud Journey Builder Activities

• April 12, 2022

Tom Brinker

Customer journeys are all about sending the right messages at the right times based on how your contacts engage with your brand. 

In Journey Builder, you can utilize activities to interact with your contacts. You can use message activities and flow control activities to not only dictate how you’re going to engage with them but also how often you’re going to contact them.

First, let’s define what Journey Builder activities are.

What are Journey Builder Activities?

Journey Builder activities are the building blocks that determine how your contacts are going to pass through your customer journey.

There are 5 types of activities in Journey Builder:

• Message activities : This allows you to message your contacts via emails or mobile messages.
• Advertising activities : This allows you to advertise to your audience through social media and search engines.
• Flow control activities: This determines when your contacts will move onto the next activity and which path they will take in your customer journey.
• Customer updates : This updates contact record data stored in Marketing Cloud.
• Sales & Service Cloud activities : This allows you to create and update records in other Salesforce platforms. These activities are available to those who have integrated their CRM through Marketing Cloud Connect.

In this post, we’ll primarily focus on message, advertising, customer updates, and Salesforce activities. We’ll discuss flow control activities in the next chapter .

Message Activities

In Journey Builder, message activities are used to send a message to your contacts through email and mobile messages. Journey Builder lets you decide when and how to send the message — allowing you to strike a balance between keeping your brand top of mind and reducing friction.

The different types of message activities are:

Push notification

• In-app message

Let’s take a look at Emails first.

Email is one of the most commonly used message activities. You can choose to use an existing Content Builder email or build a new one from scratch inside of Journey Builder.

One of the greatest benefits of using Marketing Cloud is its ability to send personalized messages at scale . In Journey Builder, you can use personalization strings to help create these individualized emails. A personalization string allows you to insert information about subscribers, senders, and messages to customize your emails.

Some common personalization strings include:

• Subscriber’s name
• Subscriber’s mobile number
• Name of the month the email was sent
• Descriptive name of a hyperlink

Keep in mind that you need to make sure the personalization string matches the contact data field exactly. 

Another best practice is to set a default value in case you don’t have the relevant data for a particular subscriber. For example, make sure to set your default value as “Customer” within the “FirstName” field. That way, if you don’t have the name of that particular contact in your database, their emails would just read “Dear Customer” instead of an awkward blank.

It’s easy to get carried away with personalization strings, but keep in mind that too much personalization can harm your hourly email send rate . 

After you’ve finished creating your email, it’s time to select your message configuration preferences . This allows you to alter how your emails will look once it hits your subscribers’ inboxes. For example, you can choose to specify the sender of your email so your contacts will know where the email was sent from.

Once you’ve selected your message configuration preferences, it’s time to go over your delivery options . Here, you can narrow down who is going to receive your emails using a publication list, which helps you exclude contacts who have opted out of certain lists. You can also choose who to exclude from this email batch through a suppression list and domain exclusions. You can also use the “enable tracking” option to measure the subscribers’ engagement level — such as tracking clicks.

We highly recommend reviewing email best practices before creating and sending out these emails. If you need some email refreshers, we’ve also written a post dedicated to outlining the best practices for effective email designs .

Mobile activities

As the name suggests, mobile activities allow you to connect with your contacts using their phones . There are many mobile activities available to you, but the most commonly used building blocks are SMS, push notification, and in-app message.

You can use the SMS activity to send a short text message to your contacts. You’ll be able to select an existing message or create a new one to send to your contacts in Journey Builder.

An important note is that you’ll need to set up your mobile short code , which is a unique 5-6 number code provided by a mobile carrier company. Since this is a relatively extensive process, many organizations choose to work with a Salesforce consulting partner to help with the process. Learn more about our Marketing Cloud services and the many ways we can optimize and run your platform on your behalf.

Use the push notification message activity if you want to send a pop-up message to your contacts’ phones. Just like the email activity, the push notification activity allows you to use personalized strings to customize your messages at scale.

When setting up the activity, you can set the open behavior of notification. Open behavior tells Journey Builder where the subscriber should land once they engage with your push notification, such as leading them to an app, a web URL, or even a CloudPage.

In-App Message

An in-app message allows you to send your contacts a message while they’re in your app. A huge benefit to using Journey Builder is that you’re able to configure your messages’ look and feel without having to code.

For example, you can customize your message dimensions so you know exactly how large your message will appear on the screen. You’ll also be able to set display controls , which dictates how and when your different messages will be displayed, such as setting a delay before the message appears or a user action that triggers the message.

In Journey Builder, you can configure the inbox activity to send a message to users’ inboxes in your app. These messages will stay in the inbox until you set it to expire. Keep in mind inbox messages are attached to the user’s device , not the contact.

You’ll need to set up your app inbox as a CloudPage , which requires your app developer to enable additional features. You can also set messages to override existing inbox messages or add to inbox instead.

WhatsApp is Facebook’s messenger app that provides end-to-end encryption for users to message one another. With Journey Builder’s WhatsApp activity, you can chat with your contacts one-on-one .

This activity requires you to have a WhatsApp account and opt-ins from contacts. It also lets you use Facebook business messenger to connect with your contacts.

With the WhatsApp message activity, you can send 2 types of messages: template messages and session messages.

• Template messages: Send transactional messages to your users, such as a payment confirmation or even shipping notifications. These messages need to be approved by the WhatsApp team before sending these messages out.
• Session messages: Send a kick-off message to start a two-way conversation with your customers. You’ll need to set the entry source as “inbound chat.” We discuss more about entry sources in Chapter 3 .

This activity can utilize keyword triggers for auto-responses. When your contact uses a keyword in their responses, it’ll trigger an autoresponder message.

Similar to WhatsApp, LINE is a popular messaging app. To use the LINE activity, you must have your LINE channels enabled.

You can utilize multi-content messages and add up to 5 components: video, image, audio, and text. You can also create carousel messages to add some variation to your messages.

Advertising activities

If you’re looking for ways to reach out to your contacts proactively, advertising activities are the building blocks for you.

Digital marketers love how you can configure both ad audiences and ad campaigns through Journey Builder.

Ad audience

Ad audience allows you to create a new ad audience based on your contacts in the journey. To use Journey Builder’s ad audience activity, you must have your contacts’ email addresses in Marketing Cloud. 

After you’ve set up your ad audience, you can choose to specifically advertise to that group at any time through Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn.

Ad campaign

The ad campaign activity lets you create Facebook ad campaigns directly from Journey Builder. Campaigns don’t run until your journey is active. The frequency of your ad showing will depend on audience size and allotted budget.

Overall, digital marketers love how they can align their ad campaigns with specific messages to create a cohesive journey.

Customer updates activity

The update contact activity allows you to update  contact data within a specific data extension stored in Marketing Cloud. This activity is an effective way to impact data outside of the journey based on what’s happening in the journey.

You select the attribute or value you want to update, and the customer update activity will overwrite the value in an existing row based on updated information. That way, you can create even more personalized messaging based on the most updated information you have on your contacts.

Common use cases include:

• Update a true/false field based on whether a contact clicks an email
• Update a true/false field based on whether the recipient received your email
• Update a date field based on if the recipient has renewed their subscription

Salesforce activities (Sales & Service Cloud)

Salesforce activities allow you to create activities based on your contacts’ information and attributes in your other Salesforce platforms — such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. As mentioned earlier, you’ll need to install Marketing Cloud Connect for this to work.

Because Salesforce activities refer to objects and records, we recommend that you review how objects and records work within a CRM. We’ve previously written a chapter on understanding data management in a CRM in our Beginner’s Guide to CRM.

Within Salesforce activities, there are 9 activities to choose from to create or update entities within Sales or Service Cloud:

• Campaign member
• Convert lead
• Opportunity
• Object activity (Best for custom objects)

Since using Salesforce activities requires your Marketing Cloud admin to be familiar with your Salesforce data, we recommend hiring an experienced Salesforce administrator to help with this process. This, however, can be expensive.

To maximize ROI, many organizations outsource their Salesforce needs to an external consultant. At EBQ, we offer an entire team of certified CRM administrators at a fraction of the cost. Visit our Salesforce services page to learn more about why you should choose us as your administration partner.

Interact with your contacts using Journey Activities

The whole point of creating customer journeys is to manage how your contacts are going to experience your brand through both the content and timing of your messaging. In Journey Builder, you can customize both these factors using messaging activities and flow control activities.

In this chapter, we discussed the following types of Journey Builder activities:

• Flow control
• Advertising
• Customer updates 

We also explored how to use these various activities to strengthen your journeys. However, many activities require quite a bit of setup before you can run them — such as building your emails or preparing your chat channels. It’s why we recommend organizations onboard a seasoned Marketing Cloud expert on their team. If you’re looking to hire a digital marketer, EBQ’s certified experts can help run your marketing campaigns for you.

Chapter 5: Flow controls

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Cerca de 20 min

Learning Objectives

Sms in journey builder, create sms activity in journey builder, journey builder sms analytics.

• Desafio +100 pontos

Create SMS Messages in Journey Builder

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Add an SMS activity into a journey.
• Review SMS performance in Journey Builder.

According to our recent State of Marketing study, we found that 40% of customers won’t do business with a company if they can’t use their preferred channels. And 69% of customers expect a connected experience. Tackle this expectation using strategic, multichannel journeys in Journey Builder. In this unit, we review the SMS activity in Journey Builder and how you can enhance your new and existing journeys using SMS. 

Entry Source and Personalization

Where to start? The beginning of course. For Journey Builder the beginning is the entry source—or the audience—for your journey. To use SMS in Journey Builder, you need to confirm that your entry source (often a data extension) includes a normalized phone number (country code + phone number with no dashes or parentheses). This is required data in your data extension before you can use SMS in Journey Builder. 

It may also be helpful to review the Trailhead modules Marketing Cloud Engagement Contact Management and Journey Builder Campaigns to understand how to setup entry sources in Journey Builder.

You can also use the Journey Builder entry source attributes to personalize your SMS messages. Journey Builder first attempts to pull the attribute value from your journey’s entry source. 

For example, the welcome journey for Scott’s Restaurant uses an entry source of a filtered data extension, named Scott’s New Customers. This data extension includes a phone number and first name fields. If you add personalization (say Scott’s wants to use a customer’s birthday in a message), Journey Builder attempts to pull the attribute value from the contact record in the MobileConnect demographics table. If no value is found, the default value is displayed. So be sure to set a default value.

Let’s follow along as Simone from Scott’s adds an SMS activity to her welcome campaign in Journey Builder. After selecting the currently running welcome journey in Journey Builder, she first makes a new version of the journey. She has determined that she wants to send a text if the customer hasn’t clicked on the first email message. So she adds an engagement split after the first email and then she selects and drags the SMS activity to the canvas. After clicking the SMS activity to begin, she adds an activity name and description: “Scott’s welcome text.” Then she clicks New Message .

From the next screen, Simone adds the full text message that include Scott’s restaurant website. She decides to shorten the company URL so she clicks Shorten URL  (1), and then Apply .

Notice the Concatenate Message checkbox in the Content pane. This allows you to send multiple messages as one long message. Concatenation only displays when you select a short or long code for a location that allows concatenation. This feature is not supported in the US, but you can learn more on the help page, Message Concatenation .

Simone reviews her work and then clicks Save Message and Return . From the Send SMS Activity Summary screen she can edit the message, select a different one, or create a brand-new message.

She is happy with the message selected, so she clicks Edit next to Message Configuration . From this screen she selects the customer short code to send the message from and she accepts the opt-out policy. When done, she clicks Delivery Options .

She sets a blockout window from 10:00 PM to 8:00 AM and then reviews Summary . Finally, she previews the message by clicking Subscriber Preview . Once satisfied, she clicks Done .

And with that, Simone has added an SMS message to Scott’s welcome journey. She then tests the journey before activating.

In addition to running a standard report, once a journey is active, you can view quick performance analytics by clicking the SMS activity in a running journey. From this screen, you can see the delivery rate of the messages sent or click View Details to see goals and ecommerce data (if available). You can also click Summary under the dropdown to view more information about the SMS. 

In this module, you have implemented SMS, created messages in MobileConnect and in Journey Builder, and you have analyzed performance. You are all set to explore the world of SMS sending. Show off your new acronym skills with your BFF (best friend forever) and go forth and impress your customers with timely, relevant text messages. E123 (easy as 1-2-3). 👍

• Trailhead: Journey Builder Campaigns
• Salesforce Help : Mobile Connect and Journey Builder
• Salesforce Help : Create the SMS Activity in Journey Builder
• Salesforce Help : Message Concatenation
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Custom Activity Configuration

In Journey Builder, both custom events and custom activities follow the same structure. For more information about creating custom events, see Considerations for Building Custom Events .

The config.json file includes the properties shown in this table. To view these properties in context, see the sample config.json file .

metaData Object Properties 

Custom activity icon details .

The value of the icon property must be a path to an icon. The path can be an absolute URL or a path that’s relative to the URL of the custom activity.

If you don’t specify a value for the icon property, Journey Builder checks to see if a file called icon.png exists in the path that you specified for the custom activity. If that file doesn’t exist, it looks for a file called icon.svg in the same path. If that file doesn’t exist, Journey Builder uses a default icon.

Journey Builder always uses the icon value in the version of the config.json file hosted on your web server. If you add a custom activity to your journey, and then modify the configuration of that instance of the custom activity, Journey Builder doesn’t update the icon. If you change the value of the icon property in the config.json hosted on your web server, the icon is updated for all instances of that custom activity in the journey.

If you change the value of icon in the config.json served by your webserver, the icon is updated for all instances of that custom activity in the journey.

The icon file must meet these specifications.

• Supported file formats: .png, .svg, .jpg, .gif
• Maximum width and height: 40 pixels × 40 pixels
• File size limit: None

lang Object Properties 

The lang object contains at least one object. The name of each object must equal the name of a BCP 47 locale code, such as en-US for US English or pt-BR for Brazilian Portuguese. In each object, you specify the name and description of the custom activity for the specified locale.

arguments Object Properties 

Configurationarguments object properties , configurationargumentactivity object properties .

Each of the actions in the configurationArguments object (publish, unpublish, save, validate, and stop) can contain the properties in this table.

userInterfaces Object Properties 

The userInterfaces object contains information about the appearance of the configuration page for the custom activity in the journeys user interface.

wizardSteps Array Properties 

The wizardSteps array contains objects that define the steps that the user navigates through as they configure the custom activity. Each object contains the values in this table.

This image shows a configuration page for a custom journey activity in fullscreen mode. The three numbered tabs ("Workflow", "Execute", and "Editor") correspond to the label values in the wizardSteps object.

schema Object Properties 

The schema object specifies schema information about in and out arguments. The schema object has the structure shown in this example.

The inArguments and outArguments arrays contain objects that specify the characteristics of each argument.

The context of the call determines the direction of the arguments in the schema. The values that you provide must match the execution context.

The outArguments can’t contain null values.

If the value of the access property parameter is set to hidden or isn’t specified, the argument isn’t shown in subsequent expression builders.

Sample config.json File 

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