Journey starters

The green steps equals different events that triggers a journey. No matter what starter you select, this step can only be placed first out in your flow.

The starters are not actual messages, you’ll add that after, it’s the entrance to your journey.

This article covers the basics of all starters:

• Date
• Birthday
• Custom
• API Request
• Subscriber unengaged
• Subscriber joins list

Most of these starters are by design evaluating on a date value on your contacts (or have other triggers). The custom starter do not, it's a blank sheet, so depending on how you are working with your contact data, it can be a good idea to include a date condition in your starter segment to avoid contacts re-entering a journey over and over again. 

General

On all starters you select whether you want to include the project segment (if any). If you include your project segment this will be added to your other conditions in your starter and also follow throughout any following message steps in your journey.

Contacts that are temporarily blocked will enter a journey when matching the starter criteria but will not receive any communication as long as they are blocked.

If you use DataDocs, learn how to include documents in your journey in this article.

​On the starter you'll make some settings that will reflect on all steps in your version. These are:

• Frequency
  The time data for all steps should be processed and messages sent. 
  Note that API request and Subscriber joins list will ignore the frequency on the starter, since these are executed immediately. The frequency is however applied on any following steps in your flow.
  
  Your journey will run continously if you don't set it to run until a specific date. If you select an end date, the journey will be set to closing or closed (depending on what expiration action you choose) on that date. A closing journey will not enter any new contacts on the set date, but will move already entered contacts forward. A closed journey will not run at all on the set date.
  
  
  
  
• Ignore unsubscribe
  Enable this if any of your messages should be sent even to unsubscribed contacts. (You will then see an additional setting on each message step which you need to activate in order to take effect.)

Date

Begin your journey based on a date in a recipient attribute. This can be, for example, a start date, a last login date, the date of the event, or the contact creation date.

1. On the start event of your journey, click Select and find the date in the module that opens.
2. Back on the workspace, you can set the parameters List, Frequency and Segment.
   1. List
      The recipient list selected during journey creation is set by default, but this can be modified here.
      Heads up! If your journey is already active, changing the list can have a dramatic effect on your journey!
      
      
   2. Frequency
      When and how often does the journey have to find new contacts to participate in the journey? Select a time slot and the frequency of the process: every day, every week, or every month.
      
      
   3. Segment
      There are two segment conditions.
      1. The first condition is mandatory and relates to the main purpose of this journey. When you click on these conditions, you can choose when, relative to the date indicated in the recipient's attribute, the starter must choose the contact to include it in the journey. Select the number of days before, after, or at the actual date in the recipient's attribute.
         
         When selecting the delay, you enter the number of days before or after. For example, if a contact has 2018-12-12 in the selected attribute and you entered two days later, the starter will target 2018-12-14.
         
         When you select On the Date of, the contact will be targeted when the value matches today's date, that is, if today's date is 2018-12-12, Symplify will target contacts with 2018-12-12 in the selected attribute.
         
         Then select the attribute where your birth date is saved. The default attribute is "DateCreated" but you can change it if you want.
         
         And finally, decide if the starter should match the exact date value of your attribute (yyyy-MM-dd). Or if it should target yearly. The starter will then skip the year of the date and only target the month and day (MM-dd).
      2. The second condition is not mandatory and applies to any additional parameters that you want to include in your starter, to which the contacts must match. The segment editor will open and you will be able to edit your extra criterias.

Birthday

1. On the start event in your journey, click on Select and find Birthday in the module popping up.
2. Back on the workspace you can set the parameters List, Frequency and Segment.​​​
   1. List
      The recipient list selected when the journey was created will be set to default but you can change to some other list here.
      Heads up! If your journey is already active, changing list may affect your journey dramatically.
      
      
   2. Frequency
      When and how often should the journey look for new contacts to enter the journey? Select a time slot and how often the process should run: every day, weekly or monthly.
      
      
   3. Segment
      There are two segment conditions.
      1. The first condition is mandatory and regards the main purpose of this journey, the birthday. When you click these conditions you can choose when, in relation to the date in the recipient attribute, the journey should pick up a recipient to join the ride.
         Select the number of days before, after, or on the actual date in the recipient attribute.
         When selecting before or after, you enter the number of days before or after. For example, if a contact has the date 2018-12-12 in the selected attribute and you’ve entered 2 days after, the starter will target the contact 2018-12-14.
         When selecting On the date of the starter will target the contact when the value matches “today's” date, i.e. if today's date is 2018-12-12, the starter will target contacts with the value (2018-)12-12 in the selected attribute.
         
         Then select the attribute where your date of birth is saved. The default attribute is “DateOfBirth” but you can change this to some other attribute if you want.
         
         And last you can see that the starter matches the value Yearly, in other words, neglects the year of the date value.
         
         
      2. The second condition is not mandatory and regards any extra parameters all contacts should match that you want to include in your starter. The segment editor will open and you can edit your segment.