The Future of Marketing Cloud Journey Builder: Flow Engine and More

Journey Builder is one of the automation engines in Marketing Cloud Engagement, a canvas interface where you can drag and drop activities and stitch them together in a sequence. This allows you to design marketing journeys that consider an individual contact’s behavior as they engage (or don’t engage). With Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced (built on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform and powered by Data Cloud) now on the scene, people have been wondering if the Campaign Flows are evolving into a replacement for Journey Builder.

In short – no, it won’t be. Salesforce has expressed multiple times that they’re committed to continually innovating for their Marketing Cloud Engagement customers. In the long term, they’ll never simply ‘shut off’ services such as Journey Builder. Plus, Campaign Flow isn’t at feature parity with Journey Builder. However, this does get us thinking – how can Journey Builder incorporate some of the best of Campaign Flows? What enhancements have been delivered this year and what does the future look like? 

Journey Builder vs. Campaign Flows  

Journey Builder has evolved into a fully-fledged automation engine for marketers building with Marketing Cloud Engagement. We won’t get into the full details in this guide, however, there’s the option to add various entry sources, activities, and flow controls (including, but not limited to, wait, decision splits, and path optimizer).

Campaign Flows, new on the scene since early 2024, are the first iteration of ‘non-admin flows’, a condensed-down interface to instruct Flow what to do without having to deal with all the nodes and elements. I say it’s the first, as no other product on the Salesforce platform has this yet. Essentially, marketers are now tapping into Flow. 

Note that Campaign Flows are not the same as Flows. Campaign Flows are a subset of Flows, which give access to specific marketing actions in a focused user interface. There are elements you’ll find in Flow that are not available in Campaign Flows (we created a comparison chart here). 

If you’re working with, or learning, all three (Journey Builder, Flow, Campaign Flows), the terminology can become confusing. 

Perhaps it’s better explained in terms of which tool lies within which tech stack:

• Journey Builder is built purposely for Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly ExactTarget), therefore, exists on a tech stack separate from the ‘core’ Salesforce platform. 
• Flow is built on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform and powers automation outside of marketing use cases. 
• Campaign Flows are built on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform and are available to only marketers for marketing use cases.

The table summarizes the points above:

Journey Builder: Improvements This Year

If we think about Journey Builder in the last year, we’ve seen a number of features added: 

• High-Scale Throughput (HTS): A setting that applies to email send activities to achieve higher throughput (more volume) and lower latency (less lag).  
• System Optimization: Journey Builder processing rates vary based on a number of factors – your data model, filters, configuration, activities, and content complexity (such as personalization). An example of this is System Priority, where from a dashboard, you can identify which journeys are sapping up processing abilities, and change the priority order of journeys when processing levels are high to ensure those journeys are processed first.
• Email Engagement Splits: Splits in Journey Builder are designed to send contacts down one path if they meet the set criteria or the alternative path. In the case of Email Engagement Splits, this could be set based on opens, clicks, or bounces.  
• WhatsApp Conversations: You can talk to your customers on a one-to-many basis and create a personalized conversation experience. The marketing department can send commercial and transactional messages. 

Journey Builder “On Core”

As mentioned, Salesforce won’t cease innovating on the Marketing Cloud Engagement application. For example, a new suite of mobile features will be coming later this year.

The Marketing Keynote at Dreamforce ‘24 alluded to how Salesforce is incorporating the best of Journey Builder into the best of Flow. Essentially, extending Marketing Cloud Engagement’s functionality within the broader Salesforce platform – your data, journeys, and AMPScript to the Salesforce platform – allowing you to do more with it.

“Journey Builder is mostly for marketing scenarios. We’re expanding that by allowing you to start connecting Journey Builder and the Salesforce Flow engine together. You’ll be able to connect into Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, thanks to Data Cloud. Data becomes actionable for orchestration, for triggers – all to create the best possible experience for your customers.”

– Steve Hammond EVP & GM, Marketing Cloud. Source: Marketing & Commerce Keynote, Dreamforce ‘24.

“This has been really exciting for us. As it is powered by Data Cloud, it’s not only about segments anymore – it’s about much deeper personalization and more complex decisioning. That’s what we’re able to do with the data graphs on flow connected to Data Cloud. An example is that data extensions show on the right-hand side of the Flow Builder. Our team used to spend time bringing in these extensions, and now they’re available in this one place.”

– Sarah Lukins, General Manager, Digital, Fisher & Paykel. Source: Marketing & Commerce Keynote, Dreamforce ‘24.

This is a new way of thinking for Salesforce and their customers. To help explain why they’re thinking this way, we can pull upon two main factors:

• Relationship Marketing: Salesforce fundamentally believes in creating a consistent, personalized experience across all touchpoints – Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, Web, Mobile, and more. They recognize that it hasn’t always been easy for Marketing Cloud Engagement customers to achieve this; they’re making it simpler with initiatives such as Salesforce Foundations. In the future, Marketing Cloud Engagement data and journeys will be accessible within Salesforce products like Marketing Cloud Advanced, facilitating a seamless connection to Customer 360*.
• AI and Agent-Based Future: With the announcement of Agentforce, Salesforce is advocating for a future where agent-based interactions will take automation to the next level. By integrating Marketing Cloud Engagement data and objects into the Salesforce Platform, Marketing Cloud Engagement customers will be able to leverage AI and Agentforce more effectively, as this is the tech stack where those technologies ‘sit’.

*Customer 360 is the brand name for the Salesforce platform data model, with objects that cater to different business functions (e.g. sales, service) but that don’t work in siloes, allowing processes to be connected up between them. 

Journey Builder “On Core” FAQ

The answers to these questions were provided by Andrew Waite, SVP, Product Management at Salesforce.

Q. What can be done in Journey Builder with Data Cloud data?

“With Journey Builder and Data Cloud, customers can continue using Data Cloud to unify their data, create segments, and activate audiences in Journey Builder, which can then use that data for personalization. We have ideas to improve the Journey Builder experience there, but what really excites us is the idea of integrating Marketing Cloud Engagement data and objects, like journeys, into the Salesforce Platform.”

Q.  What’s going on behind the scenes to enable us to use Journey Builder and Flow in a complementary way?

“We wanted to build a bridge that lets Marketing Cloud Engagement customers do more with what they have. We’ve been asking ourselves:

1. How can we more easily enable better relationship marketing so that Marketing Cloud Engagement customers can deliver smarter marketing faster? The answer is by enabling access to the Customer 360 more easily, and that’s through the Salesforce platform.

2. How can we enable Marketing Cloud Engagement customers to take advantage of the full power of Agentforce? Again, the answer is through the Salesforce platform.

You hear a lot about Data Cloud, but what you might not know is that internally, our engineering teams use Data Cloud as our own integrated data layer. We’ve been working on improving Data Cloud so it can understand Marketing Cloud Engagement with a more ‘native’ perspective. This means we’re planning to use Data Cloud under the hood to bring in and absorb Marketing Cloud Engagement data and objects so that they can be used across Salesforce. This allows customers to use the products together in a complementary way.

This is a really important point and we don’t want it to be misunderstood. We’re not shutting down Journey Builder or forcing migrations – that’s certainly not our goal. Instead, our strategy focuses on how customers can get more out of Journey Builder by thinking about how Journey Builder and Flow can be used side by side to build innovative use cases or accomplish existing ones much more easily.” 

Q.  How can Flow be an orchestration tool for multiple Journey Builder journeys?

“One of the items we’re working on is enabling Flow to listen and react to Journey Builder so it can orchestrate across multiple journeys and other processes. 

This allows marketers to easily daisy-chain journeys, prioritize across journeys, and create forms of Air Traffic Control where you can listen to see how a customer exited a particular journey and then decide which journey they should go into next. This has been a top VOC (Voice of Customer) of Journey Builder for years, and this is how we plan to deliver it.

And that’s just one example. With each release, customers will get access to more capabilities and features to build connected and personalized engagement across the entire customer journey.”

Summary

Journey Builder has been a core automation tool in Marketing Cloud Engagement for years. With Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced editions tapping into Flow (i.e. Campaign Flows), this paints a picture for how Journey Builder could tap into the same platform-wide benefits, such as actions across multiple ‘cloud’ products, Agentforce, and all that Data Cloud has to offer.  

Salesforce reassures us that Journey Builder won’t be replaced. Instead, the focus is on having Journey Builder work in tandem with Flow – not Flow against Journey Builder. 

Looking at a typical Salesforce org’s automations, there can become automations that exist in siloes. Remember back to when the Salesforce platform had multiple ways to automate processes (Process Builder, Workflows, Apex)? The idea was to bring it under one roof so that customers didn’t need to choose between the various automation options. As mentioned, the goal for Journey Builder is to not ‘shut it off’ but instead to help bring journeys created through it into view alongside others in your org – the orchestration that will pay back in dividends for your organization.