A journey is a scheduled, multi-step workflow in Customer Studio. Members enter when they join an audience or perform an event. On each run, Hightouch reevaluates your warehouse data to determine who enters, advances, or exits.
If your source isn’t listed in the Lightning sync engine
docs, journeys aren’t currently supported for
that source. If you see “This source does not support journeys” in the app, to confirm compatibility.
Audiences and journeys work together to determine who enters a workflow and what happens next.
Audiences define groups of members.
Journeys move members through a sequence of tiles over time.
Journey tiles can delay members, branch based on conditions, send email or SMS messages, or sync member data to a destination.
For example, a member can enter a cart-abandonment journey after abandoning a cart. After two hours, they receive an email. If they purchase, they exit the journey. Otherwise, they receive another message the next day.
If you only need to keep a group of members synced to a destination, sync an audience directly. Use a journey when the workflow changes over time based on timing, member behavior, or earlier tiles.
The schedule determines when Hightouch can detect a change and act on it:
Delays — A one-day delay advances a member on the first run after 24 hours have elapsed. If the journey runs every six hours, the member waits between 24 and 30 hours.
Exit criteria — If a member meets an exit condition between runs, they exit when the next run detects it.
Hold until — The member advances on the first run that detects the condition.
Destination syncs — Reaching a Send to destination tile doesn’t trigger a separate destination schedule; the sync runs when the journey processes that tile.
If you need an action to happen immediately when an event occurs, account for the journey’s evaluation schedule when designing the workflow.
Counts can differ between the entry audience, the journey, individual tiles, and the destination because each stage applies different conditions.
Audience membership — who currently qualifies for the entry audience or event.
Journey membership — who the journey has actually enrolled. Entry rules, exclusions, and re-entry limits narrow it, and a member stays enrolled until they finish or meet an exit condition, even if they later leave the entry audience.
Tile membership — who has reached a given tile. Branches send members down different paths, and Time delay and Hold until tiles hold members in place, so no single tile sees everyone.
Destination membership — who the destination actually received. Destination rules, consent, priority lists, and the destination’s own suppression or deduplication can each remove members at sync time.
Don’t expect these counts to match. Compare counts at the same stage: use entry rules and exclusions to understand journey enrollment, tile conditions to understand path counts, and destination-side filters to explain delivery counts.
