General

No, students do not receive notifications when they are added to a Journey. However, if this is something you'd like to explore doing, you could do so using a workflow and an ongoing campaign. To do this, create a segment using Journey filters, then use the Join Segment trigger to enroll students in a workflow that sends notifications.

No, steps cannot be skipped. Steps must be completed in sequential order. To avoid enrollees from getting "stuck," consider using Exit Triggers.

Unlike workflows, which are designed to perform actions, journeys are designed to track user activity between two points. A journey visualizes progress, helping you understand where users engage or drop off.

Workflows, on the other hand, are designed to perform actions. Think of Journeys as a tracking tool and Workflows as an action tool. Using Journeys to perform complex actions can be attempted, but it's not the optimal tool for that purpose.

Yes, but only after they have completed the Journey. A student can re-enter a Journey only if the trigger provides a unique context each time. For example, if a Journey starts when a student submits an application, they can enter again for each new application they submit.

If the trigger does not provide unique context—like submitting the same form—it doesn’t make sense to track it again because the Journey would look exactly the same both times. If you need to trigger an action each time something happens (like sending a confirmation email whenever a form is submitted), consider using Workflows + Rules instead of Journeys. Journeys are designed to track progress, not repeat the same sequence of events.

When all steps in a Journey are completed, the user's status for that Journey is marked as "completed." The completed users should remain in the Journey to help you analyze how many users completed all steps and identify where most users are getting lost in the process. This data is valuable for journey optimization.

Exit Triggers are activity conditions that, when met, update a contact's status to "exited" within a Journey, preventing them from continuing further in that Journey. These triggers are only evaluated against user Journeys in "active" or "expired" status—they do not apply to Journeys that are already "completed," "inactive," or "exited."

Exit Triggers serve an important analytics purpose: they help maintain accurate Journey metrics by removing users who are no longer eligible to complete the Journey. This gives you a clearer picture of actual conversion rates and progression patterns.

For example, in a Journey that tracks an admitted student's progress from decision release → deposit → attendance at orientation, you might set up an exit trigger such as updated decision status = withdrawn. If a student withdraws their application after being admitted, their status will be updated to "exited." This ensures your Journey analytics only include students who are still eligible to progress through the full path.

It's important to note that using "Completed this Journey" as an exit trigger doesn't align with Journey design principles. The goal of a Journey should be for users to complete it, and completed users should remain in the Journey with "completed" status so you can accurately measure success rates and identify where users typically drop off in the process.

When designing Journeys, use Exit Triggers specifically for conditions that make a user genuinely ineligible to continue, not for standard completion or success scenarios. This approach will provide the most valuable analytics for optimizing your student pathways.

When setting up Journey steps, it's important to use step conditions rather than user segment conditions if you want a step to be completed when a specific action occurs. User segment conditions determine if a user is eligible for a step, while step conditions determine when that step is considered complete.

If a step uses user segment conditions instead of step conditions, the step might be marked complete when any qualifying action occurs while the user matches those segment conditions. For users going through a Journey a second time, they may already match the segment conditions, causing steps to be marked complete prematurely.

Consider your primary goal: if you want to track and visualize user progress through a specific pathway, use Journeys. If you need to perform actions or automate processes based on certain triggers, Workflows are more appropriate. While you can add some actions to Journeys, they were designed as an ancillary feature, not the primary purpose.