Our students interact with us in countless ways, and our business processes often span multiple modules within Element451. Journeys are designed to track and visualize people completing sequential interactions, allowing you to monitor and manage custom enrollment funnels, track inquiries, follow admitted students as they progress toward enrollment, and much more. The possibilities with Journeys are endless.

Navigate to Data + Automations > Journeys > All Journeys.

The three components of a Journey are Initial Journey Triggers, Steps, and Exit Triggers. We'll explain each below.

Journey Trigger(s) are activities that automatically enroll a person in a Journey.

Once a contact is enrolled in a Journey, the steps are the individual activities that must be completed for that contact to progress through the Journey.

Each step can have optional conditions and actions, both of which are optional.

Generally, Journey steps must be completed in order (for an exception, see Step Groups below). A Journey only monitors the next step for each user.

For example, consider a Journey that includes the following steps: Received Open House Email > Clicked on the Link in Email > Registered for Open House. If the user receives the email and registers for the event directly on the website without clicking the link in the email, the Journey will not move forward because the middle step was not completed.

Therefore, it’s important to identify the most critical metrics for your tracking and consider using Step Groups to ensure flexibility in the process.

Step Groups allow you to bundle multiple steps to be evaluated together. A Step Group can be configured in two ways:

Exit Triggers are activity conditions that, when met, update a contact’s status to “exited” within a Journey, preventing them from continuing further. This helps maintain accurate analytics by reflecting only those who are still eligible to complete the Journey.

For example, in a Journey that tracks an admitted student’s progress from decision release → deposit → attendance at orientation, if you have an exit trigger such as updated decision status = withdrawn, and a student withdraws their application after the decision is released, their status will be updated to “exited.” This ensures the Journey only includes students who are still progressing, providing a clear and accurate view of overall progress.

Now that you've reviewed the basics of a Journey, you can create or edit one. Click below to explore our article on creating and managing Journeys.

On a Journey’s page, you can review which contacts have been enrolled in the Journey via the established triggers and view details about their progress. Additionally, you can manually add individual contacts or segments of contacts to the Journey.

Utilize Journey Analytics to gain valuable insights into the performance and progress of your Journeys.

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