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.

Steps can use three different types of conditions to determine step completion:

Step actions can be configured to execute at the completion of a step, such as sending an email or adding a task. While this functionality exists, it was designed as an ancillary feature for the primary purpose of tracking Journeys.

Important Note: If your primary goal is to perform a series of automated actions rather than track user progression, consider using Workflows instead, as they were specifically designed for action automation. Journeys excel at visualizing user progress through a specific pathway but have limited action capabilities compared to Workflows.

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. Their primary purpose is to maintain accurate analytics by ensuring your Journey data reflects only those contacts who are still eligible to complete the Journey.

Exit Triggers are most valuable when:

Exit Triggers are only evaluated against Journeys with "active" or "expired" status. They don't affect Journeys that are already "completed," "inactive," or previously "exited."

In a Journey that tracks an admitted student's progress from decision release → deposit → attendance at orientation:

If you set an exit trigger such as updated decision status = withdrawn, and a student withdraws their application after being admitted, their Journey status will update to "exited." This ensures your Journey metrics only include students who are still eligible to progress through the full path.

Without this exit trigger, withdrawn students would remain in your "active" count, artificially inflating your denominator and making your conversion rates appear lower than they actually are. Exit Triggers help you maintain accurate, actionable analytics that truly reflect the effectiveness of your student engagement strategy.

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.

Check out our dedicated help article, Journeys: Frequently Asked Questions.

The Journeys Module is only available with the Element Ignite and Engage packages.
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