Journeys

A journey is a sequence of steps that runs for a single customer over time, triggered by an event in their lifecycle — they signed up, their trial ended, they cancelled. Use journeys for “do X, then Y a few days later, then Z” automation that’s per-customer rather than always-on.

Open in Dashboard

Jump directly to the matching dashboard area while you follow this guide.

Open Journeys

When to use a journey

You want…	Use
Welcome email after signup	Journey
Day-3 onboarding nudge	Journey
14-day reactivation series for cancelled subs	Journey
One-off promotional banner	Paywall rule (or Campaign)
Coordinated multi-touch push with variant testing	Campaign (which can contain a journey)

Rule of thumb: if you’re describing a thing that happens to one customer over time, that’s a journey. If you’re describing a thing the publication is running, that’s a campaign or a paywall rule.

How a journey runs

Each journey has a trigger event — when this event fires for a customer, that customer is enrolled and starts walking through the steps.

Supported triggers:

• Customer created — fires when a new customer is registered.
• Subscription created — fires when a customer subscribes to any plan.
• Subscription cancelled — fires when a customer cancels (whether immediately or at period end).
• Trial ended — fires when a trial expires.

Each enrolled customer gets their own state. They progress through the steps in order, advancing as each step completes (or as a wait step’s clock runs out). A customer in the middle of a journey doesn’t block other customers — every enrollment is independent.

Step types

Step	Effect
Wait	Pause for a duration before advancing. The unit is milliseconds in the JSON — a typical day is 86400000.
Send email	Send a transactional email. Tokens like {{customer.name}} are expanded at send time.
Show paywall	Earmark a specific paywall rule for this customer’s next visit.
Fire webhook	POST a small payload to one of your configured webhooks. Useful for piping the journey event into your own tooling.
Set / unset segment membership	Add the customer to a segment, or remove them. Powerful for chaining (“after step 4, add to high-intent segment”).

Steps execute in order. A wait step is the only one that pauses the journey — every other step runs immediately and advances to the next.

Status

Journeys move through these statuses:

Status	Meaning
Draft	Configured but inactive — no customers will be enrolled.
Active	Live. Trigger events enroll matching customers.
Paused	Existing runs continue, but no new enrollments.
Archived	Hidden from the default list. Existing runs are unaffected.

Step 1 — Create a journey

From the journeys list, click Create journey.

Provide:

• Name — what this journey does (“Welcome series”, “Cart-abandon nudge”, “30-day reactivation”).
• Trigger event — pick from the dropdown.
• Steps — for v1 this is a JSON array. A visual step builder is on the roadmap. Example:

[
  { "type": "wait", "ms": 86400000 },
  { "type": "send_email", "subject": "Welcome", "html": "<p>Hi {{customer.name}}</p>" },
  { "type": "wait", "ms": 259200000 },
  { "type": "send_email", "subject": "Need help?", "html": "<p>Tips for getting started</p>" }
]

The journey starts as a draft. No customers are enrolled yet.

Step 2 — Activate

When you’re ready, click Activate on the journey card. Status flips to active.

From this point on, every time the trigger event fires for any customer, that customer is enrolled. Each enrollment runs its own copy of the steps independently.

Step 3 — Watch runs in flight

Each customer’s run shows their current step index, status, and timestamps. Use this to debug (“why hasn’t customer X received step 3?”) — usually the answer is they’re still inside a wait step.

If a step fails (e.g. a webhook returns 500), the run automatically retries up to 3 times with exponential backoff (1 minute, 5 minutes, 30 minutes). After the third failure, the run is marked errored and stops, with the last error captured for inspection. The rest of your journey runs are unaffected.

Step 4 — Pause or archive when you’re done

• Pause halts new enrollments but lets existing runs finish.
• Archive hides the journey from the default list. Existing runs continue.
• Delete is permanent — and removes all the journey’s history.

Tokens in emails

The send-email step supports the same token grammar as paywall copy:

• {{customer.name}}, {{customer.email}} — expanded at send time.
• {{publication.name}} — your publication’s display name.

Tokens that don’t resolve render as empty strings (and log a warning), so a journey with {{customer.name}} won’t break for an anonymous customer — it just produces “Hi ,”.

Tips

• Don’t trigger on high-volume events. customer.created fires once per customer. pageview would fire thousands of times — the engine deliberately blocks high-volume events from being trigger candidates.
• Test with a small audience first. Journeys are real-time and irreversible (an email sent stays sent). Enroll yourself first, walk through the steps, then activate broadly.
• Be conservative with email frequency. A journey that sends three emails in a week will quickly land in spam folders. Wait at least 48 hours between consecutive sends, and respect unsubscribe.

Journeys vs campaigns

Journeys are per-customer state machines. Campaigns are publication-wide promotional pushes. They compose: a campaign can contain a journey as one of its assets, with the campaign giving you the audience targeting + variant testing + win-probability reporting on top.