HubSpot's Journey Automation

This article offers simple, practical examples of how Journey Automation in HubSpot can make each step of the customer’s path easier and more helpful,  from setting up journeys to automating actions and support.

You’ll see how HubSpot tools can be quickly set up to improve every stage of customer interaction and help your team communicate with customers faster, more conveniently, and with a personal touch.

Understanding Journey Automation in HubSpot

HubSpot's Journey Automation allows your team to design, automate and optimise every stage of the customer journey based on their individual needs and preferences. By coordinating all touchpoints — from awareness to conversion or re-engagement — you can deliver personalised communication that strengthens relationships with your target audience by offering the right messages at the right time.

In today's dynamic digital world, customer journey automation is necessary, not just an advantage. It enables you to scale your marketing activities, ensures compliance with data protection standards and allows you to make informed decisions based on analytics.

HubSpot's Journey Automation solution is currently in beta and is available in the following packages:

• Enterprise Customer Platform
• Marketing Hub Enterprise
• HubSpot for Marketers Professional.

If you want to personalise your customers' experience, journey automation can be a valuable tool for improving the effectiveness of your marketing communications.

Core Advantages of HubSpot Journey Automation

With Journey Automation, you can effortlessly craft marketing scenarios that feel personalised to each customer. This increases audience satisfaction and gives your team the flexibility to respond quickly to user behaviour, adapt communication in real time and maintain consistent, effective engagement at every stage of the customer journey. This approach enables you to establish a genuine connection between your brand and your users, ensuring that every interaction is meaningful, timely and effective.

The main benefits of Journey Automation in HubSpot include:

• Personalised interactions for every contact.  Journey Automation enables you to create unique communications for each customer, sending messages, offers and content that cater to their interests and needs rather than using generic templates.
• Real-time responsiveness. You can instantly adjust messages — changing the content, send time or selected channels — to ensure each contact receives relevant messages when needed, regardless of their level of engagement.
• Deepen customer engagement. Contacting each user at the right time significantly increases email open, click-through, and engagement rates, ensuring the most efficient movement through the sales funnel.
• Building long-term relationships. Consistently providing relevant messages and care builds trust and loyalty among your audience, showing customers that their needs are a priority for your company.
• Optimise operational efficiency. Automation can perform routine processes, freeing up your team's time for more strategic and creative tasks. The system's analytical capabilities provide the insights needed to ensure your marketing activities remain relevant and productive.

Features Overview of Journey Automation in HubSpot

HubSpot's Journey Automation capabilities give you full control over your customer experience. You can set up to 10 independent scenarios, each with up to 10 personalised stages. This makes the platform ideal for both fast-paced campaigns and complex, multi-stage nurture flows. The platform supports quick starts with pre-built templates and customisable customer journeys.

You can automate actions at each stage:

• send personalised emails,
• create tasks,
• update data,
• automatically set up the right customer journey depending on the interaction.

Intuitive visuals, simple customisation tools and advanced analytics make it easy for teams to create effective, integrated and valuable marketing journeys for every user.

Create a new journey

Each user can create up to 10 journeys. To create a new journey:

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Marketing > Journeys. 
• In the top right, click Create journey. 
• To create a journey from scratch:
  • In the right panel, select Start from scratch.
  • In the bottom right, click Next. You'll be directed to the journey editor. Then, continue setting up your journey. 

• To create a journey from a template:
  • In the right panel, select Use a template.
  • In the bottom right, click Next. 
  • Select your template. Then, click Next. You'll be directed to the journey editor. Then, continue setting up your journey. 
• If you're creating a journey for the first time, to learn how to create a journey from scratch:
  • In the right panel, select Guided setup.
  • In the bottom right, click Next. Then, follow the guided tour to create a new journey. 

• In the journey editor, you can review your journey as different engagement paths or as a single journey tree. To select your view, in the top right, click the engagement path icon or the tree icon. 

Set up journey enrollment

When building a new journey, start by picking the contact lists you want to use and choose a journey property, like “Journey stage” or “Lifecycle stage.”

You can use any property type that works for your workflow, from dropdowns to checkboxes or radio buttons. Each journey stage is linked to a specific property value, so whenever a contact’s property is updated, they’ll move to the right stage automatically. If you need to change the journey’s main property or the stage values later, you can do that too.

Just remember: each journey needs its own unique combination of lists and properties, so pick something different from your other journeys.

To set up your enrollment criteria:

• In the top left, click Enrollment. 
• Click the They're in any of the selected lists dropdown menu and select the contact lists with contacts eligible to enroll in the journey.
  • This doesn't mean that contacts will automatically enroll. Contacts will still need to meet either the journey's starting criteria or any of the stage values to enroll.
  • Contacts will still continue on the journey even if removed from lists after enrolling.
  • You can select up to 5 lists. Learn more about using lists. 
• Click the Contact property equals value dropdown menu and select a property. 

Set up journey unenrollment 

To set up unenrollment criteria in the journey editor:

• In the top left, click Enrollment.
• In the left panel, click the Unenrollment tab. 
• Select the checkboxes next to the unenrollment criteria that you'd like to apply: 
  • Are on or join a suppression list: unenroll contacts from the journey when they're added to any of the selected suppression lists. 
  • Are removed from enrollment lists: unenroll contacts from the journey if they're no longer in the enrollment lists. 
  • Match an end stage early: unenroll contacts from the journey if they match an end stage in the journey. When selecting this, contacts will skip any final actions associated with the end stage. 
     

Change the journey enrollment criteria

If you've previously set up your journey with a different property, to update the property used:

• In the top left, click Enrollment. 
• In the right panel, click the Contact property equals value dropdown menu and select a new property. 
• At the top, click Save. 
• In the dialog box, select a corresponding stage value based on the new property. 
• At the bottom, click Save updates. To select the stages' property values later, click Skip. 

Select a journey's starting stage

Select a property value from the enrollment property to begin enrolling contacts into your journey:

• In the journey editor, from the starting stage, click Details. In the left panel, set up your journey starting stage:
  
  

• • Click the first dropdown menu and select a property. If you've previously selected a property when setting up enrollment, the property will appear by default. 
  • Click the second dropdown menu and select a property value to set as your enrollment stage value. 
  • To enroll new contacts with no property value for the selected property, select the Enroll contacts with blank value in this stage checkbox. 
  • In the top, click Save. 

Configure your journey stages and actions

Please note: Please avoid sharing any sensitive information in your enabled data inputs for AI features, including your prompts. Admins can configure generative AI features in account management settings. 

 To add more stages and actions to each of your journey stages:

• In the journey editor, hover over the line and click the + icon. Then, select Add new stage. When adding a new stage to an unsuccessful path: 
  • If you're in the tree view, this'll create a new branch. 
  • If you're in the engagement path view, this'll create a new alternative path section in the editor. You can click the collapse icon to collapse and expand each section. 
  • You can add up 10 stages per journey. 

• After adding a stage you can add actions to your newly added stages. In the stage, click the menu icon and select Edit flow. 
  
  • You must add at least one action for each stage. 
  • You can add up to 50 actions per stage.
• To add an action in your stage, click the + plus icon. Then, you can use Copilot (beta) or manually add actions to your stages.
• To use Copilot to add actions (beta), click Build with Copilot. In Copilot, enter your prompt and click the send icon. Copilot will suggest actions based on the request.
• When manually adding an action, you can select from the following action types:
  • Marketing actions: select from the following marketing actions.
    • Send Assets: send an automated marketing email, SMS, or WhatsApp message to the contact. When setting up this action, you can trigger all three asset types to send at once. 
    • Wait: add a delay for a specified amount of time. 
    • Wait until activity: delay until a specific user activity occurs. For example, delay until the user submits a form, visits a specific page on a website, replies to an email, or more. 
  • Process actions: select from the following process actions. 
    • Create task: create and add a task to the enrolled contact. This task will also appear on the tasks page. Learn more about using tasks. 
    • Set property: set a specific property value for the enrolled contact. You can configure the stage used for the journey automation. 
    • Send notification: send an in-app or internal email notification. You can send the notification to specific users, teams, or the enrolled contact's existing owners. 
  • Go to: associate the stage with a successful or unsuccessful end. 
• After setting up your actions, in the top left click Exit to journey. 
   

• In the main journey editor:
  • To route a contact back to an earlier stage, hover over the line and click the + icon. Then, select Go to stage. This option can only be selected for stages, go to paths cannot be added between stages. 
  • To end a journey, hover over the line and click the + icon. Then, select End journey. This will automatically add a Goal exit or Exit. 
    
    
  
  

Determine the success of your journey

Select a property value to determine the success or failure of your journey. To set up your Goal exit or Exit:

• In the Goal exit or Exit box, click the Set up.
• In the right panel, click the Set [property name] to dropdown menu and select a property value. 
• For each end, you can also click the Add to static list dropdown menu and select a static list. This will add all contacts who have finished the journey to the selected static list. This is an optional step. 

Please note: you can only select one Goal exit end per journey.

Turn on your journey

• After setting up your journey automation, in the top right, click Review and publish. 
• In the right panel, you can review the number of contacts eligible for the journey. You can also configure the following:
  • Do you want to enroll contacts that currently meet the enrollment criteria when the workflow turns on: choose to enroll records that currently meet the enrollment criteria or only enroll records that meet the criteria in the future.
    • Yes, enroll existing contacts who meet the enrollment criteria immediately when the journey is turned on: enroll all existing records that meet the enrollment criteria.
    • No, only enroll contacts who meet the enrollment criteria after the journey is turned on: only enroll records that meet the enrollment criteria after the workflow is turned on. 

• At the bottom, click Turn on journey. 

For detailed instructions on managing customer journeys, viewing version history and analysing journey performance, please refer to the HubSpot Knowledge Base.