Campaign Monitor Automation: Customer Journeys That Convert

Campaign Monitor’s automation capability is often underestimated by users who came to the platform for its design tools. The Journey Designer — Campaign Monitor’s automation builder — is a genuinely capable visual workflow tool that handles the sequences most businesses need: welcome flows, post-purchase series, re-engagement journeys, and triggered follow-ups based on subscriber behaviour.

This guide walks you through the Journey Designer in detail, covers the trigger types available, explains how to use conditional branching, and gives you the specific journey blueprints that drive the most revenue for e-commerce and service businesses.

Introduction to the Journey Designer

The Journey Designer is accessed from the Automation section of your Campaign Monitor account. It uses a visual canvas where you drag and drop steps — emails, delays, conditions, and actions — to build the customer journey.

The key elements are:

• Triggers: the event that starts a contact on the journey
• Emails: the messages sent at each step
• Delays: time gaps between steps (hours, days, or specific times)
• Conditions: branching points that route contacts into different paths based on their behaviour
• Actions: things that happen to the contact record — adding tags, updating custom fields, moving to a list

Starting a New Journey

From the Automation dashboard, click Create a Journey. You will be asked to name the journey and set the initial trigger. Once the trigger is set, the canvas opens and you start building by adding steps from the right-hand panel.

Every journey starts with a trigger step. Every trigger step should have at least one email step after it, and most should have delays between emails to space out the sequence appropriately.

Trigger Types in Campaign Monitor

Understanding the available triggers is the foundation of effective automation. Campaign Monitor supports the following trigger categories.

List-Based Triggers

Joins a list: fires when a contact is added to a specific list. This is the most common trigger for welcome sequences — when someone fills in your signup form, they are added to a list, which starts the journey.

Leaves a list: useful for off-boarding sequences when contacts are removed from a programme or cancel a subscription.

Date-Based Triggers

Specific date: fires on a calendar date — useful for anniversary campaigns or time-limited promotions.

Contact date field: fires based on a date stored in the contact’s profile, such as their birthday, subscription anniversary, or trial end date. This trigger powers birthday campaigns and renewal reminders.

Email Activity Triggers

Opens an email: triggers a follow-up journey when a contact opens a specific campaign. Useful for sending deeper content to engaged readers.

Clicks a link: the most action-specific trigger available. When a contact clicks a specific link in a campaign, they enter a journey. This is excellent for turning expressed interest into a targeted follow-up sequence.

E-Commerce Triggers (via Integration)

When Campaign Monitor is connected to Shopify or another commerce platform, additional triggers become available based on purchase activity. These include purchase completion, first-time purchase, and abandoned cart events.

Building Your Welcome Journey

The welcome journey is the automation with the highest immediate return for most businesses. New subscribers have just raised their hand — they are at peak interest and peak engagement. The welcome journey capitalises on that attention before it fades.

Welcome Journey Blueprint

Step 1 — Trigger: Contact joins your master subscriber list.

Step 2 — Email 1 (immediate): Welcome and deliver any promised incentive. Subject line: “Welcome to [Brand] — here’s what’s waiting for you.” Content: genuine welcome, delivery of lead magnet or first-purchase discount if offered, brief statement of what the subscriber will receive and how often.

Step 3 — Delay: 3 days.

Step 4 — Condition: Did the contact open Email 1? Route openers and non-openers into the same next email but flag the non-openers for a different subject line test later.

Step 5 — Email 2 (Day 3): Brand story and social proof. This email answers “why should I keep reading your emails?” Content: your origin story, a customer testimonial or case study, and a soft CTA to your best-selling product.

Step 6 — Delay: 4 days.

Step 7 — Email 3 (Day 7): Best offer. Subject line that creates soft urgency around the introductory offer if you have one. Content: your top product or service with clear benefit copy, reviews, and a single prominent CTA.

Step 8 — Delay: 3 days.

Step 9 — Condition: Has the contact clicked any link in emails 1-3? If yes, add a tag “engaged-welcome” and route to a purchase-interest nurture sequence. If no, route to a standard newsletter cadence and flag for re-engagement if still inactive after 30 days.

This branching at the end of the welcome journey is what separates a functional sequence from an optimised one. You are not treating every subscriber identically after the welcome period — you are routing based on the interest they have shown.

Post-Purchase Journey

The post-purchase journey reduces buyer’s remorse, encourages product use, and builds the foundation for repeat purchases. It is one of the most direct revenue drivers in your automation stack.

Post-Purchase Journey Blueprint

Step 1 — Trigger: Contact makes a purchase (via e-commerce integration) or is added to a “customers” list.

Step 2 — Email 1 (Day 1): Thank you and what to expect. Include order confirmation details (or link to the confirmation email if you send transactional emails separately), delivery timeline, and a note of excitement about what they have purchased. Keep this email warm and human — not a dry order receipt.

Step 3 — Delay: 3 days.

Step 4 — Email 2 (Day 4): Getting the most from your purchase. How-to content, usage tips, recipe ideas, care instructions — whatever is relevant to what they bought. This email positions your brand as genuinely invested in the customer’s success, not just in the transaction.

Step 5 — Delay: 7 days.

Step 6 — Email 3 (Day 11): Social proof and review request. Ask for a review or testimonial. Pair it with a social share prompt (“Share how you use [Product] and tag us”). Make it easy — include a direct link to your review platform.

Step 7 — Delay: 10 days.

Step 8 — Email 4 (Day 21): Replenishment or cross-sell. By day 21, a consumable product is running low. A complementary product is a natural next step. This email should feel like a helpful suggestion, not a hard sell.

Re-Engagement Journey

Re-engagement journeys target contacts who have gone cold — subscribers who have not opened or clicked in 90 days or more. Left unaddressed, these contacts drag down your open rates and can hurt your sender reputation over time.

Re-Engagement Journey Blueprint

Step 1 — Trigger: Contact is added to a “cold-subscribers” segment (no opens in 90+ days). You can trigger a journey from a manual list add or via a segment-based trigger.

Step 2 — Email 1: “We miss you.” Acknowledge the gap. Ask what they want from you. Make it genuine, not a desperate plea. Use a compelling subject line (“Is this goodbye?”) that generates curiosity rather than guilt.

Step 3 — Delay: 5 days.

Step 4 — Condition: Did the contact open or click Email 1? If yes, add a tag “re-engaged” and exit to normal campaigns. If no, proceed.

Step 5 — Email 2: Last chance with an incentive. Offer something of genuine value to come back — a discount, early access, or a free resource. Subject line: “Your exclusive offer expires in 48 hours.”

Step 6 — Delay: 3 days.

Step 7 — Condition: Did the contact open or click Email 2? If yes, tag “re-engaged” and exit. If no, tag “unresponsive” and suppress from regular campaigns.

Removing unresponsive contacts from your regular sends is not giving up — it is protecting your deliverability and your metrics. Many platforms (and email experts) recommend suppressing these contacts from standard campaigns but retaining them in your account for future re-engagement attempts after a longer cooling-off period.

Measuring Journey Performance

Campaign Monitor’s automation reporting is found in the Automation dashboard. For each journey, you can see:

• Total contacts who entered the journey
• Contacts currently at each step
• Open rate and click rate for each email in the journey
• Drop-off rates at each delay or condition step
• Contacts who exited (completed the journey or triggered an exit condition)

The metrics to focus on are click rates (are contacts responding to the content?) and progression rates (are contacts dropping off at a specific step, which might indicate a problem with that email?). If a journey email has a dramatically lower click rate than the others in the sequence, that email needs attention — the content, the CTA, or the timing.

Integration With E-Commerce Platforms

Campaign Monitor connects with several e-commerce platforms including Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce via third-party connectors. The depth of the integration varies by platform and connector. Shopify connections typically offer the richest data, including purchase history, product data, and real-time event triggers.

Before building complex e-commerce journeys, test your integration carefully. Confirm that purchase events are firing in real time, that contact data is syncing correctly, and that your journey triggers are responding to the right events. An automation built on a broken integration is more damaging than no automation at all — it sends wrong sequences to the wrong people at the wrong time.

At Excelohunt, we set up and optimise Campaign Monitor journeys for brands across categories. If your current automation is underperforming or you are building from scratch, we can map out the sequence that fits your business and set it up properly from day one.

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