Automated email programs are always evolving as your business and customers change – and inevitably, your data will, too.
Following are steps for two scenarios to update the data extension in the entry event for a live journey in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE), without needing to create a new version of the journey.
- Adding new fields to the existing data extension
- Changing to a new data extension
Adding New Fields To The Existing Data Extension
This is really easy. Once you've added your new field – and presumably, your email(s) to reference the new field – all you'll need to do is publish changes to the journey.
- Start in Email Studio > Interactions > Triggered Sends
- Click on the correct journey name and version in the left side navigation, which will open you a list of triggered sends – i.e. all the emails in your journey
- Select all and click Pause, and wait for the green confirmation banner
- Select all and click Publish Changes, and wait for the green confirmation banner
- Select all and click Start/Restart, and wait for the green confirmation banner
That's it... your email changes and DE changes are now active, and your email now has access to the new field. (But of course – test it to be sure!)
Changing To A New Data Extension
This is a bit more drastic of a change, and there are probably very few real-world scenarios where you'd change the data extension without also changing the journey, which would have dependencies for its Decision Split activities, etc. However, it can be done.
(Personally, I've only done this with staged/in-progress journeys where the data extension is still going through refinement. For example, if I identified a field to add that we missed earlier, and I want it earlier/higher in the data extension adjacent to similar fields, not by itself at the end as the last field. In that case, I may create a new version of the DE with the fields in the order I want, and change the journey entry event to use the new DE. Field order probably isn't that important to most people... maybe I'm just OCD.)
To change the DE, you'll need to edit the journey's entry event, and to do that, you'll need to pause every journey using that entry event. If you go to Journey Builder > Events > Entry Sources and look at your entry event, you'll see what appears to be a link saying how many journeys use that event. Frustratingly, clicking it will simply take you to the full journey list on the JB home page, with no filters or indicators showing which journeys. So unfortunately, you'll need to figure that part out on your own.
Once you've identified which journey(s) to update:
- Open the journey > click the blue Pause button in the top right > Pause This Version
- Go through the Pause Options, which is deciding whether you want the journey to auto-resume after a period of time. What you select here is effectively irrelevant since you'll manually resume in a few minutes.
- Click OK
- Keep the window open and don't click or reload anything as you wait [somewhat] patiently for your mouse cursor to change from a spinning blue circle to the standard cursor. You'll know it's done when the blue button in the top right now says Resume.
- Close the journey, and head back to Events > Entry Sources
- Open your entry event, which will probably jump you to step 4, SUMMARY
- Click on step 2, SELECT DE, and select your new DE
- (If you don't see your DE in this list, go back to it in Email Studio and make sure you have it marked as Sendable with a mapping to subscriber key)
- Click Next through steps 3 and 4, then Done
- Go back to your journey(s) > Resume > Resume This Version
- Once again, keep the window open and don't click or reload anything as you wait for your mouse cursor to stop spinning. You'll know it's done when the blue button in the top right has gone back to saying Pause.
And there you go, your journey is now using your new data extension.
A couple of additional considerations:
- You'll obviously want to also make any changes to the email(s) at this time, referencing any new fields and not referencing any removed fields.
- In my experience, any fields that are named the same in both the old and new DEs, any Decision Split activities in the journey will recognize the field and still work. However, be sure to test this for yourself. For any removed/renamed fields referenced by splits, those splits will fail and default to the fallback path – so if you're changing fields used by journey activities, you're better off creating a new version of the journey.
Have another question about Journey Builder? Drop it in the comments!
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