A good journey could run for years, but for many of us – our email content has a set expiration date. Seasonality could require the email content to be updated. Another issue could be image rights. So what does that mean for your journey?
There are a many different ways to go about updating your journey content. Today we will talk about 3 of them:
- Updating the Email in Journey Builder
- Updating the Email in Email Studio
- Brand New Email
Option 1: Update the Email in Journey Builder
If you are updating the email content from within the journey, you won’t need to do any other steps. To access the screen to update, simply click on the email activity on your journey builder canvas. Once it opens up, use the drop-down in the upper right corner to switch from analytics to Activity Summary. Then in the “Message Definition” section, open that drop-down and select “Edit Message”. By updating from within the journey, you are only changing the email version within the journey. This change will not affect the original email in Email Studio.
By editing the email inside the Journey, Journey Builder will automatically pause, republish, and re-activate that activity on the save.
Option 2: Updating the Existing Email in Email Studio
Please note: Journey Builder will NOT automatically pull in changes you make on the email outside of Journey Builder. You will need to publish the changes to the Journey.
There are a couple of different ways that you can use to publish your changes. The easiest way is to create a new version of the journey. When you activate the new version, Journey Builder pulls in the most recent version of the email template to save on that journey.
The other options is to “fake” edit the email activity within the Active Journey. To do this, simply go into the email activity, as we did in Option 1, and then save. When you save it should pull in the most recent version. I tend to be overly cautious on this – so I will select a different message, then go and select the correct message. By switching from one template to another and then back again, I know that Journey Builder has pulled in the most recent version.