Zoho Marketing Automation Journeys and Website Tracking

A campaign is a one-off: lots of effort for a single send. A journey takes longer to build, but it keeps working for every new contact who enters it. Combine journeys with Zoho Marketing Automation's website tracking and you can follow up based on what people actually do — not just whether they opened an email.

If you haven't set up your CRM sync and segments yet, start with Getting Started with Zoho Marketing Automation.

Build your first journey

Create a journey and either pick a template (a good source of ideas if you're new) or start from scratch.

1. Choose a trigger

The most useful trigger is contact added to a segment. Because segments update automatically from CRM data, people enter the journey as soon as they match. Choose whether to include contacts already in the segment, only new ones, or only existing ones. A journey can have several triggers.

2. Add actions

Drag in Send email and create the email as you would a normal campaign. Add a WhatsApp step alongside it if it suits your audience.

3. Add a time delay

Don't bombard people — add a delay, such as seven days. You can choose which days actions may run: for B2B, leave weekends unticked and anything due on a Saturday rolls to Monday.

4. Branch on email activity

Add a Check email activity step for the earlier email and branch on clicked, opened or delivered:

• Clicked: create a task in Zoho CRM for the existing record owner to call them. This is where marketing and sales start working together.
• Opened but not clicked: send a follow-up email.
• Delivered but not opened: clone the original email block, wait another week and resend — then merge the paths back together to continue.

Other actions include adding or removing list membership, assigning tags (which can then trigger other journeys or target campaigns), updating the lead score, sending internal notification emails, and webhooks for connecting your own software.

A good first journey is a new-lead sequence: when someone fills in a newsletter or contact form, send a short series over a few weeks telling them more about you. Build it once and every future lead benefits.

Test a journey before launch

Sending test emails only checks individual steps, not the flow. Instead:

1. Create a segment of internal test contacts (e.g. email contains your company domain).
2. Use that segment as the journey's trigger and launch it.
3. Shorten time delays to around an hour while testing, or you'll wait weeks.
4. When you're happy, restore the delays and add your real segment as a trigger.

Journey reporting

A journey's overview shows how many contacts entered and exited each step over a chosen period. Click the person icon on any block to see exactly who's there, or look up one contact's path by email address. For deeper reporting, Marketing Automation integrates with Zoho Analytics.

Website tracking: the missing link

Add the tracking code from Settings → Web to your website's header. It sets a cookie, so update your cookie policy as you would for any analytics tool. You then get:

• Simple website analytics — visitors, sessions, entry and exit pages, traffic sources — without the complexity of Google Analytics. Don't expect the numbers to match other tools exactly; each defines a "visitor" differently. The trends should line up.
• Known visitors. When someone clicks a link in your email, Marketing Automation knows who they are and can track what they do on your site.

Goals

Create goals for the actions that matter — typically a form's thank-you page. When a known visitor reaches a goal, you can see which campaign drove it, and a response action can tag them. That tag can start a new journey — and because the data comes from CRM, the journey can skip people who already have an open deal.

That's far more meaningful than open rates, which are now unreliable because Apple Mail and many security tools open emails automatically.

Page-visit triggers

Journeys can also start on a page visit — including a number of visits. One visit to your pricing page might mean nothing; five probably means interest.

Smart URLs

Smart URLs generate a tracked link, a short URL and a QR code for a specific campaign — ideal for print. Put one on business cards for an event, or on your vans, and you'll know exactly which leads came from them.

Pop-ups and landing pages without a developer

Once the tracking code is on your site, you can launch these from Marketing Automation with no further code:

• Sign-up forms — embeddable forms (usually best for newsletter sign-ups) with response actions and push to CRM.
• Sign-up pop-ups — pop-up, slide-in, banner or full-screen, targeted by page, device, audience (new, returning, known, unknown) and trigger (page entry, exit intent, scroll depth). Pause and clone them as campaigns change.
• Engagement pop-ups — information or offers rather than data capture, with frequency controls and custom-event triggers if you have a developer.
• Landing pages — a drag-and-drop builder with templates (including webinar pages), forms and code snippets for anything the editor can't do. Connect a subdomain via DNS to use your own domain — and reuse one address, such as events.yourdomain.com, for each new event so shared links never go out of date.

For marketing teams without easy access to a web developer, this is one of the most valuable — and most overlooked — parts of the product.

Watch the full webinar to see a journey, goals and pop-ups built live.