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We would like to initiate a journey for 'new' users via the Rest API (POST /interaction/v1/events, see documentation). These users are new in SFMC. In other words, we have no contact (email address and associated subscriber key) in SFMC for such users.

We have some ideas to do that: We generate a unique subscriber key in our (client) application and after that we call the API with the new subscriber key ("ContactKey"), while the email-address is placed in the "Data" attribute field. That means, the journey has to install the new contact in SFMC, so we can send an email to such user.

So, our questions are: Is it in general possible to initiate a journey for "unknow" SFMC users? How can we install a new contact (subscriber key) in SFMC inside a journey? Or can you advise us another approach? Remark: We like to use a journey and it has to be just one API call, in order to reduce complexity on our side.

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  • When generating a new subscriber key in your client application, do you ensure deduplication, to verify that the same contact does not already exist in Marketing Cloud?
    – Lukas Lunow
    Commented May 31, 2021 at 12:51
  • Hi Lukas, yes we do!
    – Alexander from Berlin
    Commented May 31, 2021 at 14:54

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This is a very normal scenario, and I have a significant number of examples where API initiated journey is the first occurrence of the Contact Key/Email Address combination. This applies specifically to welcome journeys, which are initiated immediately upon someone signing up or completing a purchase.

You should start by building a sendable data extension, with a single field with the type of "Email Address", as well as additional fields holding data needed for your journey. Keep in mind that these fields need to correspond to the field names in your JSON payload to the event endpoint, e.g.:

{
    "ContactKey": "c9f3977e-cf58-487f-bb26-3dcd7ed1f61f",
    "EventDefinitionKey":"Welcome Journey",
    "Data": {
        "Email":[email protected]",
        "FullName":"John Doe",
        "Locale":"en_US" } 
}

Once the contact has entered the journey and the email has been sent, you will be able to find the contact key both in All Contacts, as well as in All Subscribers.

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  • Great! This sounds good. We will have a try. Thank you!
    – Alexander from Berlin
    Commented Jun 1, 2021 at 7:21
  • Hello, Lukas. Thanks for the hint. What kind of journey are you referring? There are three types of journeys. We like to use 'Multi-Step Journey's in order to A-B-test different mails, but unfortunately this kind of journey has to be scheduled. As far as we know, it only can run once per hour. Isn't it? This would be a bad user experience. Could we do this with a 'Transactional Send Journey", too? But I'm afraid, in that case we can't do any A-B-testing. Do we?
    – Alexander from Berlin
    Commented Jun 1, 2021 at 9:09
  • You are not correct. You can use API entry event with Multi Step Journey...
    – Lukas Lunow
    Commented Jun 1, 2021 at 9:10
  • Thank you very much for your reply. We will try it out and give you feedback after that!
    – Alexander from Berlin
    Commented Jun 1, 2021 at 13:30
  • You're welcome @AlexanderBerlin. However, instead of a thank you comment - even it indeed is much appreciated, you should accept/upvote the answer, as described here.
    – Lukas Lunow
    Commented Jun 1, 2021 at 13:53

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