Marketing Cloud Journey Interaction not injecting any contacts

Question

I have created a New DE having 5 fields

• EmailAddress
• FirstName
• LastName
• LinkClicked
• SubscriberKey

Used for Sending Yes Used for Testing Yes

Of these Fields, LinkClicked and SubscriberKey are blank fields. While other 3 have values. I am having total 3 records. These records / email IDs are not present in all subscribers.

I have linked ContactKey to EmailAddress in Data Designer in one-one rel. Also marked it "Use as ROOT". Now I am creating a Journey using the above DE as entry source and schedule as Never. After activating the journey, I am firing an event on entry source DE using Automation Studio.

My Issues:

1. When i go back and check the journey, no contacts are injected. Why ?

2. If i also remove old records and import new records in my DE, and fire the automation, still it does not show any contacts injected. What am i missing here.

3. Every time I have to mark it as Root again and again after sometime.

4. Even when Subscriber and LinkCLicked fields are not present/ are deleted, the same issues are present, so i believe it is not linked to that. Is it true ?

Can someone guide me where is the problem and is there any step missing. Pankaj

Answer 1

Can you be more clear by saying you have Rooted the data extension. As per July 2016 release, SFMC has stopped root relationships and instead replaced with Populations.

Deprecated Root Relationships

Instead of rooting the data extensions, you should be using populations:

Create a Population

If you have done Populations, only missing configuration as I could see is adding your email address in the contact configuration. Check if you have added your email address in the contact configuration. You can also add the default email address in Journey builder settings (I would prefer this as this is more reliant)

Chances are also that your contacts fell below the high water mark. Try inserting new records and test or if this is your test journey, you can delete the records in data extension and try.

Answer 2

As Ganesh points out, you will need to create a Population; don't attempt to edit the Root relationship option in the DE. The intent of a Population is that you link to an existing sendable DE containing your Contacts. However, in your case it sounds like those Contacts don't yet exist in the Contact model so it would make sense to use create a Population using event source DE as the Attribute Set.

Regarding your issue where the Email Address field is not appearing in Contacts Configuration, I assume that this is a sendable Data Extension and the EmailAddress field is type 'Email Address' not 'text'. Can you confirm?

Regarding your comment on the Contact not being in All Subscribers, when an email is sent, a Subscriber record will automatically be created for the Contact.

If you happen to be attending Dreamforce this week, I'd be happy to review your configuration with you.

Answer 3

Try storing emailaddress in subscriberkey (or whichever value you use as your subscriberkey) and tying to contactlist via the subscriberkeys instead of emailaddress.

Sometimes, emails that are not in the contact list will get rejected. ET told me that this can be worked around by prioritizing the DE's emailaddress over the contact list's email address (under contact builder > contacts configuration). I've still seen records rejected. as a workaround, i inject the DE's users into the contact list, then run the DE.