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Problem:

I'd like to exclude customers who are currently in journeys A and B from receiving newsletter send C.

Possible solution:

The only way I could come up with yet involves the following steps:

  1. Get the TriggeredSendCustomerKeys of the triggered sends for the first email send activities of journeys A and B.
  2. Create an Automation containing a SQL query activity that retrieves the SubscriberKey from Sent data view and filters by EventDate plus maximum journey duration greater than the current date for the TriggeredSendCustomerKeys of step 1.
  3. Use the created data extension as exclusion for the newsletter send.

Question:

Is there an easier and more accurate (different journey paths could have different durations) possibility to exclude contacts currently inside a specific journey or a defined set of journeys from the audience of an email send within Email Studio? Querying the current population of a journey would be a more straightforward approach, unfortunately I couldn't find any documentation on this.

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There would be a few different approaches to applying the suppression of these subscribers to your Newsletter. I'm going with Filters, here, but you could look at Auto-Suppression Lists, Exclusion Lists at time of send or SQL. To determine whether the contact is currently in a Journey, I would propose using Update Contact Activities at the entry and all exits from your Interactions

You could consider creating a data extension like this called "JourneyStatus":

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To Allow you to use this in Filters, create a new Data Relationship:enter image description here

Add an Update Contact Activity to set the Contacts "InJourneyA" or "InJourneyB" field to true at the beginning of the Interaction.

enter image description here

Add Update Contact Activities at each exit from the Interaction. If you have many exits from your Journey use Join Activities to Join all the exits to a single path and place your Update Contact Activity on the final single joined path:

enter image description here enter image description here

Create a Filter Activity or Filtered DE to use for sending your Newletter with "InJourneyA = False AND InJourneyB = False" as your selection criteria:

enter image description here

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  • The only downside I can see is having to know if contacts of this journey need to be excluded from newsletter sends anytime in the future when creating the journey. Hopefully this will work out ;) – Markus Slabina Jun 8 '17 at 9:06
  • I'm not certain I understand fully. Do you want something like a data view with entries and exits and everything else in between available to do something more sophisticated? I'd definitely concur. We have what we have, though, to solution/hack our way around. – Macca Jun 8 '17 at 14:05
  • Yes, that would be perfect, however I guess such a data view currently isn't available. In my opinion this would be great as I see requirements of our marketing division change quite frequently which requires altering journeys after they have been started (or increased initial effort) just to allow such simple features like exclusion from a newsletter send. So the "hopefully this will work out" in my previous comment was no critic on your solution, which is surely the best option currently available, but rather my hope marketers at my company know if this is necessary before starting a journey – Markus Slabina Jun 8 '17 at 14:23
  • No, that data view doesn't exist, like you say. It's interesting what you say, though. And I feel the sentiment about going back and editing journeys - bloody painful! – Macca Jun 8 '17 at 14:57

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