How to Use HubSpot Journeys Tool: A Strategic Guide for Marketers

Marketing automation shouldn't feel robotic. The best automation creates experiences that feel personal, timely, and genuinely helpful to your prospects and customers. 

That's exactly what the HubSpot Journeys tool is designed to do—help you build customer experiences that guide people through their relationship with your business in a way that feels natural, not automated.

If you've been frustrated by the limitations of linear workflows or you're looking to create more sophisticated, behavior-driven customer experiences, understanding how to use the HubSpot Journeys tool effectively can transform your marketing automation strategy. 

This guide walks you through everything you need to know—from core features and strategic use cases to step-by-step setup instructions.

What is the HubSpot Journeys Tool?

The HubSpot Journeys tool is a visual workflow builder that automates customer experiences across multiple touchpoints. 

Unlike traditional linear workflows, Journeys lets you map out complex customer paths with branch logic, creating personalized experiences based on how contacts interact with your content, engage with your team, or move through their buyer's journey.

Think of it this way: Workflows are like following a recipe step-by-step. Journeys are like being a chef who adapts the dish based on what's in season, who's eating, and how the meal is progressing.

Why HubSpot Evolved from Workflows to Journeys

HubSpot evolved from their original Workflows tool to Journeys to reflect a fundamental shift in how businesses should think about automation. Instead of simply automating tasks in a straight line, Journeys encourages you to design experiences around your customer's path.

You're not just sending emails on a schedule—you're creating a journey that adapts based on behavior, preferences, and engagement.

Who Should Use the HubSpot Journeys Tool?

Marketing teams managing lead nurturing campaigns will find Journeys invaluable for moving prospects from awareness to consideration to decision.

Sales teams can automate their follow-up sequences while keeping outreach personalized and timely based on prospect behavior.

Service teams can create comprehensive onboarding experiences and support workflows that adapt to customer needs.

But here's the thing—you don't need to be a marketing automation expert to benefit from Journeys. 

If you're a business owner looking to scale without adding headcount, Journeys helps you provide consistent, high-quality experiences to every contact in your database, even as your business grows.

Limitations of the HubSpot Journeys Tool

Before we dive deeper, it's important to understand what Journeys can and can't do. Setting proper expectations helps you plan effectively and avoid frustration down the road.

Journeys Availability Depends on Your HubSpot Tier

Journeys is only available in Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise tiers, along with certain Service Hub tiers. If you're on Starter, you'll be working with the more basic Workflows tool.

There’s a Learning Curve

The learning curve can be steep initially. The visual builder offers tremendous power, but that power comes with complexity. Your first few Journeys might take longer to build than you expect as you wrap your head around branch logic and enrollment criteria.

Complex Journeys May Introduce Timing and Processing Delays

Complex Journeys with dozens of branches and thousands of enrolled contacts may experience processing delays, particularly if you're triggering multiple actions simultaneously. It's not usually a deal-breaker, but it's worth planning for in time-sensitive campaigns.

You Might Encounter Some Technical Limitations

You can't enroll the same contact in the same Journey more than once unless you specifically configure re-enrollment settings. Once someone completes or exits a Journey, they won't automatically go through it again, which can be limiting for recurring campaigns.

Additionally, certain actions within Journeys have rate limits. You can't send unlimited emails per day, and there are caps on how many contacts can be enrolled at once.

Journey Reporting Is High-Level, Not Deeply Granular

Reporting can feel limited compared to what you might want. While you get basic analytics on enrollment, completion, and goal achievement, diving deep into performance by specific branch or action requires exporting data and analyzing it externally.

Why Journeys Matter for Modern Marketing

Your customers expect personalized, omnichannel experiences. They want you to remember their preferences, understand where they are in their journey, and provide relevant information when they need it.

Managing those expectations manually across hundreds or thousands of contacts is impossible—and that's where Journeys becomes essential.

The Complexity Challenge:

The complexity challenge is real. You might have prospects who downloaded an ebook, attended a webinar, visited your pricing page twice, and subscribed to your newsletter.

What should your next touchpoint be? Journeys helps you manage that complexity by automating decision-making based on the rules and logic you define.

Measurable Business Impact:

The business impact is significant. Companies using Journey-style automation typically see higher conversion rates because messaging is more relevant and timely.

Customer retention improves because onboarding and ongoing engagement are consistent and well-timed. And operational efficiency increases dramatically because your team isn't manually managing every touchpoint.

Journeys vs. Workflows: When to Use Each

Not every automation needs the full power of Journeys. Understanding when to use Journeys versus the simpler Workflows tool helps you work more efficiently.

Here's a quick comparison to help you decide which tool fits your needs:

Use Journeys when you're designing customer experiences that need to adapt based on behavior, span multiple channels, or require sophisticated decision logic. Use Workflows when you need simple automation—updating contact properties, managing list memberships, or sending straightforward email sequences.

5 Core Features of the HubSpot Journeys Tool

1. Visual Journey Builder Interface

The visual journey builder gives you a drag-and-drop canvas for mapping customer paths. You can see the entire journey at a glance, making it easy to identify gaps, optimize timing, and understand how contacts flow through your automation.

Branch logic allows personalization at scale. You might send one email to contacts who opened your previous message and a different follow-up to those who didn't.

2. Flexible Trigger Options

Trigger options give you multiple ways to enroll contacts. Form submissions are the most common trigger, but you can also enroll based on list membership, property changes, or custom events.

If someone's lifecycle stage changes to "Marketing Qualified Lead," they could automatically enter a sales handoff journey. If they visit your pricing page three times in a week, that behavior could trigger a sales notification.

3. Goal-Based Journey Design

Goal-based journey design keeps you focused on outcomes. Before you build, you define what success looks like—maybe it's a demo booking, a purchase, or simply engagement with key content.

The Journey tracks progress toward that goal and provides data on what percentage of enrollees achieve it.

4. Multi-Channel Actions

Multi-channel actions mean you're not limited to email. You can send emails, create tasks for your sales or service teams, update CRM properties to keep contact records current, and even trigger webhooks to connect with external systems.

A single Journey might send a welcome email, wait for engagement, create a sales task if engagement is high, or schedule a check-in email if engagement drops off.

5. Real-Time Analytics

Real-time analytics and performance monitoring show you exactly how your Journey is performing. You can see enrollment numbers, completion rates, goal achievement, and identify exactly where contacts are dropping off.

This visibility makes optimization straightforward. You can see what's working and what needs adjustment.

Examples of Strategic Use Cases for HubSpot Journeys

Lead Nurturing:

Lead nurturing represents one of the most powerful applications. Create educational drip campaigns that adapt based on content downloads and engagement patterns. 

• Integrate lead scoring so high-engagement contacts automatically route to sales while others continue nurturing. 
• Build product consideration sequences that serve different content based on which solutions someone has shown interest in. 

Your Journey might start with educational content, branch based on which resources someone downloads, and culminate in a case study or demo offer aligned with their interests.

Customer Onboarding Journeys:

Customer onboarding Journeys ensure every new customer gets a consistent, comprehensive welcome experience. 

• Send a welcome series introducing your team and key resources, then branch based on product usage. 
• Customers who actively engage might get advanced tips and feature highlights, while those with lower usage could receive check-in emails from support or tutorial content. 

Build in milestone touchpoints—30 days in, 60 days in, 90 days in—to maintain engagement. This is also where you can identify upsell opportunities by tracking feature adoption and engagement patterns.

Re-Engagement and Win-Back Campaigns:

Re-engagement and win-back campaigns help you recover inactive contacts without being pushy. 

• Identify inactive segments based on engagement drops, then create graduated re-engagement attempts. 
• Start with a friendly check-in, perhaps offering new content or asking for updated preferences. 
  • If that doesn't work, try a different channel or offer. 

Include preference center updates to reduce unsubscribes—sometimes people just want fewer emails, not zero emails. For churned customers, win-back Journeys might include special offers, product update announcements, or case studies showing how others have succeeded.

Best Practices for Customer Journey Design in HubSpot

Start With Planning Before Building:

Start with planning before building. Map the customer experience on paper or a whiteboard before you ever touch the Journey builder.

• Define clear goals—what does success look like, and how will you measure it?
• Identify your decision points and what logic should govern each branch.
• Consider the timing between touchpoints carefully. Too fast and you're overwhelming people; too slow and you lose momentum.

Personalization Strategies:

Personalization strategies should go beyond using someone's first name.

• Leverage contact properties to customize messaging based on industry, company size, or role.
• Use behavioral triggers—page visits, email clicks, content downloads—to inform what comes next.
• Adapt your journey path based on lifecycle stage. Someone who's already a customer shouldn't receive the same messaging as a cold prospect.

A/B testing within Journeys helps you optimize subject lines, sending times, and content approaches.

Performance Monitoring:

Performance monitoring should be ongoing, not just at launch.

• Check your journey analytics dashboard weekly, at minimum.
• Track enrollment numbers to ensure you're reaching the audience you expect.
• Monitor completion rates to see if contacts are making it through your full journey or exiting early.
• Measure goal achievement against your benchmarks.

Identify bottlenecks and drop-off points—if 50% of people exit after a specific email, that email needs work.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Creating Customer Journeys

Over-Complication:

Over-complication is the most frequent mistake. When you first start with Journeys, it's tempting to build elaborate, multi-branch experiences with dozens of decision points. Resist that urge. Start simple and build incrementally.

A journey with three or four branches is far easier to manage and optimize than one with twenty. Complexity creates maintenance challenges—the more branches you have, the more you need to update when messaging or strategy changes.

Poor Timing and Frequency:

Poor timing and frequency kill engagement. Email fatigue is real. If you're sending multiple touches per week, you're probably overdoing it.

• Build in appropriate delays between touchpoints—generally 2–7 days for nurturing campaigns, longer for educational content.
• Account for business hours and time zones if you're serving a global audience.
• Consider that people might be in multiple Journeys simultaneously—check for overlap that could result in too many emails at once.

Lack of Testing and Maintenance:

Lack of testing and maintenance causes Journeys to degrade over time. Always test before activating.

• Enroll yourself or test contacts to verify that emails send correctly, links work, and branches trigger as expected.
• Review and update content regularly.

A Journey built six months ago might reference outdated information, old offers, or products that have changed. Set a quarterly review schedule to refresh content and check performance.

How to Use HubSpot Journeys Tool: Step-by-Step

Building your first Journey might feel overwhelming, but breaking it down into clear steps makes the process manageable. Here's exactly how to create a Journey from start to finish.

Step 1: Access the Journeys Tool

Navigate to the Automation menu in your HubSpot portal and select Journeys. You'll need Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise to see this option. 

If you don't see Journeys listed, check your subscription level and user permissions. Only users with Marketing or Super Admin permissions can create Journeys, though other users can be granted access through custom permission sets.

Step 2: Create Your First Journey

Click the "Create journey" button in the upper right corner. 

You'll be presented with two options: start from a template or build from scratch. Templates can be helpful for your first Journey as they provide structure and best practice examples. 

You'll find templates for common scenarios like welcome series, event follow-up, and lead nurturing. 

For maximum control and learning, choose "Start from scratch." Give your Journey a clear, descriptive name using a consistent naming convention—something like "New Subscriber Welcome Series" or "Product Demo Follow-up Q4 2024." Good naming helps you find and manage Journeys as your library grows.

Step 3: Set Your Journey Goal

Before you build anything else, define what success looks like. 

Click "Set goal" and choose from options like form submission, page view, event completion, or deal stage change. Your goal should align with your business objective for this Journey. 

If you're nurturing leads, your goal might be "Contact submits demo request form." For customer onboarding, it might be "Contact logs into product for the first time." 

Setting the goal first keeps your entire Journey focused on driving toward that outcome. HubSpot will track what percentage of enrolled contacts achieve this goal, giving you clear performance metrics.

Step 4: Define Entry Criteria

Entry criteria determine who gets enrolled in your Journey and when. 

Click "Set enrollment triggers" to configure this. The most common trigger types are form submissions (someone fills out a specific form and immediately enters the Journey), list membership (contacts are enrolled when added to a particular list), and property changes (enrollment happens when a contact property meets certain criteria, like lifecycle stage changing to MQL). You can combine multiple criteria—for example, form submission AND company size greater than 50 employees.

Set your re-enrollment preferences carefully. 

By default, contacts can only go through a Journey once. If you want people to be able to re-enter (like for a monthly newsletter Journey), enable re-enrollment and set the conditions. 

You can also add suppression lists here—contacts on these lists will never be enrolled, even if they meet other criteria. This is useful for excluding customers from prospect nurturing campaigns or ensuring unsubscribed contacts don't receive emails.

Step 5: Build Your Journey Path

Now you're ready to build the actual Journey. Click the plus icon below your enrollment trigger to add your first action. 

The most common first action is sending an email. Select "Send email" and either choose an existing email or create a new one. If you're creating a new email, you'll need to complete it and hit save before continuing with your Journey.

After your first action, add a delay. Click the plus icon and select "Delay." You can delay for a specific amount of time (hours, days, weeks) or delay until a specific day and time. 

For nurturing campaigns, 2-4 days between emails is typically appropriate. For time-sensitive campaigns like event follow-up, you might use shorter delays.

Step 6: Add Branch Logic

This is where Journeys become powerful. Click the plus icon after a delay and select "If/then branch." You'll define a condition that splits contacts into two or more paths. 

Common branching criteria include email engagement (did they open or click your last email?), property values (what's their industry or job role?), page views (did they visit your pricing page?), and form submissions (did they fill out another form while in this Journey?).

For each branch, create a distinct path. Contacts who opened your email might receive more detailed content, while those who didn't could get a different angle or a reminder. 

You can nest branches within branches, but be careful—complexity increases maintenance burden. Start with one or two branch points and add more only if needed.

Step 7: Configure Actions Throughout Your Journey

Beyond emails, you can add various actions at each step. 

"Create task" assigns a task to a specific user or team—useful for sales follow-up when a contact shows high engagement. "Update contact property" keeps your CRM data current—you might update a "Last Journey Interaction" date or increment an engagement score. "Add to list" or "Remove from list" manages list membership for segmentation or reporting. "Webhook" triggers external actions if you're connected to other systems. 

Each action serves a purpose in guiding contacts toward your goal or keeping your data organized.

Step 8: Set Goal Checkpoints

Throughout your Journey, you can add goal checkpoints. These aren't required, but they're valuable for understanding performance. 

Click "Add goal" at any point in your Journey to create a checkpoint. When a contact reaches that point, you can measure how many have already achieved your end goal versus how many are still progressing. This helps identify if certain parts of your Journey are more effective than others at driving toward your objective.

Step 9: Test Before Launch

Never launch a Journey without testing. 

Click "Test" in the upper right corner. You'll be prompted to select test contacts—use your own email address or create test contacts with various properties to verify different branches work correctly. 

Enroll your test contacts and monitor what happens. Check that emails arrive and display properly on both desktop and mobile. Verify all links work and point to the correct pages. Confirm that branches trigger as expected based on test contact properties or actions. Walk through the entire Journey from a contact's perspective.

Step 10: Activate and Monitor

Once testing confirms everything works, you're ready to launch. 

Click "Review" to see a summary of your Journey settings, triggers, and actions. HubSpot will flag any errors or warnings—address these before proceeding. When you're confident everything is correct, click "Turn on." Your Journey is now live and will begin enrolling contacts based on your trigger criteria.

Monitoring is critical in the first week. Check your Journey dashboard daily to track enrollment numbers (are contacts entering as expected?), email performance (open rates, click rates), and goal achievement (what percentage of enrolled contacts have hit your success metric?). 

Look at the visual flow to see where contacts are in the Journey—if many are stuck at a particular point or exiting early, investigate why.

Step 11: Optimize Based on Data

After your Journey has been running for at least two weeks with meaningful enrollment numbers, start optimization. 

Look at email performance within each Journey step—low open rates might indicate your subject line needs work or your sending time is off. High unsubscribe rates suggest your content isn't resonating or you're emailing too frequently. Branch analysis shows which path performs better—if one branch consistently leads to higher goal achievement, consider what's different about that approach.

Make changes incrementally so you can measure impact. Change one element at a time—swap out an email, adjust a delay, refine your branch logic—and give it time to generate new data. Compare performance before and after your change. Document what works so you can apply those learnings to future Journeys.

Getting Started: Choosing Your First Journey

Prerequisites start with subscription access—ensure you have Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise. 

• Your portal needs to be properly set up with clean contact data, organized lists, and appropriate lifecycle stages configured. 
• Make sure your team has the right permissions to create and manage Journeys.

For your first Journey, choose a simple, high-impact use case. 

• A welcome series for new subscribers is ideal—it's relatively straightforward but immediately valuable. 
• A lead nurturing sequence for a specific content offer works well too. Build your journey structure starting with a clear entry trigger and defined goal. 
• Add your first action (likely a welcome email), then introduce one or two branches based on simple criteria like email open or click. Keep it manageable.

How To Scale Your Journey Strategy

Once you've successfully launched your first Journey, the mindset shift becomes important. 

• Move from campaign thinking to experience design. 
• Instead of "we need to send an email about our new feature," think "how does this new feature fit into our customer's ongoing journey with us?" 

Continuous optimization becomes a practice, not a project. You're always refining, testing, and improving based on data.

Creating a journey library helps maintain consistency. 

• Document your most successful Journeys and their key elements. 
• Build templates for common use cases—welcome series, event follow-up, product education—that can be adapted rather than rebuilt from scratch. 

This also supports team training as new members join.

When to expand versus refine is a strategic question. 

• Don't build a new Journey just because you can. 
• Audit your existing Journeys first. 
  • Are there opportunities to improve what's already running? 
  • Could you add another branch to better serve a segment? 

Only once you've optimized your current Journeys should you expand to new use cases.

Ready to Design Journeys That Drive Growth in HubSpot?

Whether you're new to marketing automation or upgrading from traditional workflows, the HubSpot Journeys tool offers a more holistic, scalable way to design customer experiences. 

Understanding how to use HubSpot Journeys effectively transforms your ability to guide prospects and customers through meaningful, personalized experiences that drive real business growth.

Ready to build strategic, end-to-end solutions that help you reach your revenue and growth goals? We combine strategic and technical expertise with HubSpot to get you there.

Contact the Evenbound team today to get started!