Journeys originally required you to set External IDs in order for them to receive messages from a Journey. Now, your subscriptions use a unique identifier called the OneSignal ID. Since every subscription has a OneSignal ID, you are no longer required to set an External ID for users to receive messages in a journey. Learn more about aliases and External IDs

If you haven't previously used External IDs for your subscription management, you will be able to start using Journeys right away.

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This change to Journeys will be generally available soon.

For Enterprise plans, all Journeys will start referencing the OneSignal ID on November 15, 2023.

For Professional plans, all Journeys will start referencing OneSignal ID on December 13, 2023.

What does this mean for your existing Journeys?

When this change is enabled, users who didn't previously have an External ID will be able to enter your active Journeys.

If you are already using Journeys and have some subscriptions without an External ID, we will start bringing more subscriptions through your Journey based on your entry rules to target a wider user base.

The expansion of your audience depends on your current coverage of External ID. For example, if a small percentage of your subscriptions have External ID set, you will see much higher traffic enter a Journey; if you have External ID set on most of your subscriptions, you will not see a large difference in additional audience size.

To check the level of coverage you have, you can go to Audience> Subscriptions and Export your subscriptions list. Then you can check the external_id column to review coverage.

Do I need to do anything to my Journey for it to work as expected?

This depends entirely on how you would like your users to be brought into Journeys. The change to reference the OneSignal ID may bring in more subscriptions, so you may want to take the following precautions to ensure the right audience is messaged:

1. Check your audience segments. Make sure that you are including and excluding the correct segments to enter a Journey. Journeys will now capture 100% of the subscriptions in any given audience in comparison to before, where only the subscriptions with External ID were captured.
2. For any Journey meant for brand new users only, we suggest that you stop and relaunch that Journey with “Future Additions only” selected. For example, this may apply for an onboarding Journey. Relaunching with this setting will ensure that only new subscriptions meeting your entry rules will be messaged.
3. Check your Automated Messages. If you are sending Automated Messages in addition to Journeys, we recommend disabling any Automated Messages that are sending a similar message to these users

If you have additional questions about these changes, or you would like us to automatically archive your Journeys so you can recreate them after this feature is enabled, please contact us at [email protected].