How does DESelect Engage deal with always-on journeys, where you don't know in advance who will enter the journey?

An always-on journey is a journey where you don't know in advance which contacts will enter the journey and when. An example of this would be a journey that a contact enters after an event occurred, such as a purchase.

In many cases, such journeys will be transactional, meaning you always want to send these campaign Sends (also referred to as just "Send/s"), no matter the saturation levels of the contacts.

For how to best deal with those cases, please check How can I overrule saturation control to make sure a certain Send is sent?

However, if you do want to apply saturation control to these journeys, you'll have to create a Send in Engage to link the Engage journey builder component to. You can create this Send from within the journey builder component or the Engage app. When doing so, you can leave the Send date empty, as there is no specific send date on which the Send is sent to all contacts.

- There are 2 different ways these journeys could be triggered:

1. You're doing nightly calculations of who should be in the journey, put those contacts in a data extension, and schedule the journey to be sent later in the day.
   • Link the Send you're using to the data extension which is the entry point to your journey.
   • Currently, these Sends will be considered unplanned Sends (see more in the next paragraph), as Engage does not know in advance when people will go through the journey. In the future, Engage will be able to plan for these kinds of Sends to be sent that day.
2. Contacts enter the journey through an event that happened and immediately flow through the journey. 
   • DESelect Engage cannot plan for this Send in the daily calculations. Such Sends will be considered unplanned Sends.

For more info on how Engage deals with unplanned Sends, please see How does Engage deal with unplanned Sends?