Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / How Marketing Automation Workflows Trigger Email Fatigue
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about something that happens quietly inside most marketing automation platforms: list fatigue from your own workflows. Luna: Quiet but costly, I imagine. Is this the thing where you send more triggered emails and people just start tuning out? Lucas: Exactly. And it's not just about open rates. It's about a feedback loop. I was looking at a SaaS company's HubSpot instance last week — about 50,000 contacts. They'd built a beautiful multi-step nurture with six triggered emails over ten days. First email opened at 38 percent. By email six, they were at 14 percent. Luna: Ouch. And that's probably not all disengagement. Some of those opens are probably bot opens now, so real humans might be even lower. Lucas: Right. Apple Mail Privacy Protection has made open rates less reliable, but even the trend line tells the story. The real problem? They kept the workflow running for eighteen months without any review. Luna: So they were repeatedly emailing people who had already shown they weren't interested. That's how you build spam complaints. Lucas: That's the second loop. More fatigue leads to more unsubscribes and spam reports, which hurts sender reputation. And with the new Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender rules that took effect earlier this year, a spam complaint rate above 0.1 percent can land you in the junk folder for everyone. Luna: I've heard about those. They require one-click unsubscribe and a spam rate below 0.1 percent for senders sending over 5,000 messages a day. That's pretty much any B2B marketing team. Lucas: Exactly. So fatigue isn't just a soft metric anymore. It's a deliverability compliance issue. The company I mentioned had a spam complaint rate of 0.18 percent on that workflow. They were flirting with being blocked. Luna: What's the fix? Do you kill the workflow entirely? Lucas: Not necessarily. But you need what I call an 'inactivity cap' built into the trigger logic. If a contact hasn't opened or clicked any of the last three emails from any workflow, you should suppress them from future sends until they re-engage via a different channel. Luna: That makes sense. But won't that shrink your active list pretty aggressively? Lucas: It will. And that's actually the point. A smaller engaged list is worth more than a large fatigued one. There's a great tool called recency scoring — you assign points based on how recently someone engaged. Anyone below a threshold goes into a dormant segment. Luna: So you're not deleting them. You're just pausing the automated cadence. Then you can run a separate re-engagement campaign with a single email, maybe once a quarter, asking if they still want to hear from you. Lucas: Exactly. And if they don't click that, you suppress them for another 90 days. I've seen companies cut their email volume by 30 percent but actually increase overall conversions by 12 percent because the remaining audience is warmer. Luna: That's the kind of trade-off that's hard to explain to a VP who wants to see 'more sends' in the dashboard. But it's the right call. Lucas: Absolutely. And here's another angle: if you're using event-triggered workflows — like someone downloads a whitepaper, you send them three follow-ups — you need to build in a time-based decay. If they downloaded the whitepaper six months ago and you just added a new follow-up email, it shouldn't fire on that old event. Luna: Right. They might not even remember the whitepaper. I've seen that with Marketo — evergreen nurture programs that never expire. Suddenly someone gets an email referencing a webinar from last year and they're confused. Lucas: That's the fatigue we don't always measure. Cognitive load. The person might not unsubscribe, but they mentally check out. And that makes future re-engagement harder. Luna: So what's the practical step for teams listening? Should they audit every workflow for fatigue risk? Lucas: Start with the ones that have been running longest. Look at the engagement trend over the last three months. If you see a steady decline, that workflow is probably fatiguing people. Then ask: how many emails does a contact receive across all workflows in a given week? That's your cumulative frequency. Luna: And if that number is above, say, five emails per week for a B2B audience, you're almost certainly over-sending. Lucas: Yeah. For B2B, I'd say three is a better ceiling. And you should surface that metric in your marketing automation dashboard. Most platforms let you create a custom report for it. Luna: I want to go back to the recency scoring idea. How do you implement that in a tool like HubSpot or Marketo without custom code? Lucas: HubSpot has a built-in 'last engaged date' property. You can use that in your list filters. Marketo has a 'last interesting moment' field. What I recommend is creating a calculated field that subtracts that date from today, then building a smart list that excludes anyone where the number of days exceeds your threshold. Luna: So if you set it at 90 days, anyone who hasn't engaged in three months gets moved to a 'dormant' list and stopped from the active workflows. Lucas: Exactly. And you can also use engagement scoring. Give 10 points for an email open, 20 for a click, 50 for a form submission. Then set a minimum score to remain in the active workflow. If their score drops below that over time, they're out. Luna: I like that because it's dynamic. Someone might open an email after months of silence, get that score bump, and re-enter the flow automatically. Lucas: Right. It's self-correcting. The key is to automate the suppression and re-entry so you don't have to manually review lists every month. Luna: And I guess the same logic applies to transactional emails too. Like order confirmations or password resets — those don't cause fatigue, but promotional triggers sitting on top of them can. Lucas: Good point. You need a unified frequency cap across all marketing emails, not just within a single workflow. Some platforms have that as a native feature now. Luna: If these marketing automation conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own setup, that's exactly the kind of feedback that keeps this show ad-free. Listener support at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo goes directly to keeping us independent and covering topics like this. Lucas: Yeah, we really appreciate those who chip in. It lets us dig into the nitty-gritty without worrying about sponsors dictating the content. And speaking of digging deeper, let's talk about one more practical tactic: using a suppression seed list. Luna: A seed list? Like test addresses? Lucas: Sort of. You add a handful of internal email addresses to every workflow. They don't trigger fatigue logic, but they let you monitor what's actually being sent. If those seed addresses start seeing emails sent to people who should have been suppressed, you know your logic has a gap. Luna: That's a cheap safety net. We should probably run that on every workflow we build. Lucas: Absolutely. And it ties back to the fatigue issue: the earlier you catch a logic error that sends an extra email, the less cumulative fatigue you create. Small fixes compound. Luna: So the takeaway for today: review your longest-running workflows, build in an inactivity cap, track cumulative frequency, and use recency scoring to keep your list fresh. Lucas: That's it. And if you can cut volume by 20 percent while lifting engagement, you're not just saving inbox space — you're protecting your sender reputation for the campaigns that actually matter.