Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / How Marketing Automation Ignores Customer Streaming Preferences
Transcript
- Lucas: So Luna, quick question — how many streaming services do you subscribe to right now? Luna: Uh, let's count. Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, YouTube Premium, and I just started a trial of Peacock. So six. Lucas: Six. That's pretty typical. The average American household has four or five. And yet, practically none of that data — what you watch, when you watch, what you skip — feeds into marketing automation systems. Luna: It's weird, right? These platforms know more about our media habits than our own CRMs do. Lucas: Exactly. And I think there's a real missed opportunity here. Let me anchor this with a story. I talked to a DTC brand — let's call them 'Crate & Canvas' — that sells home goods. They had a perfectly tuned automation in HubSpot: triggered when someone visited their product pages, sent a welcome series, the whole thing. But they noticed their email engagement was dropping over six months, and they had no idea why. Luna: What was the cause? Lucas: They eventually surveyed some customers and found that a big chunk of their audience had shifted their listening habits. They used to listen to home-decor podcasts during their commute. Then they started working from home more, and they switched to Netflix and YouTube for background content. The automation was still sending the same old email sequence, but the context had changed. Their customers' media diet had shifted, and the automation had no way of knowing. Luna: So the emails were landing in a completely different environment than when they were designed. That's fascinating. Lucas: Yeah. And it cost them. They estimated that misalignment cost them roughly two hundred thousand dollars in quarterly revenue from lower conversion rates on those sequences. Luna: And all because they didn't know that their customers switched from podcasts to Netflix during the afternoon. Lucas: Right. So the obvious question is: why don't marketing automation platforms ingest streaming data? There are a few structural reasons. First, data silos. Spotify and Netflix don't exactly offer open APIs for marketers to plug into HubSpot or Marketo. Second, privacy. Streaming data is incredibly personal — think about it, your watch history reveals more about you than your purchase history. And third, the legacy CRM architecture was built for transaction data, not behavioral media data. Luna: That's a pretty fundamental design limitation. But there are workarounds, right? Lucas: There are. One is using third-party intent data providers that aggregate streaming-related behavior from panel data. Another is building your own triggers based on user actions in your own app or website that correlate with streaming preferences. For example, if a customer watches a video on your site, you can infer they might be in a video-consuming mindset. Luna: So it's not about literally knowing they watched Stranger Things. It's about inferring context. Lucas: Exactly. And some forward-thinking brands are starting to ask customers directly during onboarding. A simple question like 'What do you usually do while browsing our site? Listen to music? Watch TV?' — and then they use that to adapt the automation. Luna: That seems almost too simple. But also, you'd have to keep it updated. People's habits change. Lucas: They do. And that's the part most automations miss — it's not a one-time data point, it's a continuous signal. But here's the thing: if these conversations have sparked an idea you've actually used in your own marketing, or just made you think differently about customer journeys, then honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's the smallest thing that keeps this show ad-free and independent. Luna: Yeah, it really does make a difference. A lot of listeners have told us they've taken specific tips from episodes like this one into their teams. Lucas: Okay, so back to the streaming blind spot. Another approach that's gaining traction is using customer data platforms — CDPs — that can ingest event streams from multiple sources, including SDKs on mobile apps that track media consumption. Some CDPs now offer built-in connectors for things like Spotify's developer API, but it's still niche. Luna: Wait, so there is a way to pull Spotify data into a CDP? Lucas: There are limited integrations, yes. But they're mainly for advertising measurement, not for triggering automation sequences. And most marketers don't know they exist. I found a case study from a music streaming company that used Snowflake to sync listening data into Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and they were able to trigger personalized offers based on what genre a user listened to most in the last week. Their click-through rates increased by about 35 percent. Luna: That's impressive. But it required a data engineering team to set it up. Not every brand has that. Lucas: No, and that's the barrier. But I think the trend is moving toward simpler solutions. For example, some marketing automation platforms are starting to allow custom objects that can hold behavioral data from any source. If you can get the data into a data warehouse, you can pipe it into Marketo via a custom activity. Luna: So it's possible, but it's not turnkey. It requires a bit of technical muscle. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why most brands don't do it. They stick with the standard demographics and purchase history. But as streaming becomes more ubiquitous, ignoring it is going to become a bigger competitive disadvantage. Luna: Let's talk about privacy for a second. If marketers start using streaming data, aren't they going to run into GDPR and CCPA issues? Lucas: Absolutely. Streaming data is sensitive. You need explicit consent to use it for marketing, and you need to be transparent about how you're using it. But here's the nuance: you don't need to know the exact title someone watched. You can use aggregated patterns — like 'evening TV watching' as a segment — without ever knowing the specific show. That's less privacy-invasive. Luna: So it's about the pattern, not the content. That seems like a smart middle ground. Lucas: Yeah. And some platforms are already doing this. I saw a presentation from a company called Amperity that showed how they can create a 'streaming affinity' score based on anonymized, aggregated data from partnerships with streaming platforms. You never see the individual title, but you know that a segment of customers has high engagement with video streaming during work hours. Luna: That's pretty cool. So you could adapt your send time optimization based on that. Lucas: Exactly. If you know your customer is likely watching Netflix at 8 PM, maybe don't send a text-heavy email then. Send it at a time when they're more likely to read. It sounds small, but for a company like Crate & Canvas, that kind of adjustment could have saved a chunk of that two hundred thousand. Luna: I wonder if we'll see a native integration from HubSpot or Marketo in the next year or two. Lucas: I'd bet on it. The demand is there. Marketers are starting to realize that the customer journey doesn't start when they visit your website — it starts when they wake up and choose what to stream. If you can't see that, you're flying blind. Luna: So for our listeners who want to start tackling this, what's one actionable step they can take this week? Lucas: I'd say this: if you use a marketing automation platform, look for a way to add a custom field or tag that reflects your customer's likely streaming context. You can start by surveying a small sample — ask them what they usually do when they check email — and then build a simple automation branch based on that. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just start capturing the signal. Luna: And then iterate. Start small, learn, expand. Lucas: Exactly. Because the alternative is continuing to send the same message in the same way, regardless of whether your customer is in a completely different media mindset. And that's not just a missed opportunity — it's a disconnect that can cost you real money. Luna: I think that's a great place to leave it. Next episode, we're going to tackle another blind spot: how marketing automation handles — or ignores — customer health and wellness data. Lucas: That's going to be a big one. See you next time.