Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / Why Marketing Automation Ignores Customer Subscription Upgrades
Transcript
- Lucas: So you upgrade your subscription — maybe you move from the Professional plan to the Enterprise tier at a SaaS company. You're paying more, you're excited, you want to get the most out of the new features. And then the very next email you get from that company is an automated message offering you a discount if you upgrade. Luna: Wait — you just upgraded. Why would they send you an upgrade offer? Lucas: Exactly. Because their marketing automation never registered the change. The workflow that sends upgrade offers is triggered by a 'subscription tier equals Professional' condition, and the system still sees you as Professional because nobody told it to update the lifecycle stage. Luna: So the customer gets this irrelevant offer, feels like the company doesn't know them, and maybe even second-guesses whether the upgrade was worth it. Lucas: Right. And we're not talking about a small problem. I looked at a B2B SaaS company — let's call them CloudLogix — that had about 15,000 customers. They found that 23 percent of their upgrade events were never picked up by their marketing automation platform. That meant roughly 3,450 customers were stuck in the wrong lifecycle stage. Luna: And how much did that cost them? Lucas: They calculated about two point three million dollars in lost annual recurring revenue. Because those customers weren't getting the right onboarding for their new tier, they weren't being cross-sold add-ons appropriate to enterprise, and some of them actually churned faster because they felt neglected. Luna: So the root cause is that the upgrade event, which usually happens in the billing system, never syncs back to the marketing automation database as a trigger. Lucas: That's exactly it. In most setups, the billing system and the marketing automation platform are separate. The customer upgrades on the billing portal, the billing system updates its own records, but the marketing platform — HubSpot, Marketo, whatever — only gets a periodic sync of the customer object. And that sync often doesn't include a timestamped event for the upgrade. Luna: So the marketing platform still sees the old tier. And all the campaigns that are supposed to trigger off a tier change — they just never fire. Lucas: Precisely. And even when the sync does update the tier field, it's just a field value change — not an event. So if you have a campaign that says 'send upgrade offer when tier changes from Basic to Pro', it might not trigger because the campaign looks for a specific event object, not a field update. Luna: So what's the fix? Do you need to build a custom API integration? Lucas: You can, but there's a simpler approach that most platforms support. You create a custom event property — something like 'subscription_change' with a property like 'new_tier' — and you fire that event from the billing system whenever a change happens. Then your marketing automation campaigns listen for that event. Luna: And that event should include the old tier and the new tier, so you can send different messages depending on whether it's an upgrade or a downgrade. Lucas: Right. And you also reset the lifecycle stage. If someone goes from trial to paid, you don't want them still in the 'trial' stage. But if they go from Pro to Enterprise, you want to move them to a new 'Enterprise onboarding' stage. Most platforms let you map that in a workflow. Luna: I've seen companies that have a 'lifecycle stage' field that's never updated after the initial lead capture. So you have people who've been customers for three years still marked as 'lead'. Lucas: Yes. And that's a data hygiene issue, but the upgrade blind spot is a specific failure of event-driven automation. One company I spoke with — they use Marketo — they had a trigger campaign that checked the 'subscription tier' field every day. But the sync only ran once every 24 hours. So if someone upgraded at 10 AM, the campaign wouldn't fire until the next sync cycle, and by then the customer had already received the wrong email sequence. Luna: So you need near real time event ingestion. Or at least a webhook from the billing system. Lucas: Exactly. A webhook that pushes the event to the marketing platform as soon as the upgrade happens. That's the gold standard. But even if you can't do webhooks, you can set up a scheduled job that checks for changes every 15 minutes and fires the event programmatically. Luna: And what about the content of those upgrade emails? If you do trigger them correctly, what should you send? Lucas: Don't send a generic 'welcome to the new tier' email. That's better than nothing, but it's still lazy. The best approach is to send a sequence that acknowledges the specific features they unlocked. If someone upgraded from Pro to Enterprise, they now have access to advanced analytics and dedicated support. Show them how to use those features within the first week. Luna: And also check if they've already used any of those features during a trial period. Because sometimes they upgraded specifically for one feature, so you want to double down on that. Lucas: Yes. And you should also suppress any downgrade or retention offers for at least 90 days. You don't want to send them a 'we miss you' campaign right after they've committed more. Luna: Now, is this just a B2B SaaS problem? Or do B2C companies face it too? Lucas: It's everywhere. Think about a streaming service. A customer upgrades from the ad-supported plan to the ad-free plan. If the marketing automation doesn't catch that, they might still get emails promoting the ad-free plan — which they already have. Or worse, they get an email offering a discount to upgrade to ad-free. Luna: Which is exactly the scenario I mentioned at the top. It's frustrating as a customer. Lucas: And it erodes trust. The customer thinks 'you don't know me at all'. So the fix is really about connecting the billing event to the marketing trigger in a timely way. And testing it. Most companies never test the upgrade path because they're so focused on the acquisition funnel. Luna: Right. They test the 'new subscriber' journey and the 'churn' journey, but not the 'upgrade' journey. Lucas: And the upgrade is often the moment of highest intent. If someone voluntarily pays you more, that's a signal you should act on aggressively — in a good way. But most automation treats it as a non-event. Luna: You know, this is exactly the kind of concrete problem that makes me glad we do this show without ads. Because we can dig into the real mechanics without worrying about pleasing a sponsor who might have a platform that doesn't handle this well. Lucas: Yeah. And if these conversations have sparked something you've actually used at work, or even just made you think differently about your own automation, supporting the show is really simple. It's just buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's what keeps it ad-free and lets us keep going deep on these nuts and bolts issues. Luna: And we genuinely appreciate it. Alright, back to upgrades — one more thing: what about the reverse? Downgrades. Should you also trigger on those? Lucas: Absolutely. But downgrades are trickier because you need to be sensitive. If someone downgrades, they might be cost-sensitive or unhappy. You don't want to immediately send a 'we're sorry to see you go' email if they just moved to a lower tier but are still a customer. Luna: So you might trigger a different sequence — maybe a check-in to see if they need help, or an offer to switch to annual billing to save money. Lucas: Exactly. But the key point is the same: you need the event to fire. And most platforms make that easy if you set it up right. The hard part is knowing that you need to set it up at all. Luna: And that's the blind spot. We assume the system knows what we know. Lucas: Right. And automation is only as smart as the events we feed it. If the upgrade event never reaches the marketing platform, the automation is flying blind. Luna: So next time you upgrade your Netflix plan, pay attention to what emails you get. If they're irrelevant, you now know why. Lucas: And if you're the one building those workflows, you have a roadmap to fix it.