Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / How Marketing Automation Misses Customer Channel Fatigue
Transcript
- Lucas: Let me paint a quick scenario. A customer browses hiking boots on your site, doesn't buy. Your marketing automation platform sees that behavior, and within six hours it sends: an email with the same boots — 'you left these behind' — then a push notification that evening, then a retargeted display ad the next morning, then another email with a 10 percent discount. Luna: And each of those is a separate workflow, right? The email is in one journey, the push in another, the ad in a third. Lucas: Exactly. No single workflow knows what the others are doing. So the customer gets four touches in maybe 18 hours. And what happens? They unsubscribe from everything. Or worse, they mentally flag your brand as noise. Luna: I've definitely done that. I once got six texts from a retailer in one weekend — I blocked the number. Lucas: Right. And the thing is, most platforms have a global frequency cap. You can say 'maximum three emails per day.' But that doesn't cap push notifications, and it doesn't account for the retargeted ad the person sees on Instagram. The cap is channel-specific. Luna: So the blind spot is cross-channel coordination. The platform doesn't have a unified 'last touch across all channels' timestamp. Lucas: Bingo. A 2025 study from a customer experience research firm — I'm thinking of the one from C Space — found that customers who received more than six cross-channel touches within 48 hours were three times more likely to unsubscribe from all future communication. Not just that channel, all of them. Luna: That's a huge retention risk. And most marketers don't even know it's happening because their dashboards show email send count, push send count, ad impression count — but not a combined 'total touches per customer per window.' Lucas: Exactly. The data is siloed. The email service provider has its own send logs, the push provider has its logs, the ad platform has its logs. They don't talk to each other. Luna: Is there any platform that does this well? Like, does Amazon have something? They're pretty good at not over-messaging. Lucas: Amazon actually has a 'do not disturb' logic on push notifications — if you've received a push in the last hour, they suppress the next one. But even they don't seem to coordinate across email and push in real time. Their advantage is that they own the whole stack. Luna: So for the rest of us, it's a data integration problem. You'd need to pipe all touch events into a single data store and then have your workflows check that before sending. Lucas: Right. And that's technically feasible, but most marketing automation platforms don't have a built-in 'last contact timestamp per channel' field that you can reference in workflow logic. You'd have to build that yourself, often in a data warehouse, and then feed it back into the platform. Luna: That's a big lift for a small team. But even a manual audit might help — like, once a month, pull a sample of your most engaged customers and count how many touches they got across channels in a 48-hour window. See if anyone's over six. Lucas: Yeah, that's a good starting point. And it's something that a handful of listeners actually do — they tell us they run these audits and then adjust their workflows. And honestly, the fact that people take time to try these things is what keeps us making shows like this. Luna: Totally. And it's also why a small number of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That directly funds the research and production — no ads, no sponsors. Lucas: It's a modest thing, but it adds up. Keeps the show independent and allows us to dig into these specific nuts and bolts problems. So thank you to anyone who's part of that. Luna: Alright, back to channel fatigue. So you've got your audit, you've identified the over-messaged customers — what's the next step? Lucas: Once you see the problem, you can start adding suppression logic. For example, before sending an email, check if the customer received a push notification in the last 12 hours. If yes, skip the email. That's a simple rule you can implement in most platforms. Luna: But to do that, you need the push send timestamp in the CRM. Most CRMs don't store that by default. Lucas: Right. So you'd need to push that data from your push provider into a custom field on the contact record. HubSpot and Marketo both allow custom fields, so it's doable. It's just not set up out of the box. Luna: And you'd need to do the same for ad impressions, which is even trickier because the ad platform doesn't send individual impression data back to your CRM — it's aggregated. Lucas: Exactly. For display ads, you might settle for a proxy — like, if someone clicks a retargeted ad, log that click as a touch. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Luna: I wonder if there's a simpler approach: just set a global cooling period. Like, no more than one touch per 24 hours per customer, regardless of channel. Lucas: That's a blunt instrument, but it would prevent the worst cases. The challenge is, some customers want more frequent communication — say, a deal alert. So a hard cap might suppress messages they actually want. Luna: So you'd need to segment by engagement level. High-engagement customers get a higher cap, low-engagement get a lower one. Lucas: That's where the sophistication comes in. And it requires a feedback loop: track whether the customer opens or clicks after a touch. If they don't, reduce the frequency. If they do, maintain or increase it. Luna: Which is basically dynamic frequency capping based on engagement. That's not new in email, but applying it across channels is rare. Lucas: It's rare because it requires a unified customer profile with real-time event streaming. Most marketing automation platforms are batch-oriented — they update profiles every few hours, not instantly. Luna: So the gap is partly technical architecture. If you're using a CDP, you're in a better position to stitch touches together. Lucas: Exactly. A customer data platform can ingest events from email, push, ads, web, and then compute a 'last touch timestamp' across all channels. Then you can feed that back into your automation platform as a field. Luna: But that's a big investment. For smaller teams, I think the audit and manual suppression rules are the realistic path. Lucas: Agreed. And honestly, even just adding a 'last touch timestamp per channel' custom field in your CRM and populating it via API — that's a weekend project for a developer. And it can save you from losing customers to fatigue. Luna: It's one of those fixes that's cheap to implement but easy to overlook because the problem is invisible on standard dashboards. Lucas: Yeah. The metric that matters is 'touches per customer per time window,' and almost no one reports it. But if you start looking, you'll probably find you're over-messaging your best customers — the ones who engage most are often the ones who get hit hardest. Luna: That's a painful irony. The people who like your brand the most are the ones you're most likely to annoy into leaving. Lucas: Exactly. And the fix isn't complicated — it's just coordination. A single field, a few workflow checks, and you've cut the noise significantly. Luna: I think that's a good note to end on. A specific, actionable gap that most marketers can start addressing this week. Lucas: Yeah. Next time, we'll look at how automation handles — or fails to handle — email deliverability signals post-send. But for now, check your touch counts. Luna: See you next time.