Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / Why Marketing Automation Workflows Need Audience Suppression
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a moment in every marketer's life where they realize they've been emailing someone who absolutely should not be getting those emails. And I don't mean spam complaints — I mean they've been nurturing a lead who already converted, or who hasn't opened anything in 14 months. Luna: Oh, I have a personal example. I once got 47 emails from a B2B SaaS company after I'd already booked a demo. It was their standard nurture workflow, and apparently nobody ever checked. Lucas: That's the exact scenario. And it's shockingly common — companies run these beautiful multi-step nurture sequences, but they never build in audience suppression logic. So they keep sending 'Hey, want to learn more?' to someone who's already signed a contract. Luna: Right. And it damages the relationship. You feel like they're not paying attention. So what's the fix? Where do you start? Lucas: The first rule is: before you build any workflow, define who should never enter it. That means building a suppression list — or in Marketo terms, an exclusion list — that sits at the very top of your smart campaign. Luna: So you're saying the suppression should be part of the entry criteria, not a cleanup step afterward. Lucas: Exactly. In HubSpot, you'd use a 'suppression list' object or just add negative filters to your active list. For example: contact status is not 'customer', lifecycle stage is not 'opportunity', and date of last engagement is within 90 days. If someone doesn't meet all three, they're out. Luna: What about people who open nothing for months? At what point do you cut them? Lucas: I'd say anything beyond 6 months of zero engagement is a red flag. But you can be more aggressive — some marketers suppress after 90 days of no opens and no clicks. The key is to use a date-based filter, like 'last engaged date is more than X days ago', and add that to your suppression criteria. Luna: And that date field — are you tracking opens, clicks, or both? Lucas: I'd use clicks as the primary signal. Opens can be unreliable due to image blocking. But if you have a high-confidence open tracker, you can use opens. The point is to have a single recency field that updates on any meaningful interaction. Luna: So you're basically building a 'never contact' list that includes customers, people who opted out, and people who've gone dark. That makes sense. But what about negative signals — like someone who unsubscribed from a specific topic? Lucas: Right — that's the next layer. In Marketo, you can use 'communication limits' per program. In HubSpot, you can tag contacts with a 'do not nurture' property if they've given a negative signal, like marking your email as spam or replying with 'stop emailing me.' Luna: And then you also need to suppress based on conversion status. If someone fills out a demo request form, they should immediately be removed from any 'learn about our product' nurture. Lucas: Exactly. That's the classic failure point we hear about. The B2B SaaS company that sent you 47 emails after you booked a demo — they probably had a trigger for form fill, but they didn't add a 'remove from nurture' step afterward. So you were in two flows simultaneously. Luna: I think part of the problem is that marketers build these beautiful sequences and then get attached to them. They don't want to take people out because they want the numbers to look good. Lucas: But that's the irony — suppressing the wrong audience actually lifts your metrics. You get higher open rates, higher click-through rates, fewer spam complaints. And your sales team stops getting annoyed emails from prospects saying 'stop emailing me.' Luna: Do you have a real-world example of the impact? Like a before and after? Lucas: Sure. A client of mine — mid-market B2B, about 50,000 contacts in their database — they had a 12-email lead nurture sequence that was going to everyone who downloaded a white paper. No suppression at all. We added three suppression rules: contacts who became customers, contacts who hadn't opened an email in 6 months, and contacts who had unsubscribed from nurture emails. That removed about 30% of the list. Luna: Thirty percent — that's huge. And what happened to the metrics? Lucas: Open rates went from 18% to 24%. Click-through rates went from 2.1% to 3.6%. And the workflow actually finished faster because the send volume dropped. The sales team reported fewer 'stop emailing me' replies. Luna: So the suppression didn't hurt — it helped. And I imagine the remaining contacts were more engaged because you weren't watering down your metrics with dead weight. Lucas: Exactly. And the key insight is: a smaller, more relevant list almost always outperforms a large, broad list. But you have to be disciplined about removing people. Luna: I wonder if this is something that's harder to do in certain platforms. Like, is HubSpot better or worse than Marketo for suppression? Lucas: Both can do it, but the approach differs. In HubSpot, you'd use a combination of contact properties and static lists. You can create a 'suppressed' contact property that's a checkbox, and then use that as a filter in your active lists. In Marketo, you'd use smart lists with exclusion criteria — for example, 'not in customer segment', 'not in unengaged segment'. Luna: So in Marketo, you're building segments for the people you want to exclude, and then referencing those segments in your campaign entry rules. Lucas: Right. And the nice thing about Marketo is you can create a 'master suppression list' as a smart list, and then include that smart list as a filter in multiple campaigns. So you don't have to rebuild it every time. Luna: That's smart. One thing I've seen people miss is suppressing based on date fields like 'last opportunity close date'. If someone just lost a deal, you probably don't want to send them 'hey, ready to buy?' for a few months. Lucas: That's a great point. Negative signals like lost deals, or even 'marked as competitor' in your CRM, should trigger a suppression flag. You can create a 'cooling off' period — say, 90 days — before they re-enter any nurture. Luna: And what about people who are already in a different workflow? Like, if someone's in a post-purchase onboarding flow, they shouldn't be in a lead nurture flow. Do platforms handle that automatically? Lucas: Not always. In HubSpot, if a contact is a member of a static list that's the source for one workflow, they could still be added to another workflow if you're not careful. You need to set up exclusion rules that check: 'Is this contact in any other active workflow?' Some platforms have built-in 'communication limits' to prevent overlap, but I'd rather have a property that tracks which workflow they're in, and then filter on that. Luna: So it's really about creating a culture of data hygiene. You have to regularly audit your workflows to see who's in them and whether they should be. Lucas: Absolutely. I recommend a quarterly suppression audit. Export the list of contacts in each workflow, check for customers or unengaged contacts, and clean up. It takes an hour but it saves you from embarrassing sends. Luna: Speaking of saving — if these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used, and you've found yourself auditing your own workflows because of something we said, that's kind of the dream. And honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, that's the smallest possible ask, and it genuinely keeps this show ad-free. We don't run sponsors — just listener support. So if you've gotten value, that link is there. Luna: Alright, back to suppression. One more thing I want to touch on: how do you handle people who re-engage after being suppressed? Like, someone goes dark for 8 months, then clicks a link in an email they got forwarded. Lucas: Good question. You should have a re-engagement workflow that checks for recent activity. If someone's been suppressed for unengagement but then visits your website or fills out a form, you can automatically remove the suppression flag and add them back to a low-frequency nurture. But don't put them right back into the same high-frequency sequence — ease them in. Luna: So you need a separate 're-engagement' workflow that's maybe one email a month, and if they engage with that, then they graduate back to the main nurture. Lucas: Exactly. And you can use scoring to automate that. If their engagement score crosses a certain threshold, remove the suppression and add them to the standard flow. But until then, keep them in a low-touch bucket. Luna: I think the big takeaway here is: suppression isn't about losing leads, it's about respecting them. When you stop emailing people who don't want to hear from you, you actually strengthen your relationship with the ones who do. Lucas: That's exactly right. And it's one of those things that's easy to set up but easy to ignore. The best marketers I know treat suppression as a core part of their workflow design, not an afterthought.