Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / Why Marketing Automation Misses Your Sabbatical
Transcript
- Lucas: So, a client of mine — a mid-sized software firm, about four hundred employees — ran the numbers on everyone who took a sabbatical last year. Thirty percent of them went completely dark on email the moment they came back. Not just unsubscribed. Just... stopped opening anything. Luna: Thirty percent is a lot of people. What did their automation look like before they left? Lucas: It looked like every other B2B company's. The CRM had a field for employment status, but the marketing side never touched it. So while someone was off trekking in Patagonia for six months, the nurture flows kept firing — product updates, webinar invites, quarterly check-ins. All the usual noise. Luna: Right, and that noise is exactly why they ignore you when they get back. It's like the system never noticed they were gone. Lucas: Exactly. And this is the thing — the platform they use, one of the big ones you'd know by name, has a perfectly good 'pause' feature. But nobody had ever built a trigger for 'employee on sabbatical.' So the journey just kept running on autopilot. Luna: So what would a smarter trigger look like? I'm imagining something that recognizes the life event and hits pause, not delete. Lucas: That's the core idea. A sabbatical is a life event that changes your context for months. If the system knows someone's out until January, it can suppress non-critical sends and queue up a gentle re-engagement sequence for the week they're due back. Not a hard sell — just a 'welcome back, here's what you missed.' Luna: But doesn't that require the employee to tell the company they're taking a sabbatical? Which, you know, HR already knows. So the data is there. It's just not connected to marketing. Lucas: That's the gap. The data exists in the HR system, but the marketing automation is looking at a completely different set of tables. And the cost of that disconnect is real — this client calculated that each lost returning employee, if they churn within six months, costs them about fifty thousand dollars in recruiting and training. Luna: Fifty grand a head. So suddenly a few suppressed emails look pretty cheap. Lucas: It's not just about saving money, though. It's about respect. When someone takes a sabbatical — for travel, family, health — they're making a big choice. The last thing they want is a system that treats them like they never left. Luna: Right. And I've seen the flip side, where companies do it well. A friend of mine took six months off to care for her dad, and her company's automation sent a note to her team saying she'd be out, and then... nothing. No marketing emails. When she came back, her first email from them was a personal note from her manager. Felt human. Lucas: That's the ideal. And the technology is actually there. This isn't some futuristic AI thing — it's a simple conditional: if employment status equals 'sabbatical', suppress all non-transactional emails until the end date. You can build that in a weekend in most platforms. Luna: So why isn't everyone doing it? Is it just that nobody thinks about it until it bites them? Lucas: Partly. But there's also a structural issue. Marketing automation is usually built around the happy path — the customer who buys, renews, upgrades. Life events that pause the journey feel like edge cases, so they don't make it into the initial build. Then you get a sabbatical wave, or a parental leave wave, and suddenly it's a crisis. Luna: And I bet the same logic applies to other long breaks, not just sabbaticals. Parental leave, medical leave, even a long overseas assignment. Lucas: Exactly. The sabbatical is just the cleanest example because it's a defined start and end date. But the principle is broader: any time someone steps out of the normal cadence, the automation needs to respect that. Otherwise you're just adding noise to a life that's already full. Luna: So let's talk about the re-engagement sequence. What should it actually say after someone's been off for six months? Lucas: It should be light on content, heavy on context. One email within the first week — something like 'We missed you, here are three things that changed while you were away.' Not a product push. And then a slower cadence — maybe one email a month for the next quarter, each one checking in on what they need as they ramp back up. Luna: That feels like good etiquette, not just good marketing. But what about the data side? How do you even get the sabbatical date into the marketing system in the first place? Lucas: There are a couple of ways. The cleanest is to have HR sync that field into the CRM automatically. A lot of platforms have native integrations for that. If you can't do that, you can add a simple self-identification form — but that puts the burden on the person, and a lot of folks won't bother. Luna: And self-identification is also a privacy thing, isn't it? I'm not sure I want my employer's marketing database to know I'm on medical leave. Lucas: That's a fair point, and it's why the HR sync is better. It's private, it's accurate, and it's automatic. The person doesn't have to do anything — the system just knows. Luna: So what's the one thing you'd tell a marketing ops person to do today, after hearing this? Lucas: Go look at your lifecycle triggers and ask: what happens when someone pauses? If you don't have an answer, you're probably losing people at exactly the moment you should be winning them back. Add a pause trigger for every life event you can identify — sabbatical, parental leave, even a long-term illness. Luna: And that's the thing about good automation — it's not about sending more, it's about sending at the right time. Sometimes the most respectful thing is silence. Lucas: That's the whole philosophy of this show, honestly. And it's also why we keep the podcast ad-free. We don't want to interrupt your learning with something that doesn't serve you. If you've gotten value from our episodes — and maybe an idea you've actually used at work — and you want to keep that going, you can support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to keep this independent. No pressure, just if it's made a difference. Lucas: So back to that client for a second. They implemented the sabbatical trigger, and within one return cycle they saw their re-engagement open rates jump from thirty percent to sixty-eight percent. That's the kind of lift you can point to. Luna: Sixty-eight percent is huge. And it probably saved a few of those fifty-thousand-dollar churns. Lucas: Yeah. And the real win is the message it sends to the employee: we see you, and we're glad you're back. That's a feeling no amount of discount codes can buy.