Glossary

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is software and workflows that execute repetitive marketing tasks automatically, triggered by predefined rules or by user behaviour.

Marketing practice

All 220 terms

What is worth automating

Behaviour-triggered messages — abandonment, milestones, expiry, inactivity.
Onboarding sequences that adapt to what the user has actually done.
Lifecycle transitions, such as trial ending or usage limits approaching.
Lead routing and scoring, where volume makes manual handling impractical.
Data hygiene — deduplication, suppression, unsubscribes handled reliably.

The failure modes

Automating a bad process. Automation makes a process faster and more consistent; if the process was wrong, it is now wrong at scale and harder to notice.

Sequences nobody owns. Workflows built by someone who has left, running for years, contacting people about products that no longer exist. Every automation platform accumulates these.

Ignoring context. The classic failure is a triggered message that is technically correct and situationally appalling — a renewal upsell after a complaint, a re-engagement campaign to someone who just cancelled.

No suppression logic. Several workflows each sending a reasonable message on the same day, none aware of the others.

Governance

Two controls prevent most of the damage. A global frequency cap across all automated messaging, enforced centrally rather than per workflow — because every individual sequence looks reasonable in isolation. And a periodic audit that disables anything without a named owner and a stated purpose.

Both are boring, neither gets prioritised, and their absence is what produces the customer who receives four emails in a day from one company.

Common questions

Where should automation stop?

Wherever the message would be wrong if the recipient's situation is unusual. High-stakes moments — complaints, cancellations, bereavement, service failures — need a human check or a suppression rule.

How often should workflows be reviewed?

Quarterly at minimum, checking that each still has an owner, a purpose and a plausible performance record. Most platforms accumulate abandoned sequences faster than anyone expects.

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