Marketing Automation Workflow
The three automation flows that earn their keep — and the ones that burn list health without producing pipeline.
What this infographic is actually arguing.
Marketing automation is one of the most over-bought and under-used categories in B2B marketing. Teams license the platform for six-figure annual contracts, build out three workflows in month one, and then spend two years congratulating themselves for "having automation" while most of the flows fire emails no one reads.
This infographic covers the three automation workflows that actually earn their keep and the patterns that burn list health without producing pipeline. The three that matter: the welcome sequence, the behavioral trigger, and the re-engagement flow. Welcome sequences set expectations, deliver the promised value, and establish voice — the first five emails a new subscriber gets determine whether they open the sixth. Get this flow right and every downstream send benefits; get it wrong and you're fighting list fatigue forever.
Behavioral triggers are the highest-ROI automation category because they fire on buyer intent signals — a pricing page visit, a specific content download, a demo video completion — and deliver contextual content while the signal is still hot. The difference between a generic nurture sequence and a behavioral trigger is the difference between spam and service.
Re-engagement flows are the least-loved and most-necessary. They catch disengaged subscribers before they become spam complaints and give them a clean way out. A well-run re-engagement flow shrinks your list in a way that improves every downstream metric — deliverability, CTR, revenue per recipient. Teams that refuse to prune pay for it in deliverability over time.
The patterns to avoid: content-drip nurtures that send the next asset in the library whether or not the last one was read, "lead scoring" that triggers sales outreach based on clicks alone, and sequence lengths over eight touches. Each of these generates activity metrics that look good in the platform and damage the actual program.
Automation earns its cost when it does work a human can't — firing at the moment of intent, at scale, with personalization that actually uses the data. It wastes its cost when it automates sending more email to more people, which is almost always how it's deployed.
Audit your flows once a quarter: what's firing, who's opening, who's converting, who's unsubscribing.
This infographic is free. The audit is too.
Two minutes, no login. Paste your URL and Stratridge returns an audit graded against the six dimensions and twenty-four factors — so you see where the story on your site lines up with the story this infographic describes, and where it doesn't.