Feature · Marketing Automation Platform

A marketing automation platform that writes to your pipeline.

Not a Marketo-sized specialist product. Strkr's marketing module ships inside the same tenant as the CRM, the messaging platform, and the delivery project tool. Journey builder, Strkr AI drafts, scoring, attribution, deliverability, included.

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What a marketing automation platform should be

The whole marketing surface inside the system of record.

Enterprise marketing automation platforms (Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua) run as standalone products that sync to the CRM over an integration layer. The result is marketing data in one tool, sales data in another, pipeline attribution reconstructed every quarter. Strkr's marketing module lives in the same tenant as the CRM, so campaign engagement writes directly to the contact timeline, lead scores drive routing in real time, and pipeline attribution happens as a product feature rather than a quarterly spreadsheet.

Shared tenant

One contact record, one source of truth.

The contact record carries campaign history, lead score, sales activity, deal stage, and account context on one page. Marketing and sales open the same record and see the same context. No duplicate detection against a separate marketing database, no reconciliation of custom fields, no "did marketing update this contact or sales."

Journey builder

Multi-step campaigns with branching logic.

The journey canvas looks and behaves like the Flows canvas: enroll contacts on a trigger, route through conditional branches, fire actions, measure outcomes. Marketing ops and sales ops learn one authoring surface. The classic marketing-automation learning curve is a one-time investment, not a per-tool tax.

Native send

Strkr sends the email directly.

Email dispatch runs on native sending infrastructure with dedicated IP options for high-volume senders. Opens and clicks write to the contact timeline immediately, not after a sync. The marketing-cloud-to-CRM bridge that most teams maintain is removed.

AI drafts

Campaign brief to email in 30 seconds.

Strkr AI drafts first-version emails from a brief, generates subject-line variants for A/B testing, writes per-contact personalization, picks the optimal send time per contact. The composition and segmentation effort that most marketing ops teams spend hours on happens in minutes.

Pipeline attribution

Campaigns tied to the deals they influenced.

Each campaign's performance view shows the deals it influenced (first-touch, multi-touch, last-touch), pipeline amount, closed-won amount, and ROI. The attribution report that most teams reconstruct quarterly is a one-click surface.

Included

Marketing module ships on Pro.

Journey builder, AI drafts, lead scoring, pipeline attribution, deliverability, dedicated IPs for high-volume senders, all shipping on Pro with no marketing-tier upsell. Per-contact pricing (see /pricing), no per-send metering.

The marketing jobs the platform covers

What a mid-market team actually needs the platform to do.

Marketing automation platforms claim to cover every marketing job. The jobs that actually produce measurable pipeline for a mid-market B2B team are a short list. Strkr's marketing module focuses on those jobs rather than spreading effort across every edge case.

Lead capture

Forms, landing pages, chat.

Native form builder with hidden-field capture (UTM, campaign source, page referrer), landing pages tied to campaigns, embedded chat widget. Lead flows into the CRM instantly with the full capture context. The classic "which form did this lead come from" question is logged on the record.

Lead nurture

Journey-based email cadence.

Multi-step journeys enroll leads on form submit, segment entry, or specific actions. Branches by engagement signal (opened, clicked, replied). Advances to MQL threshold hands off to sales. The classic nurture program that typically requires a Marketo specialist to configure ships as a journey template.

Lead scoring

Fit and intent scores that route automatically.

Strkr AI scores every lead on fit (firmographic match to ICP) and intent (behavioral signals from engagement). Combined score drives routing: above 70 to AE, 40-70 to SDR, below 40 continues nurture. Score updates in real time as engagement signals fire.

Campaigns and segmentation

Describe audiences in plain English.

AI-driven segment builder: type "accounts in financial services with more than 100 employees that have opened a product email in the last 30 days" and the AI generates the segment definition. Review the resulting contact list, then enroll. The classic segment-builder learning curve is replaced by a sentence.

Event marketing

Webinars, trade shows, roundtables.

Native event tracking: registrations, attendance, no-shows, post-event engagement. Journey templates for event follow-up fire on event-attendance signals. The post-conference "we never followed up on those booth scans" leak is prevented by a shipping template.

Account-based motions

Campaigns targeted to a defined account set.

Define a target account list (manual, segmentation, or imported CSV), run campaigns scoped to only those accounts, measure engagement per account rather than per contact, feed signals into the deal record. The ABM shape most teams buy from a specialist vendor ships as a surface in the marketing module.

The journey builder in detail

How teams actually author a multi-step campaign.

The journey builder is the heart of marketing automation. Strkr's builder is a visual canvas that borrows the shape of the Flows runtime: triggers start the journey, conditions branch it, actions execute, and delays sequence the steps. The learning curve is a weekend; marketing ops leads build their first journey within an hour of signup.

Enrollment triggers

How contacts enter the journey.

Form submission, segment entry, specific action (link click, asset download, page visit), lifecycle stage change, scheduled time (campaign launch at 10am Tuesday), or admin manual enrollment. Multiple enrollment conditions supported with OR / AND logic. A contact that qualifies twice is enrolled once per cooldown window.

Branching

If this, then that, no code.

Branch on any field in the contact record, any journey-local variable, or any Strkr AI classification. Example: branch on reply classification (interested, not interested, OOO), on lead score threshold, on campaign engagement, on account health signal. Nested branches supported with visual canvas.

Delays and timing

Wait for the right moment.

Fixed delays (wait 3 days), business-day delays (skip weekends), event-based waits (wait until next Tuesday, wait until business hours in the contact's timezone, wait for a specific trigger). The classic "we sent the follow-up at 2am local" mistake is prevented by timezone-aware delays.

Actions

Everything the suite can do, inside the journey.

Send email, send SMS (via Strkr Messaging), post to Slack, update lead score, update any field on the contact or related records, enroll in another journey, assign to a user, create a task, create a deal, trigger a Flow. The action library spans the full suite because the journey runtime is the Flows runtime.

Exits

When and why contacts leave the journey.

Auto-exit on specific triggers (deal closed, unsubscribed, hit MQL threshold). Manual admin removal. Journey end on terminal branch. Exit audit log records why each contact left. The classic "contacts stuck in a dead journey forever" problem is prevented by explicit exit conditions.

Testing and preview

Preview as a specific contact, then launch.

Before launching a journey, preview as any contact in your database. The preview walks the branches with the contact's actual field values and shows which emails they would receive, which score updates would fire, which actions would run. Dry-run on a sample before touching the full audience.

Deliverability and reputation

The infrastructure most platforms underprice.

Marketing automation platforms live or die on deliverability. The best-written campaign fails if it lands in spam. Strkr ships deliverability as a first-class concern: dedicated IPs with managed warmup, automatic bounce handling, suppression hygiene, compliance surfaces, and a reputation dashboard.

Dedicated IPs

High-volume senders own their reputation.

Teams sending above volume threshold request dedicated IPs. Warmup scheduling runs over the standard ramp window (first week 5,000/day, second week 10,000/day, graduating to full volume by week 4). Reputation metrics surface on the admin dashboard with alerts on threshold breaches.

Bounce handling

Hard and soft bounces processed automatically.

Hard bounces to permanent suppression on first occurrence. Soft bounces retry on exponential schedule with suppression after threshold. Spam-trap hits remove the contact and alert the admin. The classic "we keep sending to dead addresses" drag on reputation is prevented at the dispatcher.

Unsubscribe hygiene

Opt-outs honored across every campaign.

An unsubscribe suppresses the contact from every current and future campaign. Admins can upload external suppression lists (do-not-contact lists from previous tools). The classic "we re-contacted a six-months-ago unsubscribe" incident is prevented.

DKIM, SPF, DMARC

Setup wizard, not a documentation PDF.

Admin surface walks through DKIM, SPF, and DMARC setup for the sending domain with specific DNS record values to copy. Product verifies records are in place before authorizing high-volume sends. The setup that typically delays a marketing launch by two weeks takes an afternoon.

Compliance

GDPR, CAN-SPAM, CASL support.

Opt-in capture with consent recording, unsubscribe link mandatory on every campaign, physical mailing address injection in footer, data-subject-request workflow for GDPR. The compliance checklist that lives in legal review happens as a product feature.

Reputation dashboard

See sender health weekly.

Admin dashboard with inbox placement rate, spam complaint rate, bounce rate, engagement rate per sending domain. Alerts on threshold breaches. The visibility most teams only get from an expensive deliverability vendor ships as part of the platform.

Integration with sales and messaging

Marketing automation that writes to the pipeline.

The classic failure mode of marketing automation is that it lives in a different tool than sales. Marketing sees opens; sales sees deals. The two numbers never fully connect. Strkr's marketing module is in the same tenant as the CRM and the Messaging platform, so engagement signals drive sales motions directly and attribution writes to the pipeline automatically.

Shared lead score

Marketing engagement moves the score sales sees.

Opens, clicks, replies, downloads, page visits, and specific actions increment the lead score in real time. The score lives on the contact record and feeds routing rules. Marketing and sales see the same score because there is one score, not two.

Rep notifications

Hot clicks surface to the owning rep.

A contact in an active deal clicks a specific link (pricing page, demo signup, case study). The owning rep gets a Slack ping or in-app notification with the context. The classic "my contact visited the pricing page and nobody told me" delay is removed.

Journey-to-rep handoff

MQL threshold hands off to the sales motion.

When a contact crosses MQL threshold, the journey ends and the sales motion begins. The lead is routed to the right rep, a drafted first-touch email is prepared, and the rep sees the journey context (which emails opened, which links clicked, which assets consumed). No cold handoff.

SMS and MMS inside journeys

Strkr Messaging as a journey action.

A journey can send an SMS or MMS alongside email: a demo-reminder SMS 24 hours before, a thank-you SMS post-webinar, a conference-booth text while the contact is still on the floor. The messaging channel adds a response surface without a separate SMS platform.

Multi-touch attribution

Every campaign's share of the pipeline.

Each campaign's performance view shows the deals it influenced across first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch models. Pipeline amount, closed-won amount, ROI, and a trend across quarters. The classic "which campaign actually produced revenue" question has a one-click answer.

Projects module tie-in

Marketing campaigns run as projects.

Large campaigns (product launch, flagship webinar, conference season) can be run as a project in the Projects module with tasks, dependencies, and sprint cadence. Marketing ops gets agile delivery visibility on the campaign itself without a separate project tool.

Compared to the alternatives

What a native marketing automation layer replaces.

Most mid-market B2B revenue orgs run marketing automation on a dedicated platform (Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot MA) with a CRM integration. The stack works but produces a two-tenant data layer that marketing-sales alignment never fully bridges. Strkr's native marketing module replaces the specialist platform because the CRM is in the same tenant.

Marketo

Enterprise standard, specialist-admin product.

Marketo is powerful and the long-standing enterprise standard for B2B marketing automation. The strength is the limit: Marketo administration is a specialist role. Mid-market teams routinely under-utilize the product because configuration requires dedicated marketing-ops skill. The license, consultants, and Salesforce-sync maintenance stack to real cost.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Approachable, gated features at higher tiers.

HubSpot Marketing Hub is the most approachable platform at scale. The deeper journey features, custom-event triggers, and advanced attribution land at Enterprise. For a growing team the per-contact pricing climbs quickly, and the Pro-to-Enterprise jump is a doubling or more to unlock the ceiling.

Pardot / Account Engagement

Deeply Salesforce-integrated, enterprise price.

Pardot (now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) is tightly integrated with Salesforce but prices as an enterprise product with annual floor typically in the five figures. Capable but specialist-admin territory. Mid-market teams often buy it, under-use it, and still pay for it.

Mailchimp Marketing

Easy, limited journey features.

Mailchimp is the easiest email tool to adopt. The journey features exist but shallow, the CRM integration is one-way, attribution to pipeline requires a separate ops effort. Fine for a very small team or pure broadcast; teams that outgrow it face a hard switch.

ActiveCampaign

Mid-market journey builder, lighter B2B shape.

ActiveCampaign has a strong journey builder at a lower price point than enterprise platforms. The product shape leans small-business and ecommerce; B2B account-based motions and sales handoff flows are less tuned than in a CRM-native platform.

Strkr Marketing

Native, pipeline-attributed, AI-drafted, included.

Journey builder, AI drafts, dedicated IPs, deliverability guardrails, compliance surfaces, pipeline attribution, Flows runtime integration, Projects module tie-in, all shipping on Pro and above. The marketing automation most teams buy from a specialist vendor ships as one layer.

Klaviyo

Ecommerce-focused, thin on B2B motion.

Klaviyo is strong for ecommerce with deep Shopify and WooCommerce integration. For B2B revenue motions with account-based pipelines, sales handoffs, and multi-touch attribution against closed-won, the shape is a poor fit. Teams running mixed B2B and B2C often end up with Klaviyo for commerce plus a separate B2B platform, which recreates the stack problem the native approach solves.

Marketing automation ships on Pro. AI drafts ship on Pro. Pipeline attribution ships on Pro.

Journey builder, deliverability guardrails, dedicated IPs, compliance surfaces, included. Start a trial, build your first journey this afternoon.

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Common questions

What buyers ask about this feature.

What is a marketing automation platform?

A marketing automation platform is software that executes marketing campaigns automatically based on triggers (form submit, segment entry, specific user action), routes contacts through branching logic (engagement signals, lead-score thresholds, lifecycle stage), fires actions (send email, send SMS, update score, assign to rep), and measures outcomes (opens, clicks, replies, downstream pipeline). Historically these platforms (Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua) ran as standalone products with a CRM-sync bridge. Strkr delivers marketing automation as a native layer inside the suite: journey builder, AI drafts, scoring, attribution, deliverability, all in the same tenant as the CRM.

What are the best marketing automation platforms?

The usual list: Marketo (enterprise standard, specialist-admin product), HubSpot Marketing Hub (most approachable, gated features at Enterprise), Salesforce Pardot / Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (deeply Salesforce-integrated, enterprise price), ActiveCampaign (mid-market journey builder, lighter B2B shape), Mailchimp Marketing (easy but shallow journeys). Each solves part of the problem with a tradeoff. Strkr's native marketing module replaces the specialist platform for teams that want the CRM, marketing automation, SMS, and project delivery in one tenant with one permission model and one audit log.

How is this different from running Marketo plus a CRM?

Marketo plus a CRM is two tenants with a sync bridge. Marketing data lives in Marketo, sales data lives in the CRM, pipeline attribution reconstructs quarterly from exports. The bridge works but produces data drift (duplicate detection failures, custom field conflicts, latency on engagement signals). Strkr's marketing module is in the same tenant as the CRM. Contact records are shared, lead scores are shared, campaigns tie to deals in real time, attribution writes automatically. Marketing and sales see the same context because the data layer is one, not two bridged over an API.

Can non-specialists use the journey builder?

Yes. The journey builder uses the same canvas and vocabulary as the Flows runtime, so marketing ops and sales ops learn one authoring surface. Triggers are chosen from a dropdown. Branches are built with form inputs. Actions come from a library spanning the full suite. Preview-as-contact mode walks the branches with a specific contact's field values before launch. A marketing ops lead builds the first useful journey within an hour of signup; a non-specialist marketer with CRM familiarity typically ships their first within a day.

Can the platform handle B2B account-based motions?

Yes. Account-based motions are first-class: define a target account list (manual, dynamic segmentation, or imported CSV), run campaigns scoped only to that list, measure engagement per account rather than per contact, feed signals into the deal record. The account view aggregates campaign engagement across every contact at the account for a true ABM scoreboard. Multi-contact handoff to the right rep happens through the standard routing rules. The ABM shape that most teams buy from a specialist vendor ships as a surface in the marketing module.

What about deliverability?

The platform ships deliverability as a first-class concern: dedicated IP options for high-volume senders with managed warmup, automatic bounce handling (hard bounces to permanent suppression, soft bounces with retry), unsubscribe hygiene across every campaign, DKIM, SPF, and DMARC setup wizards with DNS record verification, and a reputation dashboard with inbox placement rate, spam complaint rate, bounce rate, and engagement rate per sending domain. Alerts fire on threshold breaches. The deliverability work most teams outsource to a dedicated vendor is built into the product shape. A B2B SaaS at 70K active contacts we work with cut their monthly deliverability consultant retainer when they migrated because the native tooling covered the same ground.

How does the platform handle migration from Marketo or Pardot?

The migration tool pulls lists, programs, workflows, templates, dynamic content rules, scoring models, and campaign-level reporting history in a single run. Automations rebuild in Strkr Flows, usually with about 30 percent fewer flows because common patterns ship first-class. Templates convert through an HTML import that preserves tracking parameters and dynamic content tokens. A growth-stage B2B team we worked with moved 180 Marketo programs in four weeks with a 10-day parallel run before cutover. The slowest part is almost always deliverability warmup on the new sending domain, which runs 2 to 4 weeks regardless of platform; the actual automation rebuild usually finishes faster than teams expect.

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