Feature · Marketing Automation Workflow

Marketing automation workflows wired to the record, not a syncing marketing cloud.

Trigger a workflow on any CRM event, branch on any field, run across email, SMS, in-app, and task channels, score the lead, log the audit trail, and watch the whole motion happen on one record store with one permission model and one view of consent. Strkr ships the workflow builder, the channel layer, the scoring engine, and the audit log native on every paid tier.

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What a workflow has to do before it earns the seat

Triggers, branches, waits, actions, and a feedback loop into the CRM.

The useful definition of a marketing automation workflow is narrow. A trigger fires on a specific event. A branch reads a specific field or signal. A wait holds the record until a condition fires or a timer expires. An action runs on a specific channel. A feedback loop writes the result back onto the record so the next workflow can read what happened. If any of those five steps lives in a separate tool, the workflow stops behaving like a workflow and starts behaving like a sync job that drifts. Strkr builds all five as native primitives on the lead and contact record so the loop closes without a middleware step.

Event triggers

Any CRM event can start a workflow.

Form submission, pricing-page view, trial start, deal stage change, lead score crossing a threshold, custom field update, incoming SMS reply, meeting booked, meeting canceled. The trigger list reads from the real event stream the record produces, not a filtered subset the vendor shipped. If the record emits the event, a workflow can trigger on it.

Field branches

If this, then that, on any field.

Branch on industry, company size, lead score tier, named-account flag, product in use, lifecycle stage, country, time zone, or any custom field. Branches support compound logic (A and B, A or B, A and not C) and the preview shows how many records sit in each path before the workflow goes live.

Timed waits

Hold the record until the right moment.

Wait for a fixed interval (two days, four hours, one week). Wait until a specific date or time of day in the recipient time zone. Wait until a condition becomes true (opened email, replied, visited pricing page). The timer respects quiet hours per locale and never fires an SMS at 2 a.m. in the recipient zone.

Channel actions

Email, SMS, in-app, task, webhook.

Send an email through the native email layer. Send an SMS through Strkr Messaging. Fire an in-app notification. Create a task on the owner. Hit a webhook into an external system. Update a field on the record. Enroll in another workflow. Each action logs to the record activity timeline alongside the manual activity.

Writeback

Workflow results update the record.

When a workflow step completes, the result writes to the record. A sent email timestamp. A clicked link flag. A booked meeting. A field update. The next workflow or the next report reads the writeback directly. The feedback loop closes inside the same object store so analytics are not waiting on a sync job.

Exit conditions

Leave the workflow when the goal is met.

Every workflow carries one or more exit conditions. Booked a meeting, converted to opportunity, hit a disqualifying signal, replied to an email. When any exit condition fires, the workflow stops and the record moves out. The exit list prevents a converted lead from receiving a nurture email two days after the meeting booking.

Error handling

When a step fails, where does the record go.

Delivery failure, bounced email, invalid phone number, webhook timeout, consent revoked mid-sequence. Each failure mode has a configured handler. Reroute to a different branch, log an error on the owner, drop the record, or retry. The error log is visible, filterable, and queryable from the workflow dashboard.

A B testing

Two subject lines, one workflow.

Any email or SMS step supports an A B split with configurable traffic allocation. The split reports open rate, click rate, reply rate, and downstream conversion rate for each variant. The winner can promote automatically after a configured sample size or stay in split mode indefinitely for ongoing optimization.

Version history

Every workflow change, stored and revertable.

Each save produces a version. The version diff shows which steps changed, which conditions moved, which copy was rewritten. Rolling back is one click. The audit log carries the actor, the timestamp, and the change scope, so compliance reviewers can trace the whole history of a workflow.

Common marketing workflow examples that run in production

Nurture, re-engagement, trial activation, event follow-up, and renewal.

The useful workflow catalog is the set of motions that revenue teams actually run every week rather than the demo-ready templates that get built once and never touched again. These are the workflow shapes most Strkr customers configure in the first month of use. Each one carries a specific trigger, a specific branch set, and a specific feedback loop that writes to the record so the next sequence can read what happened.

Inbound lead nurture

From form submission to first meeting.

Trigger on form submission. Branch on tier. Send an immediate welcome email with the matched case study. Wait two days. Send a second email with the pricing-page link. Wait three days. If no engagement, offer a 15-minute demo slot. If replied or booked, exit the workflow. Scoring updates on every step.

Trial activation

From signup to first value milestone.

Trigger on trial start. Send onboarding email with the setup checklist. Wait 48 hours. If no login, send a product tour SMS through Strkr Messaging. Wait three days. If no first value milestone, offer a 30-minute onboarding call. Exit on milestone reached, meeting booked, or paid conversion.

Re-engagement

Cold leads, surgically woken up.

Trigger on 60 days since last engagement with lifecycle stage still lead. Send a short "still interested" email with the industry-matched case study. Wait a week. If no reply, send a second email with the newest feature. Wait a week. If still cold, move to the suppressed list for 90 days.

Event follow-up

Trade show scans into real pipeline.

Trigger on badge-scan import. Branch on scan quality score. Send a thank-you email with the exec one-pager. Wait 24 hours. Create an SDR task with the booth conversation notes. Wait three days. If no meeting booked, send a nudge SMS. Convert to opportunity on booked.

Renewal warmup

Expansion motion, 120 days out.

Trigger on contract end date hitting 120 days away. Send a value-recap email with the usage story from the past 180 days. Wait a week. Send a case study showing peer expansion. Wait two weeks. Fire a CSM task to book the renewal conversation. Exit on booked renewal meeting.

Cross-sell play

White-space signal to pitched module.

Trigger on white-space signal: usage ceiling hit on a module the account already owns. Send a short email introducing the complementary module. Wait a week. Share a peer case study. Wait a week. Create a sales task with the pitch brief. The expansion forecast picks up the activity.

Customer onboarding

Closed-won into first value in 30 days.

Trigger on opportunity closed-won. Send kickoff email with the implementation playbook. Wait 48 hours. Create a CSM task to book the kickoff call. Wait two weeks. Send a check-in SMS. Wait two more weeks. Trigger the 30-day health review. Exit on 90 days post-launch.

Churn save

Red-tier accounts into save motion.

Trigger on account health tier dropping to red. Send a CSM-signed email with a specific offer: executive review, usage audit, success manager rotation. Wait 48 hours. Create a save task on the manager. Wait a week. Escalate to the VP of success if still red. Exit on tier change.

Webinar invite

From invite send to attended attribution.

Trigger on target-segment match for the webinar topic. Send invite email. Wait a week. Send reminder email three days before. Send SMS reminder 60 minutes before. Mark attendance from the webinar integration. Follow up attendees with a replay email and a demo offer.

The visual builder, step by step

Drag the trigger, drop the branch, test the path.

A workflow builder earns the seat on whether the admin can produce a correct workflow in minutes rather than fighting syntax. Strkr ships a visual canvas with explicit nodes for triggers, branches, waits, actions, and exits. Every node carries inline validation, hover documentation, and a test-run mode that walks a sample record through the whole workflow and shows exactly which path it takes. These are the builder capabilities that matter.

Visual canvas

See the whole workflow on one screen.

The canvas shows triggers at the top, branches in the middle, exits at the bottom. Zoom out for the full map. Zoom in to edit a single step. Minimap pinned to the corner for long workflows. The visual hierarchy mirrors the real path a record takes rather than hiding it behind nested menus.

Node types

Trigger, branch, wait, action, split, exit.

Six node types cover every pattern a real workflow needs. Trigger starts the flow. Branch forks on a condition. Wait pauses until time or condition. Action runs a channel or writes a field. Split performs an A B test. Exit removes the record on a goal. Nothing is hidden behind a special node that only works in one scenario.

Inline validation

Red underlines on broken references.

Reference a field that does not exist, point a webhook at an invalid URL, or set a wait to zero seconds, and the node turns red with the specific error inline. The workflow cannot save in an invalid state. Validation runs on every edit, not only on save, so the error surfaces before the thought is gone.

Dry run

Walk a sample record through, no sends.

Dry run picks a sample record, walks it through the workflow, and shows which path it took, which branches fired, which waits applied, and which actions would have run. Nothing sends. Nothing writes. The ops team can validate a complex workflow against ten real records before it goes live.

Template library

Starting points for the common shapes.

The template library ships the nine workflow shapes from the catalog above plus a dozen more specialized to specific motions. Copy a template, adjust the copy and the branches to your own ICP, and launch. The admin starts from a working baseline rather than a blank canvas.

Preview counts

How many records sit in each branch.

Before activation, the preview panel shows how many current records would land in each branch. A targeting rule that captures three records when the admin expected 3,000 surfaces the problem before any email sends. The preview updates live as the admin tunes the conditions.

Comments on steps

Document the why alongside the what.

Every node accepts a short comment. "This two-day wait matches our standard SLA." "This branch is a holdover from the Q3 campaign and should be retired after Q1." Comments ride through the version history so the next admin reads the context the previous admin left.

Keyboard shortcuts

Build fast when you know the moves.

Alt plus arrow to navigate nodes. Enter to open the inspector. D to duplicate a node. Delete to remove. Ctrl plus Z to undo. The shortcuts are learnable in a day and shave the build time from an hour per workflow to twenty minutes for admins who use the tool daily.

Mobile preview

What the email and SMS look like on a phone.

The content step for email renders the real template at 375 pixels wide, and the SMS step shows the composed message in a phone frame with character count and the segment boundary visible. The admin sees what the recipient sees before the first send, not after a test send on a personal device.

Compliance, consent, deliverability

The three failure modes marketing workflows actually die from.

Workflows that generate volume without a credible consent posture, a legal review path, and a deliverability program fall over at the first regulatory audit or the first ISP block. Strkr builds consent, suppression, deliverability, and legal review as native primitives on the workflow engine. Every send respects the real consent record on the contact. Every workflow carries a legal reviewer flag. Every channel reports its deliverability health. These are the controls that keep the program running.

Consent per channel

Email, SMS, phone, each tracked separately.

The contact record carries consent state per channel. Opt-in to email does not imply opt-in to SMS. Opt-out of SMS does not imply opt-out of email. Every workflow send reads the consent on the right channel and skips the record if consent is missing or revoked. The audit log records the skipped sends alongside the executed ones.

Suppression lists

Shared across workflows, respected on every send.

Tenant-level suppression captures hard bounces, hard opt-outs, legal holds, and manually suppressed addresses. Every workflow checks the suppression list before send. A record on the suppression list never receives a message from any workflow, no matter the trigger or the branch. The suppression list is tamper-evident.

Quiet hours

No SMS at 2 a.m. in the recipient zone.

Every message step respects per-locale quiet hours. The admin configures the window for each country or region. A workflow trying to send outside the window queues the message to the next permitted time. Legal and brand both get what they need without the admin writing custom logic.

Legal review flag

Workflows can require legal sign-off before launch.

Admins can mark a workflow template as requiring legal review. The reviewer gets a notification. The workflow cannot activate until the reviewer approves it. The approval is logged with the reviewer, the timestamp, and the version hash so the audit log can prove sign-off happened on the exact version launched.

Deliverability dashboard

Open rate, bounce rate, spam complaints, in one view.

Each sending domain carries a health dashboard: open rate, bounce rate, spam complaint rate, blocked rate, ISP breakdown. The ops team monitors the health trend and takes action when a domain drifts toward a block. The dashboard integrates with the native email layer and does not require a third-party deliverability tool.

SMS compliance

A2P 10DLC, carrier rules, keyword stop handling.

The native SMS layer runs on registered A2P 10DLC for US traffic, respects carrier filtering rules, and auto-handles STOP, HELP, UNSTOP keywords. A STOP message anywhere revokes consent on the record. Every workflow reads the consent state and skips the suppressed record on the next pass.

GDPR and CCPA

DSAR, deletion, data residency.

The platform supports Data Subject Access Requests and deletion workflows that respect the audit log while removing the personal data. Data residency controls route storage to the region required by the tenant. Workflows respect the deletion state and never resurrect a deleted contact in a cadence.

HIPAA and BAA

For regulated healthcare deployments.

Strkr supports HIPAA-compliant deployments with a signed Business Associate Agreement for qualified customers. PHI flows through dedicated handlers with field-level encryption. Workflows for HIPAA tenants carry additional restrictions on which fields can appear in message bodies and which channels can carry PHI content.

SOC 2 in progress

Formal controls, external audit.

Strkr runs a SOC 2 Type II program with an external audit firm. The report is available under NDA to prospective customers. The controls cover access management, change management, incident response, backup and recovery, and vendor risk. Marketing workflow audit trails sit inside the SOC 2 scope.

Reporting on what the workflows actually did

Open rate is a vanity metric. Pipeline sourced is the number.

The reporting that keeps a workflow program alive is not the open rate dashboard. It is the pipeline-sourced number, the opportunity-created count, the meeting-booked rate, and the influenced revenue curve. Strkr builds the workflow report on top of the same object store the pipeline runs on, so the attribution path is one query rather than three sync jobs across three tools. These are the reports the ops leader actually looks at.

Pipeline sourced

Opportunities created by workflow in the window.

Every opportunity carries a sourced-by field that points to the workflow that generated the lead or the engagement that led to conversion. The report groups by workflow and shows the dollar amount of pipeline each workflow sourced in the quarter. The marketing leader has a credible answer to the CFO question.

Meeting booked rate

Meetings per 1,000 records entering the workflow.

For top-funnel workflows, the meeting-booked rate is the leading indicator of eventual pipeline. The report normalizes to records entered, not records contacted, so a workflow that skipped half its targets on consent does not inflate the denominator. The rate is comparable across workflows and across time.

Influenced revenue

Closed-won deals that touched this workflow.

The influenced-revenue report shows the closed-won amount of every deal where the contact or account was active in the workflow during the sales cycle. Multi-touch attribution is modeled explicitly, and the report shows first-touch, last-touch, and even-weight splits so the marketing team picks the attribution model the business accepts.

Exit reasons

Why records left the workflow.

Every exit carries a reason: goal reached, exit condition fired, consent revoked, hard bounce, workflow retired. The exit report shows the distribution of reasons so the admin sees whether a workflow is converting on goal or shedding records on consent, which is a very different signal.

Branch volume

Which paths the records actually took.

A workflow with ten branches should show records distributed across the branches in roughly the shape the admin expected. The branch-volume report shows the real distribution. A workflow where ninety percent of records fell into one branch is a workflow with the targeting wrong, and the report surfaces the gap before the ops lead needs to ask.

Timing analysis

How long records spent in each wait.

For every wait node, the report shows the median, p90, and p99 time records spent before moving. A wait with a two-day timer that shows a p90 of eleven days is a wait that is waiting on a condition that never fires. The timing report catches silent failures in the exit logic.

Channel comparison

Email versus SMS versus in-app, per workflow.

For workflows that mix channels, the per-channel report shows send volume, delivery rate, engagement rate, and attributed conversion by channel. The admin sees which channel pulls weight on each workflow and reweights the send mix on the next version based on real data rather than channel bias.

Cohort retention

Records converted at 30, 60, 90 days post-entry.

A workflow that converts leads to meetings at 15 percent at day 30 and loses half of those between day 30 and day 90 is a workflow with a quality problem downstream. The cohort retention report shows the full curve so the admin can see whether the workflow sources real pipeline or vanity volume.

Scheduled snapshots

A weekly digest to the right stakeholders.

Any workflow report can be scheduled as a snapshot delivered weekly to the marketing leader, the SDR manager, or the ops team. The snapshot carries the current numbers and the week-over-week delta. The team reads the real update in their inbox and does not have to remember to open the dashboard.

A workflow engine that lives inside the record store, not next to it.

Triggers, branches, waits, actions, scoring, consent, deliverability, and reporting all ship on every paid tier. Strkr AI, Strkr Messaging, flows, and the CRM pipeline read from and write to the same object store, so marketing automation and sales automation stop drifting and start sharing one timeline.

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Common questions

What buyers ask about this feature.

What is a marketing automation workflow and what has to be inside it to work?

A marketing automation workflow is a configured sequence that starts on a defined event, routes a record through branches based on fields and signals, waits for timed or conditional moments, runs actions across channels (email, SMS, in-app, task, webhook), and writes the result back to the record. The feedback loop into the record store is the step most tools skip, and the step that keeps the next workflow from drifting out of sync. Strkr builds all five pieces (trigger, branch, wait, action, writeback) as native primitives on the lead and contact record so the entire motion runs inside one object store with one permission model and one audit log.

What are common workflow examples that production teams actually run?

The nine shapes most Strkr customers configure in the first month are inbound lead nurture, trial activation, re-engagement of cold leads, event follow-up from trade shows, renewal warmup at 120 days out, cross-sell plays on white-space signal, customer onboarding to first value, churn save on red-tier accounts, and webinar invite plus follow-up. Each one carries a specific trigger (form submission, trial start, 60 days since engagement, badge scan, contract end date, usage ceiling, closed-won, health tier change, segment match), a specific branch set, and a specific feedback loop that writes the outcome to the record so the next workflow can read what happened without a sync job.

How does the visual builder compare to a code-based workflow tool?

The Strkr workflow builder is a visual canvas with six node types: trigger, branch, wait, action, split (for A B tests), and exit. Every node carries inline validation, hover documentation, and a dry-run mode that walks a sample record through the whole workflow and shows exactly which path it takes without sending anything. The template library ships the nine common shapes plus specialized templates for specific motions. Keyboard shortcuts and a mobile preview compress the build cycle for admins who use the tool daily. The open REST API and webhook infrastructure expose every step for teams that want to drive workflows programmatically rather than from the canvas.

How does Strkr handle consent, suppression, and SMS compliance?

The contact record carries consent state per channel (email, SMS, phone, mail) so opt-in to one does not imply opt-in to another. Every workflow send checks the consent record before executing, skips the record if consent is missing or revoked, and logs the skipped send alongside executed sends. Tenant-level suppression captures hard bounces, hard opt-outs, legal holds, and manually suppressed addresses. The native SMS layer runs on registered A2P 10DLC for US traffic, respects carrier filtering rules, and auto-handles STOP, HELP, UNSTOP keywords. A STOP message anywhere revokes consent on the record. Quiet hours are configured per locale so no SMS fires at 2 a.m. in the recipient time zone.

What reporting ships on top of the workflow engine?

The default workflow reports cover pipeline sourced (opportunities created by workflow with dollar amounts), meeting-booked rate (normalized to records entered), influenced revenue (closed-won deals that touched the workflow with first-touch, last-touch, and even-weight attribution), exit reasons (why records left), branch volume (actual distribution versus expected), timing analysis (median and p99 wait times), channel comparison (email versus SMS versus in-app), and cohort retention (conversion at 30, 60, 90 days). Any report can be scheduled as a weekly snapshot delivered to the marketing leader, the SDR manager, or the ops team with the week-over-week delta included.

Does marketing automation ship on every tier or is it an add-on?

Marketing automation workflows are a core capability of Strkr and ship on every paid tier at no extra charge. The workflow builder, the trigger catalog, the branching logic, the native email layer, the native SMS layer (through Strkr Messaging), the consent record, the suppression list, the deliverability dashboard, and the reporting suite are all native. Strkr AI runs on every tier with no credit meter and powers the dry-run explanation and the content suggestions inside the builder. There is no separate marketing automation SKU, no premium workflow module, and no middleware layer required to connect the workflow engine to the CRM pipeline.

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