Marketing Automation Mistakes Costing ROI: Set & Forget

When it comes to marketing automation, you can’t just ‘set it and forget it’ and then expect a pipeline full of engaged leads to appear like magic. 

Automated journeys that aren’t regularly reviewed and refined tend to lose their impact over time. Conversions dip, engagement weakens, and what was once a carefully designed lead nurture flow becomes misaligned with your audience’s needs.

If you’re responsible for proving marketing ROI, securing future budget, or simply ensuring tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud or HubSpot are working as they should, this is an issue worth addressing as soon as possible.

The idea that automation should be completely hands-off is appealing. But it’s also misleading.

Good marketing automation isn’t static. It responds to prospect behaviour, adapts to new data points, and provides a tailored experience at every stage of the customer journey. Left untouched, even the best workflows risk becoming disconnected from real buyer behaviour.

Think back to your own experience as a customer. Have you ever received a string of emails that didn’t reflect your buying needs or where you were in the buying process? For example:

• A product pitch email immediately after downloading a top-of-funnel guide?

• A re-engagement message when you’d just clicked through a previous campaign?

These moments create friction that can alienate your audience. They signal that the brand isn’t paying proper attention. And they’re usually the result of automation that hasn’t been revisited in a while. Your marketing automation has gone stale.

Marketing automation is a long game. Not in the sense that it takes forever to set up, but because it should be regularly optimised. What worked in Q1 might not work now. And if you haven’t tested, updated, or walked through your nurture journey in months, chances are your leads can feel it.

What tends to happen is:

• Logic becomes outdated.

• Messaging no longer reflects your offering.

• Behavioural triggers don’t align with how leads are engaging.

Your audience won’t tell you this explicitly. They’ll simply stop opening and clicking.

All of this leads to missed opportunities. And if your data isn’t being reviewed frequently, you may not spot the decline in engagement until results have already taken a hit.

Here’s a challenge: walk through your primary nurture flow as if you were a new lead.

• Does the tone feel clear and relevant, or a bit robotic?

• Are the timings of each step based on real behaviour?

• Do the CTAs make sense at each stage, or are they too early?

• Are you using segmentation, dynamic content, or lead scoring to personalise?

• Is there any process for learning and improving based on performance?

If any of this feels off, your automation may be due for a refresh.

Marketing automation mistakes don’t always show up as obvious problems. Often, it’s the small disconnects that do quiet damage. Over time, these cause:

• Lower lead engagement.

• Drop-off in journeys.

• Less reliable attribution data.

• Fewer quality conversions to report on.

• Decreased return on marketing investment.

For managers tasked with proving marketing value to the business, automation that isn’t working hard enough isn’t only a technical concern, but a barrier to securing budget, recruiting additional resources, and having creative freedom.

Great marketing automation isn’t solely about efficiency; it’s about delivering an excellent customer experience. When it’s working well, automation does more than save time. It:

• Helps the right people move through the funnel at the right pace.

• Delivers messaging that feels timely, not forced.

• Improves lead quality by nurturing based on actual behaviour.

• Builds trust and consistency, especially where teams are stretched.

If your flows are gathering dust, consider this your sign to revisit them.

Run regular audits

Aim to audit your marketing automation account at least quarterly. A thorough audit considers everything from technical errors to marketing automation strategy. As part of your audit, consider whether your existing journeys are still aligned with your strategy. Do the triggers and logic still make sense? How has performance changed over time? Taking a step back to review the data is essential to maintaining and improving your ROI.

Test small changes

You don’t need a full rebuild to see improvements. Sometimes adjusting a single email or trigger can make a meaningful difference to engagement and conversion rates. Once you’ve identified where there may be issues with your setup, make small adjustments and monitor the result.

Align with your team

If your sales process, messaging, or product focus has changed recently, your automation should reflect that. Make sure your flows evolve as your business does.

Get a fresh perspective

When you’re managing marketing automation alongside a thousand other competing priorities, it can be hard to find the time and energy to investigate what is and isn’t working. 

Having an outside perspective can do wonders for your marketing automation setup. This is where a marketing automation consultant can help - especially if they’re certified specialists in your platforms. 

MarCloud is a Salesforce and HubSpot Partner helping businesses scale. With experience and a proven ROI Framework, we support teams to show tangible results.

If you’d like an outside perspective on how your flows are performing and where they might be holding you back, we’re here to help. Get in touch and we’ll take a look.