What email automation sounded smart when you added it, but ended up being useless?
One example for me is a browse abandonment automation I tried in the past. On paper, it makes sense. Someone looks at a product, does not buy, then gets a reminder later. But I found out later on that it's way less effective than I thought, especially when the person was just casually browsing or had only click around for two seconds.
Same thing with some winback emails. The concept makes sense because I'm reaching out to customers who already had some interest in my brand before. But sometimes it feels like I'm just emailing people who have already mentally moved on, and the workflow just creates more unsubscribes than actual revenue.
I'm not saying these automations never work. I know they can. I'm more interested in the ones people built or added to their stack because everyone kept saying "you need this", then later realized it was not worth keeping.