r/MarketingAutomation

Managing paid campaigns gets a lot more complicated when budgets reach six or seven figures. There are more campaigns to monitor, more decisions around where spend should go and less room for expensive mistakes. AI can help with bid adjustments and shifting budgets based on performance, but giving it too much control over spending still seems risky.

For agencies handling several large accounts, manually reviewing every adjustment isn't always practical either. Having automation handle routine optimizations while keeping major budget decisions under human approval seems like a reasonable balance. The question is how much responsibility AI can take before the risks outweigh the time saved.

When we launched Tappd.io, we were so focused on growth that we didn't think much about who was signing up. Tappd lets you send email and push notifications and in-app messages from a single place, and segment your customers on all possible filters. That kind of power is great for real businesses, but it's also attractive to people who want to blast junk email. Some of our early users did exactly that.

Attempt 1: Alerts only

We did have some protection in place. If a user's content looked spammy, our system would fire an alert. The problem? It was just that, an alert. Nothing was actually stopped. By the time someone looked at it, the junk had already gone out. We were watching abuse happen with no way to stop it.

Attempt 2: Auto-block on detection

So we flipped it. If the system detected abusive content, it automatically blocked the send and flagged it for our support team to investigate.

That stopped the abuse, but it created a new problem: it was also blocking real users. Legit customers had their sends stopped and were left waiting on support to clear them. That's a terrible experience, especially for someone who just signed up and is trying to see if your product works.

Attempt 3: Talk to people first

What finally worked was a lot less technical than we expected. We started interviewing early customers and put a gate on their first journey. Before a new user can start sending, we get to know who they are and what they're trying to do.

This did two things:

- Abusers dropped off. Most of them don't want to get on a call or explain their use case.

- Genuine customers got a better experience. We learned what they needed, and they weren't caught by filters built to catch bad actors.

What we took away from this

- Detection alone isn't protection. An alert that doesn't stop anything is just a log.

- Blocking aggressively hurts good users. Every false positive costs you trust.

- Sometimes the best fix isn't more automation, it's adding a human step at the right moment in the journey.

- Early users shape your product, but they also shape your platform's reputation. Be intentional about who you let in.

If you're building a platform where users can send messages at scale, think about abuse prevention from day one, not after the first incident.

Curious how others have handled this. Have you used onboarding gates or manual review for early users? What worked and what backfired?

(We're building Tappd.io, happy to answer questions in the comments.)

I’ve worked in CRM and lifecycle for a while, and setting up the actual automation is rarely the part that takes the longest.

Once the trigger and audience are decided, there’s still a lot of manual work: writing the email, designing it, finding images, adding links and personalization, testing everything, and moving it into the platform.

I’ve started working on a small tool around this problem, but before spending more time on it, I’m trying to understand whether other teams experience the same thing.

Where does most of your time go between deciding to run a campaign and having it ready to schedule?

Ops person at a 5 advisor RIA. We've had meetings coming in from 3 different sources this year and every one of them lands as a calendar invite with a name and nothing else. By the time it reaches Redtail somebody has retyped it, if they remembered. Right now it's a shared inbox, a spreadsheet and one very patient associate. I'm trying to design this before we add a 4th source. What does a sane intake look like between an outside setter and the CRM?

So, this is what I currently have. We’re doing enterprise sales with a very niche target group.
This means I don’t need to blast 1,000 emails and LinkedIn messages a day. I’m looking for a more tailored, AI-driven automation setup.
Ideally, the setup would work something like this:
A tool or AI agent understands our ICP, our solution and our market. We then create different personas, and these personas can be targeted based on different rules, such as buying signals or manual entry by the sales team.

Once someone matches the criteria, they should be added to a flow. For example, a flow could include a LinkedIn connection request/InMail and a cold email, with each message being deeply personalised by AI based on the individual, company and context.
All of this data should then be synced back to HubSpot, so the activity and relevant information are visible in the company/contact records.

In other words, I’m looking for something that works almost like a sales automation agent.

I’m currently testing a few tools, including Lemlist, Gojiberry, Surfe, FirstTouch and Expandi. So far, Lemlist seems like one of the strongest options for the multichannel approach, especially because of its HubSpot integration.
Unfortunately, Gojiberry doesn’t have a native HubSpot connection, which is a bit of a dealbreaker for us.

What would you recommend for this kind of multichannel, AI-driven sales agent approach?
Especially interested in setups that work well with HubSpot and focus on highly targeted, personalised enterprise outreach rather than high-volume outbound.

I've been experimenting with automation and one thing I've noticed is that the boring stuff can actually be the best stuff to automate. I'm not trying to have ai decide my entire ad strategy. I'd just like to eliminate repetitive steps that don't really require a human.

For example, we regularly have batches of meta creatives that need to be launched across campaigns. Blip caught my attention because it focuses on that operational side rather than trying to replace the media buyer. Has anyone else taken this approach? What boring marketing process did you automate that ended up being useful?

I’ve been working on a faster way to turn existing footage into short-form videos, and I’d like to try it with real client or brand content.

Send me a batch of footage + your brief/content plan, and I’ll turn it into a few short videos for free. I just want honest feedback on the edits and workflow.

If interested, comment with what kind of content you manage.

Hey for anyone maintaining form-to-CRM integrations, can you remember the last time a submission didn’t reach its destination?

What first tipped you off? I’m particularly interested in whether your existing tools caught it or someone had to notice something was missing.

I’m researching a possible monitoring product, not selling one. A short example would help me understand whether there’s an actual gap here or whether existing alerts already handle it well.

No need to share client names or private data.