“Campaign thinking asks "what are we sending this month?" Journey thinking asks "what should happen when this person does something?" So you design around moments, not dates. When does someone enter, when do they leave, and what happens if they qualify for two journeys at once.”
Marketing automation promises to do the follow-up that busy teams never find time for - consistently, and for every contact. But the tools only pay off when they're pointed at the right target: not this month's campaign, but the individual customer moving through a journey of their own.
In this article, we draw on the knowledge of martech industry experts, who share lessons from real-world projects - from framing automation around journeys instead of campaigns, to layering it in as a team's marketing maturity grows, to extending the automation builder with custom activities, actions, and triggers.
We close with how these journeys hold up over time - ownership, naming, testing, and consent - and why designing around the customer, not the campaign, is what keeps automation valuable as AI reshapes the marketer's workflow.
Campaign thinking vs journey thinking
Marketing automations are a tool in the marketer's toolbox. It's important that marketers understand where and how to use them effectively.
The foundational principle, shared by all our experts, is that marketers should always automate a portion of a larger customer journey, not just a process or a single experience.
Marketing automation works when you design around what the individual customer does, not your next campaign.
If you adopt this mindset, you realize that journeys frame the big picture of customer experience. They help you plan for both the ideal path to a goal and the moments when the customer does something unexpected.
Although the journey perspective is the foundation of good automation design - far better than treating automations as a campaign delivery tool - marketers must contend with dimensions beyond the individual customer.
“There's a B2B wrinkle too as you often have three or four people from the same organisation in a journey at the same time. You design per contact but you have to think per account, because the decision belongs to the group, not the individual.”
Where the journey starts: fitting automation into maturity
Like any powerful tool, automation invites a reflex to use it everywhere when launching a new CMS or DXP project - especially when someone on the project has deep experience in this area. Automations bring more consistent customer experiences, fewer lost opportunities, more time saved for marketers - the value is there, so why not invest?
The consensus from the experts brings nuance to this topic.
Plan for automation from day one, but introduce it in layers as the team's marketing maturity grows.
Thinking about marketing automation during project planning guarantees the business case is understood and addressed. This is more important than leveraging it in every customer journey from day one.
Whether the need is more autonomy, fewer lost leads, or a way to scale the team, a clear business pain point lets the journey strategy and automation tactics follow - and ensures the team realizes real value.
You might think this all comes down to ROI, but ROI is the proof point, not the problem it solves. Dmitry agrees with Milan that marketers want autonomy, and that's how he frames automation.
“What closes the deal almost every time is the promise of autonomy: giving marketers the power to change automations themselves with little to no dev involvement, instead of locking requirements into code. That flexibility resonates more than a straight ROI pitch”
Automation vs email marketing
Email marketing is a cornerstone of driving and reacting to customer engagement. Marketers familiar with email campaigns, recurring newsletters, or transactional communication might look at automations featuring emails and see them as just a variation on this theme.
You might ask, "Aren't these tools interchangeable? Scheduling an email is basically a simple automation and an automation can be designed to send a full email series, right?"
The consensus is clear. If an email responds to something one person did, it's automation; if it's the same message going to an audience on a schedule, it's an email marketing list - a recipient list in Xperience by Kentico.
As automations grow in steps, covering more conditions and scenarios, some will inevitably send multiple emails - related in content, even when no strict sequence is required.
These automations can start to look like email campaigns. Where do we draw the line?
Jeroen brings us back to the foundational principle of the customer journey.
“An email sequence belongs in an automation when it is triggered by an individual action, event, or stage in the journey. Examples include follow-up after an open day or a reminder after a form submission. In those cases, each contact enters the sequence at their own moment.”
Building the journey: starter kits, scenarios, offline signals
So far we've answered the why and when of automations, but there's still so much to explore in the implementation - the how.
First, it's helpful to know what teams are including in their project launch. For digital agencies, this answers the question, "What's so common that it's become part of our starter kit?"
As mentioned earlier, planning defines what matters most - simple and high impact. Teams start with a small set of automations that cover marketing tasks in most customer journeys:
Responding to interest - form submission autoresponders
Providing product or service information - gated content, curated guides
Strengthening an existing relationship - account registration welcome messaging, event attendance follow-up
Profile enrichment - assign attributes to drive personalization, external CRM syncing
These starter kits grow organically out of the experiences successful agencies gain building Xperience by Kentico projects. But it's not just intuition driving these investments - marketing teams often know what they want from the start.
“Clients most often ask for automated emailing triggered by a specific action or condition, such as a form submission, registration, or change in contact data.”
After a project launches and teams become familiar with how customers engage with their digital experiences, it's time to evaluate whether the automations have actually improved their most important workflows.
Although these initial automations move the needle, the commonly requested ones aren't necessarily where the real value opportunity lives.
However, there's a reason the standard, simple automations are delivered first. They are the easiest to connect to actual results.
“Many clients arrive with sophisticated ideas around automatic segmentation and personalization, but during discovery they often can't articulate how they would measure success. So what actually ships first are the easy, measurable wins: onboarding email series, event signup with pre and post nurture, things a small marketing team can point to and show tangible results with.”
If you're looking for more from industry experts, check out these links to shovel-ready tips and insights about marketing automation from the Kentico community:
Running journeys long-term: ownership, naming, measurement, consent
As automations grow in capability, handling more complexity in the customer journey, a question naturally arises: who actually owns the automation technology and implementation?
Clearly, marketers build the automations because they understand their audience and own the customer experiences. On the other hand, the underlying tech, especially when extended with custom actions, triggers, and conditions, is the domain of the software developer.
The answer is more of an acknowledgement than a compromise - ownership is shared.
“Ownership is shared, but the long-term goal is for marketers to manage the automations themselves. Developers are responsible for the technical foundation, reusable building blocks, and integrations with external systems. Marketers then own the content, sequence, and day-to-day optimization of the journeys.”
Treat automations as long-lived shared assets: marketers own the journey, developers own the foundation, and you name, measure, test, and consent-check them so they hold up over time.
This discussion of ownership has been focused on the people, but what about the logic that drives automations? This logic is a combination of code, configuration, and step selection in the automation builder. At first glance, it might not be clear where each piece lives - and therefore who owns it:
Code - software developer
Configuration - software developer or marketer
Automation builder - marketer
“The test is simple. If a marketer might want to change it, it goes in the builder. If changing it safely needs testing, it goes in code. The builder owns the what and the when, so order, timing, branching and content. Code owns the how, so integrations, data handling and anything touching another system.”
The rest of our industry veterans have a very similar opinion, coming at the question from different perspectives.
Shared ownership implies continued collaboration over time - not just between developers and marketers, but also among marketers on the same team - and collaboration benefits from conventions.
One convention that our experts agree on completely is naming.
You might have your automations well organized, but just because something looks nice doesn't mean it works correctly. We need to validate that the customer's journey through the automation delivers a great experience for them and helpful data for marketers.
There's actually a lot to consider here:
How do you test the automation's individual steps?
Is it enough to use a QA environment, or is production testing required?
Can you change an automation's logic or content with customers mid-stream or do you need to create a new one with modified configuration?
Another topic related to testing is consent and data privacy.
“You should always design automations that respect opt-out or opt-in status. There should be a very easy way to do that in your automation process.”
This is a great starting point that naturally leads to other questions:
What if a customer journey is composed of several separate automations, connected by triggers and conditions?
Can you make a single consent check at the entry point to simplify your flow?
Is the best practice to check before every action, no matter what?
Depending on where your business operates and the legal framework you work within, this might be more or less of a concern, but it's unlikely to be something you can skip entirely.
Extending the journey: activities, actions, triggers
Many developers and marketers are interested in the recent improvements to marketing automations in Xperience by Kentico. They want to see use cases for all the extension points:
So, we finish this section on tactics with a selection of examples from our experts.
Custom activities have been available in Xperience since day one, and that has given Dmitry enough time to understand it's not just how you use them. You also need a business case - a "why".
“Which activities unlock the most value? The ones aligned with the client's business goals and KPIs, carrying enough metadata to be sliced and diced later. A bare "search" event isn't enough; pairing it with the filters used and the number of results shown, and carrying that context into the click event, is what turns one activity into something reusable across multiple purposes.”
Marketers often face a large gap in physical-to-digital transition data, which shows up as poor brand experiences for customers.
Custom activities can close that gap, bridging offline, in-person, high-value events into digital experiences in a way that feels natural and helpful to the customer.
“Once you can push a signal from another system onto the contact record, like event attendance or a CRM stage change, the automation builder stops being an email tool and starts connecting the whole business.”
These creative solutions from our experts show how simple tools used well can have a huge impact on an organization.
Developers unlock marketer autonomy by exposing actions, conditions, and triggers as reusable building blocks in the automation builder.
When these are well designed, marketers feel both capable and confident configuring the customer's journey.
Your journey doesn't have to end here
Across every section, one principle held: automate a portion of a real customer journey, not a campaign or a single send. Design around what an individual does - when they enter, when they leave, and what happens when they do something unexpected - and, as Joe put it, automation stops being an email tool and starts connecting the whole business.
The rest follows from that foundation. Introduce automation in layers as a team's maturity grows. Keep a clear line between marketer-owned journey logic and developer-owned code. Name things well, test every path, and check consent at every send. Extend the builder with custom activities, actions, and triggers so offline moments and high-value business signals shape the journey too.
And like the customer journeys they support, these practices are a beginning, not an end. AI is already changing how marketers author content, segment audiences, and even read the notes left on each automation - but its value still depends on a journey that's been thoughtfully designed around people. Structure the journey well today, and you give both your team and tomorrow's AI agents the context they need to act with confidence.
Ready to put these ideas into practice? This six-part article series on automation is a step-by-step guide that picks up where the strategy leaves off:
Xperience Automations can handle more than most teams ask of them. Here are five concrete scenarios - real pages, real emails, real contact data - to show exactly what's possible and where to start.
Sean Wright
I'm Lead Product Evangelist at Kentico. I'm part of the Product team at Kentico along with David Slavik, Dave Komárek, Debbie Tucek, Martin Králík, and Martina Škantárová. My responsibilities include helping partners, customers, and the entire Kentico community understand the strategy and value of Xperience by Kentico. I'm also responsible for Kentico's Community Programs.