5 October 2026

Plexo illustration for Stop Lead Leaks: 7 ActiveCampaign Recipes for Marketers, Measured

Stop Lead Leaks: 7 ActiveCampaign Recipes for Marketers, Measured

Start with welcome and onboarding, lead nurture to demo, a 30-day onboarding sequence and a re-engagement path, and measure every one of them with Jump To conversion tracking, ActiveCampaign’s rebranded Goals feature. These four automations cover the biggest revenue leaks in most funnels: slow first contact, cold leads, early churn and silent unsubscribes. The rest of this guide gives you the exact steps, the architecture to keep them maintainable, and how to prove they work.

TL;DR:

  • Automations should target clear business outcomes like booking demos or increasing purchases, not just open rates or generic engagement.
  • Use specific Jump To conversions with tracking enabled to measure automation success and optimize thresholds based on traffic quality.
  • Separate sensing automations that trigger tags and scores from delivery automations that act on those tags, enhancing flexibility and maintainability.
  • Prioritize automations based on revenue impact, focusing on automation gaps identified through audits and monitoring their performance regularly.
  • Measure automation effectiveness through completion rates and time to conversion rather than vanity metrics, ensuring actions truly drive revenue.
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Table of Contents

Core automation concepts you need before you build

Every automation in ActiveCampaign is built from the same small set of parts. Get these right and the seven recipes below take minutes to assemble instead of hours of trial and error.

Start triggers decide who enters an automation and when. The most useful ones are a form submission, a list subscription, a site visit and a change in contact score. Active Intelligence added site-visited and score-change triggers alongside reply-detection, which means you can react to behaviour instead of just form fills.

Actions are what happens once someone is inside. The common ones are sending an email or SMS, adding a tag or custom field, creating a deal or task, firing a webhook to another tool, and starting or ending another automation.

Three logic elements do almost all the heavy lifting:

  • If/Else splits contacts based on a condition, such as whether they clicked a link.
  • Wait pauses the automation so behaviour has time to happen before you check it.
  • Split Actions randomly divide contacts for A/B testing inside the workflow itself.
  • Jump To marks a conversion checkpoint and can be tracked as a measurable goal.

Underneath all of this sit your data structures: tags, custom fields, and contact or deal scores. Whether an automation is set to run once or multiple times per contact matters enormously for score-based triggers, since a “runs multiple times” automation can add points every time a condition is met rather than just the first time.

Seven practical automation recipes you can build now

Each of these follows the same shape: a trigger, four to six steps, a Jump To conversion to measure success, and a note on what tends to go wrong.

  1. Welcome and onboarding drip. Trigger on list subscription, send three emails over 5 to 7 days, use If/Else to check opens or clicks, then branch engaged contacts toward product education and quiet ones toward a re-permission email. Set Jump To as “onboarded” once someone completes the sequence or takes a key action. Watch for: generic welcome copy that doesn’t differ from your lead magnet promise.

  2. Lead nurture to demo. Trigger on a landing page form, add score increments for email opens, link clicks and page visits, and use an If/Else or score-change trigger to check when score passes your threshold. When it does, Jump To “demo booked”, create a deal in the relevant pipeline and assign a task to sales. Watch for: thresholds set once and never revisited as traffic quality shifts.

  3. Abandoned cart or abandoned action recovery. Trigger on a cart or checkout event, send a reminder email within an hour, follow with a second email and an SMS at 24 hours, then test a discount on the third touch. Jump To “purchased” closes the loop. Watch for: discounting every abandoner by default, which trains your list to wait for a deal.

  4. Re-engagement win-back. Trigger on inactivity, typically 60 to 90 days with no opens or clicks, and run a short multi-channel sequence across email and SMS. Use If/Else to send engaged clickers down a win-back offer path and silent contacts toward a final “still want to hear from us” email. Jump To “re-engaged” or “resubscribed” depending on the action you’re measuring.

  5. Post-purchase expansion. Trigger on purchase, add a Wait tied to a usage milestone (first login, first result, first repeat order), then send an upsell or cross-sell sequence. Jump To “upsell accepted” when the second purchase or upgrade happens. Watch for: upselling before the first purchase has delivered any value.

  6. High-intent reactive path. Trigger when a contact visits your pricing page twice in a short window, then fire an immediate personalised SMS and a sales notification task in the same step. Active Intelligence’s score-change and site-visited triggers make this reactive pattern possible without manual list checking. Watch for: notification fatigue if your threshold is set too low and every browser triggers a sales alert.

  7. Content repurposing pipeline. Trigger on webinar completion, feed the recording into transcription, tag the contact by topic interest, then create a content task automation that routes the transcript to your writing queue. This one isn’t customer-facing, but it keeps your nurture content fresh without a separate production process.

Pro Tip: Name every Jump To step after the business outcome it represents, not the automation step number, so your reports read like a results dashboard instead of a technical map.

For recipes that lean on outbound sales motion, such as nurture to demo, a B2B sales engagement platform can sit alongside the automation, to manage the human follow-up once a deal is created.

Advanced architecture: modular hubs, tags and scores

A single giant automation that does everything from tagging to sending to scoring breaks the moment you need to change one email. ActiveCampaign’s guidance on CRM workflows describes a better pattern: separate sensing automations that tag and score contacts from delivery automations that read those tags and send.

  • Sensing automations watch behaviour (site visits, form fills, score changes) and write to a canonical set of tags and fields.
  • Delivery automations only read those tags and fields, never duplicate the sensing logic themselves.
  • A central hub automation can route contacts to the right delivery automation using “start another automation”, keeping each piece small and testable.

This separation means you can rewrite an email sequence without touching the logic that decides who qualifies for it. Naming conventions matter here too: a consistent prefix like “SENSE: pricing page visits” versus “SEND: pricing nurture” keeps a growing account navigable once you’re past a dozen automations.

Score-based triggers need the “runs multiple times” setting turned on deliberately, since the default single-run setting means a contact’s score change will only fire your automation once no matter how many times their behaviour repeats, which silently breaks lead-scoring recipes.

Pro Tip: Use “end another automation” when a contact converts, so they stop receiving nurture emails from a parallel sequence that no longer applies to them.

Measure and iterate: Jump To tracking and testing

None of these recipes mean anything without measurement. ActiveCampaign’s automation conversion tracking requires you to tick the tracking checkbox on a Jump To action before it populates the Jump To Tracking report, since tracking is optional by default.

Once enabled, that report shows two numbers worth building your review process around:

  • Completion rate, the share of contacts who reach a given Jump To step.
  • Average time to completion, how long contacts take to get there, which tells you whether your Wait steps are calibrated correctly.

One thing worth tracking as a baseline: Jump To conversion tracking attributes outcomes directly to automation paths rather than to vanity metrics like opens, which matters because an email with a high open rate and a low Jump To completion rate is quietly failing at its actual job.

For testing, Split Actions let you divide contacts randomly inside the automation itself, so you can run two subject lines or two offer structures and compare their Jump To completion rates rather than just their open rates. Log the winning path’s completion rate and time to completion somewhere visible, a shared dashboard or a simple spreadsheet, so the next person building an automation starts from evidence rather than guesswork.

How a consultant turns an audit into an automation plan

A short example of how this comes together in practice: a wellness brand audit typically surfaces three or four automation gaps at once, usually in onboarding, lead nurture and re-engagement. The job after the audit is picking three to prioritise for a 90-day plan, not building all of them at once.

  • Map each audit finding to a specific Jump To conversion it should move, such as “demo booked” or “re-engaged”.
  • Build the sensing and delivery automations in that priority order, testing each Jump To before moving to the next.
  • Keep a live operating view of completion rates and time to completion so the client sees progress weekly, not at a 90-day review.

We run our own engagements this way: the audit identifies which automations matter most to revenue, then we manage the build and the dashboard directly rather than handing over a slide deck.

Pro Tip: Ask any consultant proposing automation work to show you the Jump To report they’ll be judged against before the contract starts, not after.

Examples of automations by industry or business type

The same building blocks produce very different recipes depending on what you sell. A wellness or recovery brand typically needs onboarding automations tied to first-session attendance, re-engagement tied to missed bookings, and post-purchase sequences tied to programme completion rather than a single product purchase.

An e-commerce brand leans harder on cart abandonment, post-purchase cross-sell and win-back sequences triggered by purchase recency, since the buying cycle is short and repeatable.

A B2B services or SaaS business usually needs lead nurture to demo as its highest-priority automation, backed by score-based routing so sales only gets notified once a lead has shown real intent, plus onboarding automations that reduce early churn in the first 30 days.

A local or multi-location service business benefits most from high-intent reactive paths, SMS reminders for bookings, and re-engagement automations triggered by time since last visit rather than time since last email open.

The pattern across all of them is the same: identify the one or two conversions that actually predict revenue for that business model, then build sensing and delivery automations around those, not around generic “stay in touch” sequences that look busy on a dashboard but don’t move a Jump To number.

Where automations earn their keep, and where teams trip up

The automations worth building are the ones tied to a business outcome you can name, like a demo booked or a second purchase, not the ones that simply keep open rates respectable. Open rate is a vanity signal dressed up as a KPI.

The two mistakes I see most often are a single monolithic sequence trying to do nurture, sales notification and re-engagement all at once, and an automation list with no naming convention, so nobody can tell which one owns which outcome six months later.

Hire outside help when your team is stretched too thin to build and measure properly, when you have no Jump To reporting in place at all, or when your sales process has multiple pipelines that a simple linear sequence can’t represent.

— Jordan

Plexo’s business audit and how it maps to automation delivery

If building and measuring seven automations sounds like more capacity than your team has this quarter, that’s exactly the gap our Plexo Business Audit is built to close. The audit runs for 90 minutes and identifies which operational and marketing constraints are costing you revenue right now, then we turn those findings into a 90-day delivery plan rather than a report that sits in a drive folder.

What that looks like in practice:

  • We prioritise the Jump To conversions that map to your actual revenue, not every automation that’s theoretically possible.
  • We set up live dashboards so completion rates and time to completion are visible weekly, not discovered at review time.
  • We manage the build directly, so you get a working system rather than a set of recommendations to implement yourself.

Our wider Content, Operations, Revenue service covers the follow-on implementation once the audit sets priorities. Book a 90-minute audit to see which three automations would move your numbers fastest.

FAQ

What are five examples of marketing automation?

Five common examples are a welcome and onboarding drip, a lead nurture sequence to demo booking, cart abandonment recovery, a re-engagement win-back sequence, and post-purchase upsell automation. Each uses triggers, conditional logic and a Jump To conversion to measure success, as described in ActiveCampaign’s automation blog.

What are the top marketing automation tools?

The main categories are CRM-integrated automation platforms, dedicated email marketing automation tools and sales engagement platforms, each suited to different stages of the funnel. A B2B sales engagement platform typically handles outbound follow-up, while platforms like ActiveCampaign handle the nurture and conversion tracking layer.

Can you give an example of a workflow automation?

A common example is a lead nurture workflow: a contact fills out a landing page form, receives a scored nurture sequence, and once their score passes a threshold, the automation creates a deal and a sales task while marking a Jump To conversion as “demo booked”. This pattern is outlined in ActiveCampaign’s CRM workflow guidance.

Is ActiveCampaign a CRM tool?

ActiveCampaign combines email marketing automation with CRM-style features such as deals, pipelines and contact scoring, so it functions as both depending on how it’s configured. Its automation actions let you create deals and tasks directly from marketing triggers, which is why many teams run sales and marketing from the same account.

How do I measure whether an automation is working?

Enable tracking on a Jump To step and review the Jump To Tracking report for completion rate and average time to completion, rather than relying on open rates. This is the built-in method described in ActiveCampaign’s conversion tracking help article.

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