🗞️ In The News

• 🧼 Unilever Snaps Up Dr. Squatch - Because Viral Soap Sells Itself - Source: Marketing Dive

• ⚖️ Anthropic Wins Fair-Use Ruling—but the Copyright Knife-Edge Remains - Source: Wired

• 💼 LinkedIn’s AI Hire-Bots Could Make Your Recruiter Redundant - Source: Social Media Today

• 🧠 Nearly Half of Creatives Are Neurodivergent - Industry, Meet Your Real Superpower - Source: Marketing Dive

🔗 Large On LinkedIn

• 💀 Liquid Death’s Brutal Brand Rule: Own a Niche So Hard Some People Hate You — from Preston Rutherford (link)

• 🪳 NPS: The Cockroach Metric Still Scuttling While Smarter KPIs Sprint Past — from Aarron Spinley (link)

• 🪩 Giants Can’t Dance: Creativity Beats Corporate Bulk Every Time — from Sir John Hegarty How Google Makes Loads of Money - From Byron Sharp (link)

• 🤖 The Great Flattening: Hope and Why Truly Creative People Shouldn’t Fear AI — from Justin Oberman (link)

💼 Case Studies: Case Closed

• 🔍 Four Sneaky Semrush Tricks to Turn Reddit into Your Competitive Spyglass - Source: Search Engine Land

• ⏰ Science Shows Emailing Less Often Lifts Conversions—Quality Beats Quantity - Source:Science Says

• 💄 How To Build A Beauty Brand with Zero Paid Ads—The Pure SEO Playbook - Source: Link Assistant

🧰 You Won’t Blame These Tools

• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Clarify AI - The Autonomous CRM That Updates Itself And Turns Customer Data Into Real-Time Revenue Signals

• 📨 Cora - The AI Inbox Butler That Turns Email Overflow Into Twice-Daily Actionable Briefs

• 📃 Tyce - The AI Document Agent That Drafts, Reviews, And Automates Document Creation In Seconds

NOT JUST EMBARRASSING, BUT EXPENSIVE 🔥💵 

A little over a decade ago, automation sounded like progress: wire up more branches, sneak in a few conditional splits, and watch the customer “journey” hum along.

You’ve thought of everything, brilliant. And you have the scenarios all fully-automated. Cha-ching!

Instead, many brands now stagger under a mountain of technical debt, also unable to even point to the revenue uplift of all that effort.

And all that effort and complexity is piling up - NTT DATA likens it to “paying down a high-interest loan”—the longer you ignore the tangle, the more it slows development, inflates maintenance costs, and leaves the whole stack fragile.

It isn’t just our data teams that are suffering. When every extra step copies data, re-tags profiles, and spawns another API call, pipelines clog. Integration complexity, data-quality drift, and outright failures top the list of pain points for modern data teams, according to a Cloud Data Insights’ 2023 survey.

Those hiccups ripple outward: messages arrive late, or multiply, personalisation gets fuzzy instead of focused, and customers wander off.

It’s not just pipes getting clogged, it’s your customers inboxes too.

The human fallout is brutal. Optimove’s 2025 Marketing Fatigue Report found 70 % of consumers hit “unsubscribe” on brands when they feel the volume gets relentless. And 81 % simply ignore irrelevant messages - until their email or channel provider simply blocks them.

In other words, the more you spray, the faster they stray.

And now vendors are starting to get the picture. Twilio Segment rebuilt its journey engine around real-time, event-triggered flows precisely because the old drag-and-drop monolith “tied up engineering resources for months” whenever marketing wanted a tweak.

Complexity is no longer a badge of sophistication; it’s a very ugly roadblock.

The takeaway is stark: bloated nurture journeys don’t just irritate executives who land in their own re-engagement loops—they chew through budgets, throttle pipes, and erode customer trust.

Ignoring the issue means slower experiments, lost revenue, and a steady drip of unsubscribes you’ll never win back.

It’s time to retire the “more steps = more value” posturing game and start measuring journeys by the sales they add, not the branches they show off.

THE 4 LAWS OF FINDING “FLOW” 🪠🧘 

LAW 1 - Every Step Adds Friction
Each branch, delay timer, or data-enrichment call isn’t just another box on a canvas; it’s a potential failure point. One extra lookup can double latency if the downstream service is under load. Multiply that by a dozen steps and the “personal” note arrives after the moment has passed. The cure is ruthless pruning: kill any step that doesn’t fundamentally change the value proposition or the message.

LAW 2 - Timeliness Beats Sophistication
Customers don’t care that a workflow took eight conditional paths to select a hero image with a 31 year old male in it. However, they do notice that the email you asked them to look for arrived eight very long minutes after you told them to check their inbox. Real-time triggers tied directly to a single behavioural signal consistently outperform deep-branch nurtures. Speed is, in practice, the sharpest form of personalisation.

LAW 3 - Behavioural Tagging > Persona Trees
Long-form persona trees try to predict every twist of a customer’s journey in advance. But they age badly. Business and offerings change, and some poor soul has to go back in and update that mess. A leaner approach tags key events at the source—add-to-cart, plan downgrade, product category, latest order value, first login—then lets those tags fire self-contained messages. New use-case? Add a tag and a trigger, not another branch. This keeps the logic close to the behaviour and cuts the risk of stale assumptions.

LAW 4 - Design for Deletion
Most journeys are born; few are retired. Anything left running unmonitored will clog throughput, spawn ghosts in reporting, and confuse the next team who inherits the setup. Build with an expiry date: if a flow or a send activity hasn’t run for ninety days, it should auto-notify you or switch itself off. Deleting dead journeys is cheaper than hardening them, and far kinder to the next person on call.

Taken together, these laws turn a sprawling choose-your-own-adventure into a set of laser-focused nudges that reach people while they still care. Strip, speed, tag, delete. Your calendar (and your patience) will thank you. Ya welcome.

YOUR PLAYBOOK TO KEEP IT TIGHT 📘 

OK, so now that you have the laws figured out lets take a look at some clear actions you can take to tidy up this mess.

1. Audit and Strip

• Pull the last three months of live journeys into a spreadsheet.

• Highlight any step that merely waits, enriches, or re-routes without changing the final message. And be honest with yourself.

• If you can remove the step and the customer would still get the same offer and message, delete it.

Common pothole: teams keep “just-in-case” branches for edge cases that never fire. Archive them instead of shielding them with more logic.

2. Tag at the Source

• Instrument core product and marketing events once eg. add-to-cart, plan downgrade, new sign-up, referral, churn survey complete etc.

• Store tags on a single customer profile table that every channel can read.

• Map each tag to one self-contained trigger rather than a feeder branch. You can still include appropriate delays and follow-ups, but always re-check for disqualifying behaviours and other activity that may have taken place since the delay.

Tool tip: open-source event routers (e.g., RudderStack) let you enrich tags in flight and land them in both marketing and analytics with one call.

3. Fire While the Signal Is Hot

• Set triggers to react within seconds, not minutes.

• Use lightweight, per-trigger templates - no master canvas - so updating copy never risks the entire system.

• Use master/ global creative templates. This makes your library of trigger-based comms much easier to update when the brand team decides to add a drop-shadow to the logo.

• Cap the total number of active triggers per customer (e.g., three in 24 hours) to prevent pile-ups when multiple events collide. You can try to get fancy with weightings around which messages get through - but absent some critical transactional/ account based rules - you really should just go with a “first in best dressed” policy.

Metric to watch: engagement-to-latency ratio. Divide opens or clicks by median send delay; improving this shows you’re getting faster, not just louder.

4. Retire on a Timer

• Add an “expiry date” field to every flow when you launch it.

• Run a weekly job that flags anything sending zero messages for 30 days.

• Archive or delete flagged flows; document why you kept any exceptions.

Potential pitfall: sentimental attachment. Someone once spent weeks building that journey, so no one wants to bin it. Hold a quarterly “de-clutter sprint”, get the team around it and celebrate the retirement of previously great work (and now your biggest deletions).

Follow these four steps and you’ll shift from labyrinthine nurture trees to a lean set of instant, relevant nudges.

The payoff is two-fold: customers only hear from you when it matters, and your data team finally their weekends back.

BUT, BUT… MY CUSTOMERS DESERVE “MORE” ❤️‍🔥 

Yes, they do. But the most important thing is accuracy and timeliness.

Yes, lean triggers can feel clinical. Critics worry you’ll lose the warm arc of a multi-email narrative or worse, flood people with pings the second they breathe on the product. Both are fair shots. Triggers do fragment the story if you launch them in silos, and real-time pipes can slip into machine-gun mode without strict guardrails.

The fix is governance, not more branches. Wrap related triggers in a single brand voice guide (see templates point above), cap non-triggered sends per customer per day or week, and reserve one “checkpoint” message, think weekly recap or progress badge to stitch the story together. You’ll be surprised how well these weekly account “recap” messages work, when they’re baked with pure personalisation.

On the tech side, run latency and frequency dashboards in the same view so marketing sees impact and risk together. If a trigger’s relevance window closes (low clicks, high delay), retire it fast.

Handled this way, triggers stay concise, customers stay engaged, and you still get room for the occasional long-form hero piece. Just without the labyrinth leading up to it.

LESS CANVAS, MORE CONVERSION 📈 

Complex journey builders once felt like power tools crossed with air-traffic control, chuck in another branch, admire the sprawling map, hit send. Today the brands winning attention and sales are the ones who move quickly, not the ones who diagram beautifully.

By stripping dead weight, tagging behaviour at the source, firing messages while the moment still matters, and retiring flows before they fossilise, you trade complexity for speed and relevance.

Your customers don’t know (and don’t care) how elegant the wiring is behind the scenes. They’ll remember that your “We noticed you downgraded—anything we can fix?” note arrived the moment they closed the tab, not 10 days later, after another 3 sales emails.

They’ll recall that you kept the inbox quiet when you had nothing meaningful to say.

So this week, pick one bloated nurture journey, makes some notes, press delete, and replace it with a handful of single triggers tied to a real signal. Track the engagement-to-latency ratio and watch how the numbers shift.

If it works (and it will) keep pruning.

If you enjoyed this edition, please forward it to a friend who’s looking to level-up their lifecycle marketing game - they’ll love you for it (and I will too) ⏭️ 💌

PS. When you’re ready here’s how I can help you:

1. Fractional CXO services: Need a top strategic product, marketing and digital transformation mind to grow your brand, but don’t want the hefty price tag? Fractional CXO services allow you to start growing revenue, before your grow your people costs. Limited slots available.

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Troy Muir | The Ladder