The Scheduled Send Is Dying
For the better part of two decades, enterprise email marketing has operated on a deceptively simple premise: assemble an audience, craft a message, pick a date, and press send. The batch-and-blast paradigm — sending a single communication to an entire list on a predetermined schedule — became the backbone of digital marketing operations. It was efficient, predictable, and easy to measure. It was also, as we now understand with uncomfortable clarity, fundamentally misaligned with how buyers actually make decisions.
ActiveCampaign's recent declaration that "the days of classic marketing automation are over" is not mere vendor posturing. It reflects a structural shift that has been building for years and is now reaching a tipping point. The confluence of real-time data infrastructure, sophisticated behavioural tracking, and rising buyer expectations has rendered the scheduled campaign send not just suboptimal but actively counterproductive. Enterprise marketing teams that continue to operate on calendar-driven cadences are discovering that their carefully planned campaigns arrive at precisely the wrong moment — when the buyer's attention has already moved elsewhere.
The transition from batch-and-blast to event-driven, behaviourally triggered campaigns represents more than a tactical adjustment. It demands a fundamental rethinking of campaign architecture, data infrastructure, team structure, and performance measurement. For marketing operations leaders navigating this shift, the question is no longer whether to make the transition but how to execute it without disrupting the revenue engine that still depends on existing campaign frameworks.
The Structural Problem with Scheduled Campaigns
The batch-and-blast model persists not because marketers are unaware of its limitations but because enterprise marketing organisations have built their entire operational infrastructure around it. Content calendars, approval workflows, resource allocation, reporting cadences — all of these are organised around the concept of discrete campaign sends with fixed dates. Dismantling this infrastructure is operationally complex and politically fraught.
Yet the evidence against scheduled sends has become overwhelming. Research consistently shows that the relevance window for any given marketing message is measured in hours, not days. A prospect who downloads a technical whitepaper at 10 AM on Tuesday has a dramatically different engagement profile by Wednesday afternoon. The scheduled nurture email that arrives three days later, according to the predetermined campaign cadence, finds a buyer who has already moved to the next stage of their research — or worse, has engaged with a competitor whose systems responded in real time.
The problem compounds at scale. Enterprise marketing teams typically manage dozens of concurrent campaigns, each with its own schedule, each competing for the same inbox real estate. The result is a phenomenon that data teams have begun calling "cadence collision" — the accidental overlap of multiple scheduled sends that creates inbox fatigue and drives unsubscribes. Frequency caps and suppression rules offer partial relief, but they treat symptoms rather than addressing the underlying architectural flaw: campaigns should not be scheduled around the marketer's calendar but triggered by the buyer's behaviour.
The Inbox Attention Economy
The economics of email attention have shifted decisively against batch senders. Average enterprise inbox volume has increased by roughly 40% since 2020, while the time recipients spend evaluating each message has decreased proportionally. In this attention economy, timing is not merely one variable among many — it is the primary determinant of engagement. A behaviourally triggered message that arrives within minutes of a qualifying action achieves open rates two to five times higher than the same message delivered on a schedule. The content is identical; only the timing differs.
This is not a marginal improvement that can be captured through better A/B testing of send times. It represents a categorical difference in how messages are perceived. A triggered email feels like a response — a continuation of an interaction the buyer initiated. A scheduled email feels like an interruption — an unsolicited intrusion into a context the buyer did not invite. The distinction matters enormously for brand perception, particularly in B2B contexts where trust and credibility are prerequisites for engagement.
The Architecture of Event-Driven Campaigns
Transitioning to event-driven marketing automation requires enterprise teams to rethink their campaign architecture from the ground up. Rather than designing campaigns as linear sequences with fixed timing, marketers must build responsive systems that listen for behavioural signals and act on them in real time.
Defining the Event Taxonomy
The foundation of any event-driven campaign architecture is a comprehensive taxonomy of triggering events. These fall into several categories, each with distinct implications for campaign design.
Engagement events are the most straightforward: email opens, link clicks, form submissions, content downloads, webinar registrations, and page visits. Most marketing automation platforms have supported basic engagement triggers for years, but enterprise implementations often fail to leverage them beyond simple autoresponders. A mature event-driven architecture uses engagement signals not as isolated triggers but as inputs into a dynamic scoring and routing system that determines the most appropriate next action.
Behavioural pattern events represent a more sophisticated category. These are not triggered by a single action but by the recognition of a pattern across multiple interactions. A prospect who visits the pricing page three times within a week, downloads a competitor comparison guide, and opens the most recent product update email has exhibited a pattern that signals active evaluation — the kind of multi-dimensional signal that, as we explore in our analysis of AI-driven lead scoring, machine learning models are uniquely equipped to detect and act upon. Detecting and acting on these compound patterns requires robust data infrastructure capable of real-time event correlation across multiple channels and touchpoints.
Absence events — the things that do not happen — are perhaps the most underutilised category. A prospect who was highly engaged but has gone silent for fourteen days, a trial user who has not completed a key onboarding step, a customer whose usage has dropped below a threshold — these negative signals are often more valuable than positive ones. Building campaigns that trigger on the absence of expected behaviour requires a fundamentally different technical architecture than responding to actions that occur.
External events extend the trigger framework beyond the marketing technology stack. Changes in a prospect's firmographic data, funding announcements, leadership transitions, regulatory developments, or competitive moves can all serve as campaign triggers when integrated through APIs and data feeds. The most sophisticated enterprise marketing teams are building event-driven campaigns that respond to market signals that their prospects have not yet acted upon, positioning the brand as anticipatory rather than reactive.
The Real-Time Data Layer
Event-driven campaigns are only as good as the data infrastructure that powers them. The fundamental requirement is a unified, real-time customer data layer that can ingest behavioural signals from multiple sources, correlate them to known identities, evaluate them against trigger rules, and initiate campaign actions — all within seconds or minutes, not hours or days.
For enterprise marketing teams operating on platforms like Oracle Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Adobe Marketo, this typically means augmenting the platform's native capabilities with a dedicated event processing layer. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have emerged as the primary architectural solution, providing the real-time identity resolution and event stream processing that marketing automation platforms were not originally designed to deliver. The integration between the CDP and the marketing automation platform becomes the critical juncture where event-driven strategy meets campaign execution.
This integration is where many enterprise implementations falter. The data layer must support not only real-time event ingestion but also the contextual enrichment that makes triggered messages genuinely relevant. In an era where first-party data is becoming the foundation of demand generation, the quality and depth of this enrichment layer determines the ceiling of what behavioural triggers can achieve. A triggered email that says "we noticed you visited our pricing page" adds little value. A triggered message that references the specific product category the prospect explored, acknowledges their company's recent growth announcement, and offers a relevant case study from their industry — that requires a data architecture sophisticated enough to assemble context in real time. Teams looking to build this foundation should consider a thorough platform maturity assessment to understand where their current infrastructure falls short.
Rewiring Campaign Operations
The shift from scheduled to event-driven campaigns has profound implications for how marketing operations teams are structured and how they work.
From Campaign Managers to Systems Architects
In a batch-and-blast model, the core competency of campaign operations is project management: coordinating content creation, list building, QA, approval, and deployment on schedule. In an event-driven model, the core competency shifts to systems design: defining trigger logic, building decision trees, configuring real-time data flows, and monitoring automated systems that run continuously.
This is not a trivial shift in skillset. It requires marketing operations professionals who think in terms of systems and states rather than tasks and timelines. The campaign brief — that staple document of scheduled marketing — gives way to the campaign architecture diagram, a visual representation of trigger conditions, branching logic, content variations, and exit criteria. The most effective enterprise teams are investing in strategic services that help them redesign their campaign frameworks from the ground up rather than attempting to retrofit event-driven logic onto campaign structures designed for scheduled sends.
Always-On Campaign Frameworks
Event-driven campaigns do not have launch dates. They are designed, built, tested, activated, and then run continuously, responding to behavioural triggers as they occur. This "always-on" model requires a fundamentally different operational cadence.
Rather than the familiar cycle of plan-build-send-report, always-on campaigns demand continuous monitoring, optimisation, and iteration. Content must be maintained and refreshed on a rolling basis rather than created for a single send. Performance metrics shift from campaign-level aggregates ("this send achieved a 22% open rate") to system-level indicators ("this trigger pathway converts at 8% with a median response time of 47 minutes").
The campaign services required to support always-on frameworks look markedly different from those that support scheduled sends. Production shifts from episodic bursts of activity to a steady-state model where content creation, technical configuration, and quality assurance happen in parallel and continuously. Enterprise teams that have made this transition report that while the total volume of work does not necessarily increase, the distribution and nature of that work changes substantially.
The Hybrid Reality
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that pure event-driven marketing is neither achievable nor desirable for most enterprise organisations in the near term. Major product launches, seasonal campaigns, event promotions, and regulatory communications will continue to require scheduled sends. The practical objective is not to eliminate scheduled campaigns but to shift the balance dramatically — from perhaps 90% scheduled and 10% triggered to 30% scheduled and 70% triggered.
This hybrid model introduces its own complexities. Scheduled and triggered campaigns must coexist without creating conflicting experiences for the buyer. A prospect who receives a behaviourally triggered message at 9 AM should not receive a scheduled batch send on the same topic at 2 PM. Managing this coordination requires sophisticated orchestration logic and a unified view of all communications — both scheduled and triggered — that reach each individual.
Platform Considerations for Enterprise Teams
The major marketing automation platforms have evolved their event-driven capabilities at different rates, and enterprise teams must understand the native capabilities and limitations of their chosen platform.
Oracle Eloqua and Event-Driven Architecture
Oracle Eloqua's Program Canvas and its evolution into more sophisticated workflow tools provide a solid foundation for event-driven campaigns, but the platform's historical strength in structured, multi-step campaigns can also be a constraint. Eloqua's native event processing operates on a cadence-based evaluation cycle rather than true real-time event streaming, which means that "triggered" campaigns may experience latency measured in minutes rather than seconds. For enterprise teams requiring sub-minute response times, augmenting Eloqua with real-time event processing middleware is often necessary. Organisations seeking to maximise their Eloqua capabilities should evaluate the full spectrum of integration options available for event-driven use cases.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Journey Builder
Salesforce Marketing Cloud's Journey Builder was designed from the outset with event-driven logic as a core capability. Its API event and interaction triggers support real-time campaign activation, and the platform's integration with the broader Salesforce ecosystem provides access to a rich set of behavioural and transactional signals. However, the complexity of Journey Builder's configuration and the platform's consumption-based pricing model mean that enterprise teams must be deliberate about which events justify real-time triggered campaigns and which can be handled through more cost-effective batch processes.
Adobe Marketo and Smart Campaigns
Adobe Marketo's Smart Campaign framework offers flexible trigger-based campaign activation, with the ability to respond to a wide range of behavioural signals. Marketo's strength lies in its relatively intuitive trigger configuration and its deep integration with CRM systems. For enterprise teams evaluating or optimising their Marketo capabilities, the platform's trigger processing architecture supports rapid response times for most standard event types, though complex multi-condition triggers may require careful optimisation to avoid processing bottlenecks.
HubSpot and Workflow Automation
HubSpot's workflow automation has matured significantly, offering event-based triggers that cover a broad range of behavioural signals. While historically positioned for mid-market organisations, HubSpot's enterprise tier now provides the sophistication required for complex event-driven campaigns. Its native integration between marketing, sales, and service hubs creates a unified behavioural data set that simplifies trigger-based campaign design.
Measuring What Matters in Event-Driven Marketing
The shift to event-driven campaigns demands a corresponding evolution in measurement frameworks. Traditional campaign metrics — open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates measured at the send level — provide an incomplete picture of event-driven campaign performance.
Response Time as a Core Metric
In event-driven marketing, the time between a triggering event and the delivery of the responsive communication is a primary performance indicator. This "trigger-to-touch" metric directly correlates with engagement rates and downstream conversion. Enterprise teams should establish target response times for each category of trigger event and monitor actual performance against these targets.
Pathway Analysis Over Campaign Analysis
Rather than evaluating individual campaigns, event-driven measurement focuses on the performance of trigger pathways — the end-to-end sequences that begin with a behavioural signal and conclude with a desired outcome. Pathway analysis examines not just whether a particular triggered message was opened or clicked but whether the entire sequence of triggered interactions moved the prospect toward a defined goal. This requires attribution models that can track influence across multiple triggered touchpoints rather than crediting a single campaign.
System Health Metrics
Always-on campaigns require always-on monitoring. Enterprise teams must track system health metrics including trigger processing latency, queue depth, error rates, and content freshness. A triggered campaign that references outdated pricing or discontinued products does more harm than a generic scheduled send. Operational dashboards that surface these metrics in real time become essential infrastructure for event-driven marketing operations.
A comprehensive campaign maturity assessment can help enterprise teams evaluate their current measurement capabilities and identify the gaps that must be addressed before scaling event-driven campaign programmes.
The Strategic Imperative
The transition from batch-and-blast to event-driven marketing automation is not a technology upgrade. It is a strategic repositioning of the marketing function from broadcaster to responder — from an organisation that talks at buyers on its own schedule to one that engages with buyers on theirs.
The enterprises that execute this transition successfully will build a durable competitive advantage. Their marketing communications will arrive at the moment of maximum relevance, their content will address the specific context of each buyer's journey, and their brand will be perceived as responsive and attentive rather than intrusive and generic.
Those that delay will find themselves trapped in a deteriorating paradigm. As more organisations adopt event-driven approaches, buyer expectations will recalibrate. The scheduled batch send that once seemed normal will increasingly feel tone-deaf. Open rates will continue to decline, unsubscribe rates will rise, and the marketing team will find itself working harder to achieve diminishing returns.
The path forward requires investment in three areas simultaneously. First, the data infrastructure that enables real-time event processing and contextual enrichment. Second, the campaign architecture that translates behavioural signals into relevant, timely communications. Third, the operational capabilities — skills, processes, and measurement frameworks — that sustain event-driven marketing at enterprise scale.
None of this happens overnight. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and the cost of inaction compounds with each passing quarter. The days of classic marketing automation may not be entirely over, but the era of event-driven, behaviourally triggered campaigns has decisively begun. Enterprise marketing leaders who recognise this shift and act on it now will define the next chapter of customer engagement. Those who wait for the transition to complete itself will find they have waited too long.
