Marketing Automations

Accelerating Marketing Automation with Pre-Built Salesforce Flow Templates

Building effective marketing automation takes time, and staring at a blank canvas can often delay your first campaign. With Agentforce Marketing (aka Marketing Cloud Next), you can bypass those early hurdles with six out-of-the-box flow templates designed to accelerate your path from idea to execution.

Instead of building common campaign patterns from scratch, you can now select a proven framework, customize it to your business needs, and launch faster. These templates don’t replace your marketing strategy—they accelerate it, providing the structure and foundational assets you need to focus on what truly differentiates your brand: messaging, personalization, and customer experience.

Why Flow Templates Matter for Marketers

Marketing automation success is not just about sending emails. It’s about creating relevant, timely experiences that guide customers through their relationship with a brand.

These flow templates help marketers:

• Reduce implementation time: Launch common marketing journeys faster.
• Create consistency across campaigns: Follow proven automation patterns.
• Focus on what matters: Spend less time building and more time optimizing.

For organizations adopting Agentforce Marketing, these templates spark a critical shift in focus: What does this experience need to accomplish now?

Learn how to build your own Flows in Agentforce Marketing with this expert-led workshop.  Register here.

How to Access the New Flow Templates

The new templates are available directly within the campaign creation experience. 

To access them:

• Open the Marketing app
• Navigate to Campaigns
• Select Add New to create a campaign
• Fill out details on the campaign creation pop-up window
• Enter your campaign details and check the “Active” box

Once in the campaign workspace, look to the  “Let’s build your campaign” section, scroll down to “Need a faster start? Browse templates.” 

Selecting Browse Templates opens up the available Salesforce-created flow templates. 

From here, marketers can select the template that best matches their campaign goal and use it as the foundation for their automation. 

After selecting the template, you’ll be guided through the configuration process, including automation settings within the flow template itself. 

Inside the Templates: Six Salesforce-Designed Marketing Journeys

1. Birthday Promotional Email Automation Template

What It Does:

The birthday promotional email automation template helps organizations celebrate customers while encouraging repeat purchases through a personalized promotional experience.

This template for organizations looking to create a simple but effective customer engagement moment to:

• Recognize a customer’s birthday
• Provide an offer
• Encourage action before the promotion expires

Inside the Flow:

This is a segment-triggered flow. The template includes:

• Birthday offer email
• Birthday offer reminder email

Why It Matters:

Birthday campaigns are great examples of personalized lifecycle marketing. They create a meaningful customer touchpoint while encouraging engagement. This template removes the need to build the basic journey structure manually, allowing marketers to focus on the offer, branding, and customer experience.

Pro-Tip: Before activating a birthday automation, validate that your customer birthday data is accurate and consistently maintained. Personalization is only effective when the underlying data is reliable.

2. Lead Capture Follow-Up Email Automation Template

What It Does:

The lead capture follow-up email automation template helps organizations convert new leads into engaged prospects through an automated welcome and nurture experience. This is one of the templates I expect many B2B organizations will recognize the value of because lead follow-up is one of the most common marketing automation use cases.

Inside the Flow:

This is an event-triggered flow. The template includes:

• Lead capture welcome email
• Lead capture product email
• Lead capture brand value proposition email

Why It Matters:

Many organizations invest heavily in generating leads but struggle with what happens next. This template creates an immediate, consistent follow-up experience by helping organizations welcome new prospects, introduce their brand, highlight products or services, and provide valuable resources.

Pro-Tip: This is one of the templates I would recommend reviewing early during an Agentforce Marketing implementation. It provides a strong foundation for lead nurturing while allowing marketers to focus on content strategy and personalization.

3. Reengagement Email Automation Template

What It Does:

The reengagement email automation template helps organizations reconnect with inactive customers or leads. Instead of continuing to send the same messaging to disengaged audiences, this template creates an intentional journey designed to win customers back.

Inside the Flow:

This is a segment-triggered flow. The template includes:

• “We miss you” email
• Benefits and social proof email
• Second discount offer/reminder email
• Final call to action email

Why It Matters:

A mature marketing strategy is not only about acquiring new customers. It’s also about understanding and improving engagement with existing audiences. This template helps marketers reconnect with inactive contacts using incentives strategically, reduce unnecessary communication, and create clear exit paths.

Pro-Tip: Define what “inactive” means before activating the flow. A customer inactive for 30 days may require a different approach than someone who has not been engaged in over a year.

4. Event Email Automation Template

What It Does: 

The event email automation template helps marketers manage communications before and after webinars, conferences, product launches, and other events. Successful events require more than registration emails. Customers need reminders, confirmations, and meaningful follow-up.

Inside the Flow: 

This is a segment-triggered flow. The template includes:

• Event registration confirmation
• Event one-week reminder
• Event one-day reminder
• Event attended follow-up
• Event did not attend follow-up

Why It Matters: 

This template extends the customer experience beyond attendance. We also recommend using Campaign Member and Campaign Member Status to track attendance, creating strong alignment between marketing engagement and CRM reporting.

Pro-Tip: Many teams focus heavily on driving registrations, but underestimate the value of post-event communication. The follow-up experience is often where the strongest conversion opportunities happen.

5. Nurture Campaign Email Automation Template

What It Does: 

The nurture campaign email automation template helps organizations build ongoing relationships with leads through a structured engagement journey. This is especially valuable for B2B organizations with longer buying cycles, where prospects need education and trust-building before making a decision.

Inside the Flow: 

This is a segment-triggered flow. The template includes:

• Welcome to our brand
• Exclusive event or content invitation
• Exclusive offer ends soon

Why It Matters: 

Effective nurturing is about responding to customer behavior, not just following a schedule. The built-in decision paths help ensure that engaged prospects do not continue receiving irrelevant communications.

Pro-Tip: Define your entry criteria, engagement signals, and exit strategy before launching a nurture journey. The technology enables automation, but your strategic rules drive its success.

6. Signup Form Automation Template

What It Does: The signup form template walks the user through what is needed to build a new form, such as Data Source, Fields, Form Content, and an optional Landing Page. This template also captures consent for communications immediately upon form submission.

Inside the Flow: This is an event-triggered flow. The journey follows this sequence:

1. Customer submits form
2. Create record
3. Create consent request
4. End flow

During configuration, marketers define the record type created (options include Lead, Contact, or Account), the marketing channel, the communication channel (Email or SMS), the consent status, and specific record type settings.

Why It Matters: Strong marketing automation starts with strong data practices. This template connects lead generation, data creation, and consent management into one unified, automated process.

Pro-Tip: Before activating this flow, confirm your organization’s data model and consent strategy. Decide what records should be created, what information sales needs, and how communication preferences should be managed.

For more tips on building Agentforce Marketing Forms, check out the Building Better Form Flows with The New Agentforce Marketing Flow Template blog post. 

Summary of Flows 

Flow Name	Trigger Type	Primary Benefit
Birthday Promotional Email Automation	Segment	Celebrates customers and encourages repeat purchases with personalized offers.
Lead Capture Follow-Up Email Automation	Event	Converts new leads into engaged prospects via automated welcome and nurture journeys.
Reengagement Email Automation	Segment	Reconnects with inactive customers or leads through strategic, incentivized re-engagement.
Event Email Automation	Segment	Manages end-to-end communications for webinars, conferences, and product launches.
Nurture Campaign Email Automation	Segment	Builds long-term relationships through structured, behavior-based engagement journeys.
Signup Form Automation	Event	Captures consent and automates record creation immediately upon form submission.

Moving from Building Automation to Optimizing Experience

The six flow templates in Agentforce Marketing represent an important shift in how organizations approach marketing automation. Instead of spending hours recreating common journeys, marketers now have pre-designed frameworks that provide a strong starting point. Whether you are launching a lead nurture program, reconnecting with inactive customers, managing an event experience, or capturing new subscribers, these templates help reduce implementation effort and accelerate time to value.

The future of marketing automation is not about removing the marketer from the process. It’s about removing repetitive work so marketers can spend more time where they provide the most value: understanding customers, creating meaningful experiences, and driving business growth. Open the Agentforce Marketing app today, explore the new templates, and see how much faster you can get your next campaign live.

Need Assistance?

If you need any assistance with your Agentforce Marketing platform, please reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team! We would be happy to help you navigate your next steps in starting to use the platform alongside your existing technology to drive better results.

Artificial intelligence and real-time data are shifting the landscape under our feet. For a long time, Salesforce Flow was considered “admin territory.” Marketers stuck to traditional journey builders and engagement programs. But things have changed. Flow is no longer just a backend automation tool for admins. It can now be directly harnessed by marketers in the Agentforce Marketing platform (also known as Marketing Cloud Next, or Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced Edition) to streamline workflows and deliver personalized, multi-channel journeys at scale. And for marketers with Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement, they can already access these features. To start taking advantage, it’s critical to start learning Agentforce Marketing Flow fundamentals.

See how fellow marketers at Denver Public Schools are already using Flow and Agentforce Marketing features to streamline campaign workflows, deliver multi-channel campaigns, and track attribution. Register Here

The Foundation: Diving into Flow Basics

Historically, Flow Builder was seen as a tool reserved only for Salesforce Admins because of its ability to perform deep backend activities like creating records, automating heavy backend logic, or running APEX.  

With the arrival of Agentforce Marketing, we now have Marketing Flows—sometimes referred to as “citizen flow”. It uses the exact same interface and requires a similar foundational skillset, but it gives marketers unprecedented control over their campaigns. Don’t worry, admins: access to Marketing Flow does not equal full admin rights. Granular control remains secure through specific user permissions.

What is Flow Builder?

Flow Builder is a drag-and-drop visual interface used to automate complex business processes, workflows, and user interactions. Think of it as the core automation engine of Agentforce Marketing. It seamlessly orchestrates your three most vital assets: 

• Segment: Your targeted audience.
• Content: Your dynamic messaging.
• Actions: Your delivery mechanisms.

What can you do with Flow?

Marketing Flows provide a massive playground of strategic options:

• Send: Deploy emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages directly through the canvas.  
• Wait: Pause an individual’s progress for a specific amount of time (from minutes to months) or until a specific event occurs.  
• Update: Dynamically push data to multiple objects or auto-create tasks for your internal team members.  
• Customize: Branch engagement paths using real-time data or user interactions.  
• Optimize: Utilize built-in Path Experiments to split-test channels, content variations, and delivery cadences.

What are the types of Flow?

There are several core marketing flow types tailored to your specific orchestration needs. Below are the most common flow types you’ll need in Agentforce Marketing:

• Automation Event-Triggered: Runs quietly in the background and fires immediately when an action occurs—such as a form fill, an email click, or a new subscriber signup. These are frequently used as completion actions or to instantly route leads.  
• Segment Triggered (recently renamed to “Audience Flow”): Targets a specific group of people (segments, lists, campaign members, etc.) when the flow runs. It is ideal for nurturing new leads or managing ongoing communications, allowing users to exit via rules or end steps.  
• Data 360 Flows: Powered by Data Cloud permissions, these flows can auto-convert records or trigger automation based on calculated insights and real-time score changes.  
• CRM Record-Triggered Flow: This type fires the moment CRM record data changes or updates.  
• Autolaunched Flow: Background automation kicked off by subflows, Apex code, or REST APIs.

Elements: The Building Blocks of Flow

Every flow you build is constructed using three basic types of canvas elements:

• Logic Elements: Includes options like Decisions to branch your paths, Wait Time based on a date, time, or event, and Path Experiments to test different paths.  
• Data Elements: Elements that let you directly Create, Get, Update, or Delete records across the platform.  
• Interaction Elements: The execution steps, where you can Send Email, Send SMS, Send WhatsApp, create Consent, or trigger a Subflow. 

Agentforce Marketing Flow: Three Ways to Build

Building out your vision doesn’t mean staring at a blank whiteboard. Agentforce Marketing gives you three flexible onboarding paths depending on your technical comfort level and campaign complexity.

Start learning how to build your own flows with this hands-on training, Agentforce Marketing Flow Fundamentals Workshop. Learn more and sign up here.

Building Flows with Agentforce

If you are a new Flow user or simply want to quickly stand up a simple nurture, you can use the conversational Agentforce Campaign Creation interface. By providing a prompt grounded in a campaign brief, Agentforce will automatically generate a campaign preview and lay out the flow steps for you. From there, you can ask the agent to refine text tones, add messages, or alter paths using natural language.

Building Flows with Campaign Canvas

The Campaign Canvas is perfect for simple nurtures and straightforward customer journeys that do not require complex decision splits. It offers a streamlined “Quick Start” interface where you can rapidly add linear steps for your triggers, target segments, message content, and wait periods.

Using Flow Builder

When your campaign demands advanced nurtures, exit rules, behavioral decisions, or experiments, it’s time to open up the full Flow Builder. Here, you get full access to the toolbox, manager tabs, canvas layout, and the ability to cleanly cut, copy, paste, and configure every element.

You can also combine these approaches to building flow. Using Agentforce or the Campaign Canvas is a great way to start your flow structure. You can then use the Flow Builder to fine-tune the flow details and add more advanced flow logic. 

Lean on Flow Templates to Save Time

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you launch a new campaign. Salesforce provides over 300 out-of-the-box templates, including multiple marketing-focused options.

Furthermore, once you build a custom flow architecture that works perfectly for your brand, you can save your own flows as templates for your wider marketing team to replicate safely. Flow templates are a great way to avoid starting from scratch. Learn more about Flow Templates from Mike Morris’ blog, Saving Time with Flow Templates in Agentforce Marketing.

Getting Started with Flow & Agentforce Marketing

It’s critical for marketers to start learning Flow to take advantage of the latest automation, AI, and real-time data features in Agentforce Marketing. However, the path to not only learn Flow but also figure out the best deployment approach for your organization to start using these features alongside your current platform can feel overwhelming.  

You don’t have to continue on this journey alone. Tap into the expertise of the Sercante | Trilliad team. We’ve developed a proven Marketing Cloud Convergence Path that we tailor to each marketing team’s business outcomes, ensuring you can continue maximizing your existing platform while fast-tracking your overall time to value.

Agentforce Marketing (aka: Marketing Cloud Next) introduced marketing teams to Salesforce Flow for the first time. While flows provide increased capabilities over tools like Engagement Studio in Account Engagement and Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud Engagement, building them can be time-consuming and even intimidating to new users.

In this post, we’ll explore how to create and use templates to increase efficiency while taking full advantage of the power of Flow.

Non-Admin Flow Types

“Non-admin” flows power Agentforce Marketing and allow marketers to automate key processes without needing administrator-level permissions. Common use cases include sending emails, delivering SMS messages, and creating Salesforce records.

There are two primary Flow types within Agentforce Marketing:

• Form-Triggered: These have a 1-to-1 relationship with a marketing form. They are used to create or update Salesforce records, manage consent, and handle immediate post-submission tasks.
• Segment-Triggered: These are primarily used to send individual or a series of emails and SMS messages. They also power Path Experiment (available in the Advanced Edition) and provide access to additional flow elements allowing marketers to build customized journeys.

Flow is extremely powerful, but getting started can be tough. The Flow canvas is a “blank slate” that requires thought and configuration.

Let’s take a look at how marketers can simplify and scale their efforts using flow templates with a real-world scenario.

Example Scenario

The marketing team has a high volume of assets that they would like to gate on the website using Agentforce Marketing forms. They need to ensure that existing contacts or leads are updated when a form is submitted before creating any new lead records. Additionally, they must generate consent records whenever a user opts in to marketing communications and add them to the correct Salesforce campaign for tracking purposes.

User Setup and Permissions

To replicate the experience of a marketing user, all flows and images in this post were created with a Salesforce user with the following profile and permissions. These are reflective of a standard marketing user.

• Profile
  • Standard User
• Permission Sets
  • Marketing Cloud Admin
  • Tableau Next Included App Business User (This provides access to the Marketing Performance Dashboards)
• CMS Contributor Role
  • Content Manager

Form and Flow Templates

The first step is determining the fields that need to be included on the form. The best approach is to take a minimalistic approach and only ask for information that will be used or is needed for lead routing.

Hidden fields on forms are very useful for capturing form-specific data for use in your flow. For example, you can use them to automatically pass the Campaign ID and Campaign Member Status.

Creating the Form Template

1. Select the “Marketing” app from the App Launcher.
2. Click the “Content” tab to enter the Salesforce CMS.
3. Click on the “Content Workspace for Marketing Cloud” workspace.
4. Click the “Add” button and select “Content”.
5. Choose the “Form” CMS content type.
6. Add Data Source as “Lead”.

7. Drag the input fields into the form, and configure the labels, unique names, and determine if the field should be required or hidden.
8. Set the desired action at form submission (show thank you message or redirect).
9. Add a title, API Name, and description and then save.

Here’s an example of my form. Note that all fields have been set to required (with the exception of the opt-in checkbox). It’s important to know that Flow will overwrite data in Salesforce if a submission is received with blank data. If optional fields are needed, formulas can be created in the flow to protect data.

Creating A Flow

1. From the form you just created, click “New Flow” in the flow section.
2. Select “Open Flow in Flow Builder”.

3. Customize the flow as needed and save.

Customizing the Flow

The flow needed to meet our requirements is a little complicated, but that’s the whole point of this post. We don’t want the marketing team building this logic repeatedly.

This flow was built by a user with the “Marketing Cloud Admin” permission set. The “Marketing Cloud Manager” role lacks access to certain required elements. If you’d prefer, your Salesforce Administrator can also set up this template for you.

Flow Summary 

Here’s a summary of the actions being performed in the flow.

• Creates an opt-in consent record if the consent box on the form is checked.
• Finds existing Salesforce contacts based on the email address and last name in the form submission.
  • Updates existing contact records, if found.
• Finds existing Salesforce leads based on the email address and last name in the form submission.
  • Updates existing lead records, if found.
  • Created new leads, if matching records are not found.
• Retrieves campaign members based on the CRM ID of the person who submitted the form and the campaign ID included in the hidden field on the form.
  • Updates the campaign member status of existing members to the value included in the Campaign Member Status hidden field from the form.
  • Created new campaign members using the hidden fields from the form.

Saving the Flow as a Template

We can now complete the creation of the flow template.

Save As Template  

1. From the Flow tab, open the latest version of the flow.
2. Delete the associated form from the “Start” element.
   • Click “Edit” next to “Event: Form Submission”.
   • Click the “X” to delete the form.

3. Click “Save As New Flow”.
   • Add the flow label and a detailed description of what the flow does and when it should be used. The API Name will automatically populate based on the flow label.

• Note: You may run into an issue saving due to the presence of the Consent Request element. If this happens, delete the field reference in the Contact Point value and save. 

4. Click “Save As New Version”.
   • It’s important to create a new version of the flow before saving as a template. The initial version of the flow will be v0.
   • Saving a new version will increment the version number and ensure your updates are available in the flow template. 
5. Click the dropdown to the right of the “Save As New Version” button and select “Save as Template”.
6. Confirm that the template has been created by completing the following steps:
   • Click the Flows tab.
   • Click the “New” button.
   • Enter the template name in the search box.. 

Using Your Templates

Now that all the heavy lifting is done, you or your team can use your form and flow templates to quickly support additional assets. Here’s how.

Repeat the following steps for all new assets

1. Create the Salesforce campaign that will be used for the form and the campaign members.
   • When creating the campaign from the Marketing App, do not select a campaign template.
   • Selecting a template will result in an additional flow being created.

Do not select a template at the following screen.

2. Navigate to the form template in the CMS.
3. Select the “Clone” from the dropdown menu to the right of the form name.

4. Name the new form based on the asset name.
5. Update the Campaign ID and Campaign Member Status (hidden field values) and Form Submission action.

6. From the Flow tab, click the “New” button.
7. Search for and select the gated content template.
8. Click “Edit” next to “Event: Form Submission” and select the cloned form.
9. Update the Contact Point value in the Consent Request element to reference the email address from the associated form.
10. Click “Save” and name the new flow.
    • Click “Show Advanced” and delete the value in the “Source Template” field.
      • Non-admin users will not be able to activate the flow if this step is omitted.

• The Consent Request element can be a bit finicky. If you see an error after updating the Contact Point, just delete the element and add it back.

11. Exit the flow details page and associate the flow to the correct campaign using the “Associated Record” lookup.

12.  Return to the CMS and publish the form (this will also activate the flow).
13. Add the embed code to the web page promoting the asset.

Save Time and Increase Efficiency with Templates

Building the initial form and flow template featured in this post took approximately one hour. Because the logic is quite involved, I spent a portion of that time testing to ensure everything functioned exactly as intended.

Once the templates were ready, I put them to the test with a stopwatch. While the steps in the “Using Your Template” section might look detailed, I was able to create a brand-new form and flow in just 4 minutes and 1 second. That is a massive 93% time savings!

Beyond just saving time, templates ensure accuracy and process consistency. Asking multiple people to manually replicate the complex requirements stated in this post would almost certainly result in errors.

If you frequently build forms and flows with similar structures, do yourself a favor and templatize. Your future self (and coworkers) will thank you.

Sercante is recognized as a Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Implementation Expert and has the expertise to support your Agentforce Marketing needs. If you’re interested in support with Agentforce Marketing, reach out to us and let us know how we can help.