Marketing running campaigns from three disconnected tools -- email in one platform, SMS in another, lead scoring in a spreadsheet -- with no unified customer view?
Leads assigned to sales the moment they fill a form, with no nurture sequence or qualification, so sales wastes time on unready prospects?
Marketing Automation Platform Development
One platform that orchestrates email, SMS, and push campaigns from a single contact record -- with lead scoring, journey logic, and CRM sync built in so marketing and sales work from the same data.
We build custom marketing automation platforms for MarTech companies and in-house teams that need more control than off-the-shelf tools allow -- without the per-contact pricing that makes scale expensive.
Journey builder with conditional logic and triggers
CRM and CDP integration for unified contact data
A custom marketing automation platform gives marketing teams a single tool for multi-channel campaign orchestration, lead scoring, and CRM integration -- without paying per-contact fees or working around the limits of off-the-shelf platforms. RaftLabs builds marketing automation platforms for MarTech companies building products and for in-house teams that have outgrown HubSpot or Marketo. Most builds deliver in 12 to 16 weeks at a fixed cost.
100+Products shipped
·24+Industries served
·FixedCost delivery
·12-14Week delivery cycles
When the off-the-shelf tool stops fitting
HubSpot and Marketo work well until they don't. Per-contact pricing makes scale expensive. Workflow logic hits limits when your journey requires branching that the platform doesn't support. White-labelling for a MarTech product is not possible without building on top of someone else's API terms. Data ownership becomes a concern when all contact activity lives in a third-party system.
A custom marketing automation platform is scoped to your contact data model, your channel mix, and your lead qualification logic. The journey canvas works the way your team thinks about campaigns, not the way the platform vendor decided to model it. Pricing scales with your infrastructure costs, not your contact count.
We build platforms for two audiences: MarTech companies building automation as a product feature, and in-house marketing teams at established businesses that have genuine reasons to move off commercial platforms.
What we build
Journey builder and orchestration
Visual drag-and-drop journey canvas where marketers build multi-step sequences without engineering support. Event-based triggers from form submissions, page visits, purchases, and CRM updates. Conditional branching on contact attributes, behaviour, or lead score. A/B test nodes with configurable split ratios and winner promotion rules. Delay and time-based send windows. Wait-for-condition steps that hold a contact in the journey until a specific event fires. The logic layer that lets your team build campaigns that respond to what contacts actually do rather than just when they were added to a list.
Email campaign engine
Drag-and-drop template builder with reusable content blocks and brand-locked design constraints. Dynamic content personalisation using contact attributes and behavioural history. Deliverability management including sending domain warmup, bounce handling, unsubscribe processing, and complaint rate monitoring. List segmentation by any contact attribute or behavioural event. Campaign performance analytics covering opens, clicks, conversions, and revenue attribution. Scheduled and trigger-based sends managed through the same interface.
Lead scoring and qualification
Configurable scoring model combining behavioural signals -- page visits, email clicks, content downloads, demo requests -- with demographic fit attributes from your CRM or enrichment data. Score thresholds that trigger sales handoff notifications and CRM status updates. Score decay for contacts that go cold so the scoring remains a live signal rather than a historical record. Disqualification rules to remove contacts from scoring when they match known non-buyer patterns. A scoring model your sales team trusts because it reflects real buying signals, not arbitrary point assignments.
SMS and push notification
SMS send via Twilio or AWS SNS with opt-in and opt-out management compliant with carrier requirements. Push notification delivery to web browsers and mobile apps via Firebase or APNs. Delivery status tracking and retry logic for failed sends. Channel preference management so contacts receive communications on the channels they have opted into. SMS and push sends coordinated through the same journey canvas as email so multi-channel sequences are managed in one place rather than across separate tools.
Campaign analytics and attribution
Open, click, and conversion tracking across email, SMS, and push channels. Multi-touch attribution models -- first touch, last touch, and linear -- applied to revenue events from your ecommerce or CRM data. Revenue attribution by campaign, journey, and channel so marketing spend is connected to outcomes rather than activity metrics. Cohort analysis for contacts entering journeys at different times. Attribution data exportable to your data warehouse or BI tool for cross-channel reporting alongside paid media spend.
CRM and data integration
Bidirectional contact and activity sync with Salesforce, HubSpot, or your custom CRM. Contact records updated in the marketing platform when CRM data changes and vice versa. Activity data -- email opens, link clicks, journey entry and exit -- written back to the CRM contact record so sales has visibility without switching tools. Webhook support for custom integrations with other systems in your stack. Data mapping configured to your field structure rather than requiring your CRM to match a fixed schema.
Frequently asked questions
Custom makes sense in three situations. First, if you are building marketing automation as a feature inside a MarTech product -- white-labelling a commercial platform adds cost and creates dependency on another vendor's terms. Second, if your contact volume makes per-contact pricing on commercial platforms more expensive than building and hosting your own. Third, if your journey logic or data model is complex enough that the commercial platform requires significant workarounds and the workarounds are creating operational problems. For most businesses under 100,000 contacts with standard campaign needs, HubSpot or Marketo is still the right answer.
Journey orchestration is the logic layer that decides what communication a contact receives and when, based on their behaviour and attributes. A journey starts when a contact meets an entry condition -- filling a form, reaching a lead score threshold, making a purchase. At each step, the journey checks conditions, waits for events, sends communications, or updates contact data in the CRM. Conditional branches let you split the journey based on contact attributes or responses to previous steps. Time delays and send-window constraints mean communications arrive at the right time, not just as soon as the previous step completes. The result is campaigns that respond to what contacts do rather than running on a fixed schedule.
Deliverability is managed at the infrastructure level and the operational level. On the infrastructure side: dedicated sending IPs, domain authentication with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, sending domain warmup for new IP addresses, and bounce and complaint rate monitoring against ISP feedback loops. On the operational side: unsubscribe processing within the required timeframes, suppression list management, and list hygiene workflows to remove invalid addresses before they affect sender reputation. We configure the sending infrastructure and build the operational workflows into the platform so deliverability management is part of the system, not an afterthought.
A core platform covering the journey builder, email send, lead scoring, and CRM integration typically delivers in 12 to 16 weeks from requirements sign-off. Adding SMS and push channels, advanced attribution modelling, or a multi-tenant architecture for a MarTech product extends the timeline. We scope the build before pricing it so the timeline is tied to a specific feature set, not a rough estimate. Fixed-cost delivery means the scope is agreed upfront and the timeline does not expand as the project runs.
