How Formstack Ditched Legacy Marketing Automation For Inflection.io

Formstack, a leader in form-building and productivity platforms, had long relied on Pardot as their marketing automation platform. But as the company scaled, Pardot’s limitations became increasingly apparent—creating inefficiencies and making it hard for the team to grow their campaigns effectively.

Formstack's Marketing Automation Challenges:

As Formstack shifted toward a product-led growth (PLG) strategy, they needed to run more product-informed campaigns. But unlocking product usage data in Pardot was frustrating and limiting. Its rigid campaign builder, weak segmentation, and clunky integrations made advanced targeting difficult.

Looking for a more intuitive, integrated, and scalable solution, Formstack began evaluating Pardot alternatives.

Why Inflection?

Inflection.io addressed the key gaps Pardot couldn’t.

Inflection’s native integration with Redshift—where Formstack’s product data lives—enabled real-time sync and seamless use of behavioral signals. Inflection’s support of flexible workflow automation and bi-directional Salesforce connection, eliminated contact migration headaches. Inflection’s ability to meet Formstack’s immediate needs while supporting a gradual migration made it the clear choice.

Within just 27 days, Formstack launched its first campaign on Inflection.

How Formstack Replaced Pardot with Inflection.io

Formstack and Inflection teams aligned on goals, objectives, and expectations to kick off the migration from Pardot. This is how we collectively pulled off the Pardot replacement in less than a month:

Step-by-Step Plan for Replacing Pardot with Inflection

1. Current setup assessment: Inflection audited Formstack’s Pardot instance, identifying data gaps and workflow opportunities.
2. Domain authentication: Inflection helped select sending domains and warm them up to ensure strong deliverability.
3. Redshift Integration: Product data was connected via Inflection’s native Redshift sync, enabling real-time product-aware campaigns.
4. Salesforce integration: With Inflection’s bi-directional Salesforce sync, Formstack avoided contact migration and maintained a live connection to their CRM.
5. Initial data imports:The team started with their most engaged contacts to quickly launch meaningful campaigns.
6. Warming up new domains: Inflection shared best practices for warming up new sending domains, ensuring that the client was prepared for their initial email campaigns with the new platform.

How Formstack Jacked Up Their Expansion Revenue with Product-Informed Campaigns

One of Formstack’s most effective initiatives with Inflection  were the “limits” campaigns.

Their product plans have thresholds— how many forms a customer can create, how many submissions they can receive, or how many users they’re allowed. Before Inflection, marketing around those limits was nearly impossible. It required manual list pulls and small-scale outreach each month.

Formstack fully automated upgrade nudges that triggered when accounts neared usage thresholds—timely, personalized messages that guided users toward the right plan.

Before Inflection, we had no good way to market around usage thresholds—it was all manual list pulls. Being able to automate that changed everything, and we’ve seen incredible engagement as a result.

- William MacKay, Sr. Director of Growth Marketing, Formstack

Formstack also automated nurture flows promoting key add-ons during onboarding and triggered upsell nudges based on usage and engagement.

On top of that, Formstack now scores leads using Inflection based on both marketing and product activity, helping them segment audiences and prioritize outreach more effectively.

Takeaway

By moving from a rigid, legacy marketing automation platform to Inflection.io, Formstack unlocked the ability to run product-informed, scalable, and highly personalized campaigns. From automating complex workflows and usage-based upgrade nudges Inflection helped Formstack modernize their marketing automation and drive measurable growth. The results: faster execution, deeper customer engagement, and a foundation built for scale.

Inflection is a marketing automation platform that lets you activate your product data and data warehouse to drive more pipeline, improve product onboarding and adoption, and revenue expansion, all from one platform. Request a marketing automation demo today.