If you run a B2B company, you’re painfully aware that the sales cycle can be long. Prospects want to conduct comprehensive research. They want to weigh and compare their options. They have to go through an education period, then get buy-in from the decision makers within their own company.
While this is part and parcel of the game, it’s always a good thing when you come across tools that can streamline this process. At the end of the day, implementing technologies to do so will make things a lot easier for your prospects and your employees.
HubSpot workflows is one of these golden nuggets. And once you start implementing them into your marketing campaigns, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.
A Workflow is a tool on HubSpot where you can automate emails to your contacts based on specific, preset user behaviors. For example, let’s say you create a landing page with a form enticing visitors to join your mailing list in exchange for your eBook, national bestseller How To Solve the World’s Problems. You can then set up a workflow that establishes that every time a person fills out the form and submits it, they’ll receive a series of communications:
A Thank You email with the downloadable eBook, a follow-up communication a few days later that may be relevant to the book’s content, and a third one possibly promoting something else that may be helpful to the reader.
Setting this process into a workflow means that (a) your contacts will always receive the information in a timely manner, (b) it’ll be done automatically, and (c) you don’t have to worry about typos or other human errors every time you send one of these emails (granted, provided you proofread everything when setting up your workflows).
You can set up a workflow for any type of lead nurturing or drip campaign. You can also create different ones to be sent to different contact segments within your CRM to ensure that everyone in your email list is exclusively receiving marketing emails that are relevant to them.
While the advantages of using HubSpot workflows seem apparent at first glance, there are additional benefits that may not be as obvious. For example:
Automating communications is a practical way to ensure that no lead or customer falls through the cracks. This is crucial, since often, time is of the essence when it comes to reaching out to contacts. Even if they’re not particularly waiting for a communication from you, automating workflows can also ensure brand awareness, as you stay top of mind because they see you in their inbox regularly. This is even more useful as your business grows and it becomes impractical to try to keep track of everything via spreadsheets.
Since workflows can be set and “forgotten” about, your marketing team can focus their efforts into more complex matters. There’s no point in having someone manually send individual emails to a large group of people when there are strategies to design, editorial calendars to create, and content to write. HubSpot sets the stage for working like a well-oiled machine.
Not everyone who comes into contact with your business website is ready to buy. There are those who are visiting for the first time because they typed a question on Google. Others are waist deep researching their options, while a third group may be ready to reach for their wallets with just a little prompt from you. All of these individuals have different information needs; and setting up workflows for each stage of the buyer’s journey ensures they feel catered to.
HubSpot deals are ongoing communications with a contact. You can organize each deal stage into categories to track the progress of these conversations. For example, if the first step a qualified lead can take is to request a demo, then schedule a call, both of these steps is a deal stage. If a contact signs a contract with you, it’s a closed won deal. If they don’t, it’s a closed lost deal. You don’t want the latter to ride off into the horizon. Setting up a workflow to follow up with them can give you insights as to how you can either reengage them or serve them better in the future.
Sometimes people fall off the radar because life gets in the way. Maybe they got busy at work, or found a temporary solution for their pain points so they put you on the back burner. Creating a workflow to reach out to them again can do wonders for reengagement. And if you’re using HubSpot’s customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can segment those readers to better serve them.
Alright. So workflows are extremely useful. But to best set them up will depend on several factors that are very unique to you.
Prior to drafting emails, you need to know exactly what it is you want to communicate. Are you promoting a new service? Announcing industry news? Reminding readers of XYZ? Whatever it is, flesh it out, so that you can then craft your marketing emails around it.
Once you know your campaign goals, you’ll know who’s the ideal audience. If you’re offering a discount to new customers, you clearly don’t want to send those communications to people who’ve already made repeat purchases from you.
What are the behaviors that will trigger these communications? Let’s use the new customer discount example again. If that’s what you’re intending to do, good starting points would be to send the first communication to people who recently downloaded a lead magnet or requested a demo. You can then include follow-up emails at specific time frames after that.
Don’t be annoying. People signed up for your email list because they think you have something of value to offer. It doesn’t mean they want to hear from you several times a day. So be considerate when timing the frequency of your emails. Maybe send one when they first download content, then a few days later to follow up. Or once or twice a week intervals.
Email communications have to look enticing. You want to design call to action buttons that are attractive and that communicate exactly what will happen when a person clicks on it. HubSpot makes this really easy with their CTA creators. No coding knowledge required. You’ll also want to create items such as landing pages, lead magnet, online forms, banners, and anything else you will use to promote your campaign.
The only way to know if a campaign is effective is to track its progress. How many people are opening your emails? If most of them are going unread, you’ll want to revisit your subject lines. How many of those people who open your emails are clicking through to your website? If the number is low, you may want to revisit your CTAs (or A/B test them to see if a different element will help it perform better). What’s your conversion rate? Monitoring all of these components will help you identify what’s working and what isn’t.
HubSpot truly is an all-in-one platform when it comes to, well, pretty much everything. But we’re talking about automation tools, so let’s look at those within the context of workflows:
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You can use email templates to match your brand style and continue using the same modules and calls to action in future communications. No coding knowledge required. In fact, you can even use extremely user-friendly tools such as drag-and-drop editors.
Email tracking lets you know open rates, clickthrough rates, conversion rates, when a person opened an email, whether they’ve replied to it, etc… This alerts you of when it’s time for one of your team members to reach out to them. It also automatically stores all communications in a contact’s CRM file, so that whether it’s sales, marketing, or service reaching out to them, they’ll have a full history of communications to provide better service.
Nobody likes to receive marketing emails that start with Dear Reader. People aren’t cookies, so don’t treat them in a cookie cutter way. HubSpot lets you personalize every communication by tracking your website visitors so that you can tailor your messaging around their specific circumstances. This includes their name, which content they’ve viewed, the company they work for, industry, etc… As a result, you’re significantly increasing the likelihood they’ll engage with you.
I’ve mentioned segmentation several times throughout this blog, and I’ll still bring it up one more time because it’s such an essential part of any effective marketing campaign. And there are so many ways you can categorize your contacts so that you can create ultra targeted communications: What’s their job role? What are their responsibilities? Revenue? Demographics? Each of these groups will benefit from different types of campaigns.
Time is of the essence in marketing, sales, and service. That’s an inalienable truth. HubSpot workflows enable you to notify the pertinent team member who can best help a particular contact. It can also route communications to specific individuals so that your contacts are not left waiting forever for someone to get back to them.
Since every campaign is different, they require that you track different metrics. Is your goal to obtain more website visitors? People to enroll in a webinar? Want them to schedule a discovery call? Tell you their favorite color? Whatever it is, you can set it up to match your needs. You can also choose how you want the dashboards to display these metrics: pie chart, line graph, or whatever else may strike your fancy.
Let us show you how HubSpot tools can best align with your specific business goals. Get a free HubSpot audit. Within 48 hours, you will receive the results, along with actionable steps to ensure that you’re moving forward in a way that will help you boost your ROI.