An automated workflow in HubSpot is a powerful tool that can optimize your manufacturing sales marketing, and operations process. Workflows can remove and automate repetitive or manual tasks so you can focus on operations, logistics and scaling up your business.
Workflows allow you to send your customer important information they need such as customer service emails (tracking numbers, follow-ups, order acknowledgements), how-to product videos and articles, product guides, and so much more. Beyond allowing a business to focus on growth opportunities, additional benefits of integrating HubSpot workflows are:
Top Benefits of HubSpot Workflows
- Improve lead management by automating initial follow-up emails and phone calls
- Increase sales productivity by reducing administrative tasks
- Set up a repeatable and scalable operating procedure that happens automatically
- Boost customer engagement and retention
- Increase brand awareness with product or service emails
- Build community with your customers through regular, timely communication that is personalized and relevant to each customer
- Reduce operations headaches by creating automatic order review and approval processes, task automation, and documentation.
There are endless options in terms of setting up HubSpot workflows that work best for your business. The beauty of HubSpot is that workflows are designed to be customized to your unique business use case.
Thinking of all the possibilities can certainly be overwhelming if you’re new to or haven’t used the workflow tool before. But we’re here to help! In this article, we will provide a brief overview of the HubSpot workflows that be easily integrated, regardless of company size.
Closed Won
This is an opportunity to create a workflow that triggers from a closed won sale. From here, you can continue nurturing your new customers with relevant content that will help support their customer journey. You can schedule a variety of administrative actions that will also allow eliminate repetitive tasks.
- Create an active list of “customers” that can be used for regular company or product updates.
- Automate order acknowledgement emails
- Onboard new customers with a welcome email series
- Internal process automation and documentation of critical client details.
- Production status emails to customers
- Shipping & Tracking emails to customers
- Automate new customer onboarding with your internal team
- Communicate training materials or product information to your customer
A post-sale closed won workflow can be invaluable. This automation allows you to continue to support your customers by combining high-touch one one one interaction with your sales and operations team, with the ease of automation. Freeing up your team to spend more time with customers and less time on administrative work.
Closed Lost
After a long process of submitting a sales proposal, receiving a rejection can be disheartening. While a closed lost opportunity may sound final, it doesn't have to be. This is a chance to segment your closed lost deals into a workflow that will continue to re-engage them with your brand. When it comes time to bid a new project, the brand awareness that you’ve built through the workflow can increase the chances your company will be remembered as a gracious, helpful, informative and supportive partner.. Examples of information you can automate in a closed lost workflow include:
- Company newsletters
- Industry news
- Customer feedback
- Event invitations
- Webinar Invitations on new products and solutions
- How-to guides
- Troubleshooting articles
Re-engagement
Creating a thoughtful re-engagement campaign can boost your inbox deliverability, open rates, and click-through rates. It’s also an important way to clean up your database so that you are only communicating with prospects and customers who want to hear from you. According to a study by Return Path, 45% of recipients who have received re-engagement emails read subsequent messages. You can set-up an automated workflow to deliver a sequence of emails to unengaged customers based on sales or emails. In a re-engagement workflow, you can include:
- Incentive to re-order
- Schedule a one-on-one consultation
- Check-in emails
- Video tutorials
- Latest blogs or educational resources of interest
- Database cleanup by allowing your unengaged contacts to be removed from your list.
Form Submissions
No matter the industry you are in, it’s likely that you have resources that clients can download via form submission. Based on that submission, you can nurture your prospects particular interests by delivering related content. After sending an initial “thank you” email, which would include the asset they requested, you can periodically send content that could include:
- Project Case Studies
- Product demo videos
- Company videos
- How-to videos or articles
- Webinar invitations
- Event invitations
- Frequently Asked Questions email series
- Industry guides
- eBooks
Tip: To avoid fake email submissions, instead of directing the client to a landing page deliver the content piece via email only.
Website Activity
Creating a workflow after content downloads is essential, but this shouldn’t be the only website activity that triggers a workflow. HubSpot’s insights allow you to trigger nurture workflows for contacts based on their website page views, amount of form submissions, and ad interactions. When a contact engages with your website content, their activity is assigned a value that HubSpot categorizes as a lead score. Lead scores help marketing and sales prioritize a contact’s engagement. This lead score can be useful in terms of setting up workflows to ensure contacts with a high lead score will get the follow-up they need. In this workflow you can schedule:
- Tasks to your sales team to follow-up with a contact that has a high engagement (lead score)
- Invitation to a landing page where they can request more information related to their activity
Customer Appreciation
Customer loyalty programs are no longer just for consumers. They’re becoming more frequent in the B2B world. A customer’s loyalty increases profits, drives sustainable growth, and creates opportunities for memorable brand experiences. Help drive customers to take advantage of your program by building a process that tiers your customer based on their purchasing habits and preferences. This allows you to stay consistent by triggering email announcements at the beginning of each promotional period. In addition, with HubSpot’s insights you can capture data that will tailor your loyalty offerings to customer interests purchasing habits, and preferences.
Customer Referral
A customer referral program plays an invaluable role in growing new business opportunities. In fact, 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know. While a sales team should continue to build rapport and verbally request referrals, there will be occasions where it simply may not come to mind during a phone call. This is where an automated customer referral workflow can help fill in the gaps. After a post-sale order summary, you can set-up the workflow to send a special customer offer. For example, “Give, $50, Get $50” when you refer a friend. You can also provide additional value and include a link to a micro-site full of resources, how-to videos, and eBooks that your customer can forward to their friend. Other ways to structure an automated workflow:
- Send instant notifications to your team if a referral completes a form submission for their exclusive offer
- Send emails or create tasks to notify your team if a referral has purchased
Beyond these HubSpot workflows, there are still a lot of others you can build to help manage your contacts based on different circumstances. The best way to manage workflows is to understand your buyer’s journey and what resources or content they would need to move further along.
One of the first steps we recommend when engaging with a new client is to sketch out the buyer’s journey and build a curated customer experience in HubSpot that will wow your customer while saving your team so much time.
If you would like help planning or setting up HubSpot workflows that are successful for your business, give Donnelly Marketing Group a call at 888-964-1577 or email info@donnellymgroup.com.
