Why is automating your marketing so important? Here’s three reasons why I personally love it:
- Organization: You can keep things organized because they’re all in one place, rather than using multiple platforms to get the job done.
- Time: You save time because the software does the work for you rather than spending hours doing tedious tasks. Example: all of the data you would ever need for your marketing is all in ONE PLACE. Between your social media, blog, email marketing, paid ads, and more, you can see how all of your content performs in one software rather than digging through other platforms and pulling together the information manually.
- Delegation: You can free up your resources so your team can focus on big picture projects rather than small responsibilities that don’t bring you closer to achieving your goals.
If you weren’t already convinced that it’s time to start automating as much as you can, I’m sure you are now! Check out the top three processes you can automate through HubSpot.
Automate Your Communications Through HubSpot
Do you ever feel like you’re constantly switching between your phone and your computer to reply to instant messages, emails, texts, chats, social media direct messages, and more? It gets overwhelming and makes it easy for important conversations to slip through the cracks and get forgotten about. The reason why I KNOW you do, is because I used to!
Rather than trying to keep track of all of these different places to respond to your team members and customers, you can automate the following communications methods through HubSpot.
Slack
Why manually add your tasks in HubSpot when a team member requests something via Slack when you can automate it? Thanks to the HubSpot and Slack integration, it’s possible!
Not only does this save you time but it also prevents you from forgetting about the task completely. If you’re guilty of opening a message in Slack and then getting distracted by something else, now you don’t have to worry about losing track of what you need to do and when.
Alternatively, if you’re constantly using Slack to communicate, you can use the platform to receive notifications when someone sends a chat through your website, which allows you to see the status of the conversation and gives you the option to either reply to the chat directly in Slack or opt to be sent to HubSpot to reply there.
Chatbot
Making it easy for leads to communicate with you is important, but it can be difficult to always have multiple team members available to answer questions and inquiries as they come through. Instead of taking up your team’s time to have them individually answer each message a prospect sends, why not implement a chatbot that allows for automated yet personalized conversations?
Scheduling meetings has never been easier thanks to live chat! Instead of going back and forth via email to determine a day and time that works best for both parties, the chatbot will provide the lead with your meeting link so they can conveniently schedule something on their own. Additionally, the chatbot can help to “vet” the people who schedule meetings with you so you’re actually speaking to someone who’s a good fit for your product and not someone who isn’t an ideal customer.
I used to get a lot of “meeting requests” before chatbot existed through my Contact Us page. And while that is fantastic, it would take me a little bit to schedule the meeting between having to email the prospect and find a time that worked for both of us. So it was a no brainer for me to add that on my list of things my chatbot was going to help me with.
You can also use live chat to help website visitors find what they need on your site, preventing you from answering the same questions over and over again. By implementing a knowledge base, you can spend less time repeating the same information and more time on your work by giving your customers the answers they’re looking for right then and there.
And honestly, some people just like the instant gratification that a chatbot provides. You have a technical issue or question, you can easily chat with someone. You need to schedule time, you can easily schedule a meeting. You have a question? No problem, the chatbot will find you the resource with the answer. Instant gratification.
Emails
Do you have multiple Gmail accounts or various email addresses through different email providers and always find yourself switching between tabs to check all of your inboxes? Good news: you can streamline that!
HubSpot allows you to send and reply to emails for the contacts, companies, deals, and tickets located in your account. Not only does this prevent you from needing to sort through multiple inboxes but it also allows you to take advantage of using templates when sending your emails so you never have to write the same email twice, especially when it comes to lead generation.
Automate Your Workflows Through HubSpot
When you go through your sales processes, you likely have the same steps that you follow for your leads. Rather than manually going through each step, you can create workflows in HubSpot that will execute the next part in the process for you. Other than filling in certain contact properties, this can happen with two tasks: nurturing leads and sending proposals.
Nurturing Leads
Once a lead joins your email list, you never want to give them the silent treatment. Set up a lead nurturing workflow so they hear from you consistently, helping you to stay top of mind for them!
What does that look like? It may involve a few steps:
- When a prospect opts into your list for a resource, free demo, or other offer you have, they immediately receive an email with the information on how to claim the offer.
- Throughout a predetermined period of time, spaced out, the prospect will receive a series of educational emails that may include blog posts, resources, case studies, videos, and more.
- Towards the end of the series, the prospect will receive a promotional email that may encourage them to schedule a meeting or sign up for a free trial, with the goal being them taking you up on that offer.
An interesting feature is being able to trigger another workflow at the end of the series depending on whether or not the lead took advantage of the offer, which can either take them to the next step in the process involving that offer or continue to nurture them. I’ve always loved the endless possibilities with a good old workflow.
Sending Proposals
Do you spend a lot of time sending and following up on proposals, never mind onboarding a client when they accept a proposal? Or, even worse, do you use an entirely separate software to handle your proposals for you? I do! I use Proposify and all I want is once a client signs, I want HubSpot to do the rest of the work.
Automate that through HubSpot with Proposify!
Additionally, you can set up a workflow that will automatically trigger a welcome email and the onboarding process once a client accepts a proposal, helping you to speed up getting them into your system and started.
Automate Your Sequences Through HubSpot
Keeping track of all of the emails you need to send and when for sales and marketing can be difficult to manage. Rather than sending the emails individually and manually, set up sequences within HubSpot to automatically send those emails out on your behalf at the time you specify.
Sales
Did you give a lead a free demo of your product or have a meeting with them? Create a sales sequence that will send them a series of emails after the demo or meeting to keep them engaged, share helpful information to push them closer to making a purchase, and be there for support.
Automating this allows you to…
- Save time
- Customize your communication with your prospects
- Streamline your process
Staying in consistent contact with your leads will help you to close the deal more quickly.
Marketing
Just like using workflows to nurture leads, you want to use sequences to keep them engaged. You can use a variety of sequences for marketing, including the following:
- Abandoned cart sequence
- Welcome sequence
- Re-engagement sequence
By staying at the top of your prospect’s inbox, you’re staying at the top of their mind. Who doesn’t want that?
Feeling overwhelmed? I’ve been there! Setting up these automations may take a little bit of time at the beginning, but once everything is running smoothly, I promise, you’ll see just how much time it saves you in the long run.
