In today's fast-paced digital age, businesses need to find ways to stay competitive by leveraging automation and streamlining their operations. One such tool that can help businesses achieve these goals is the HubSpot Workflows tool. This powerful automation tool can be used for a wide range of tasks, from reminding customers to repurchase a product to sending out educational emails to potential leads. In this blog post, we'll explore four examples of how businesses can use HubSpot Workflows to save time, reduce errors, and ensure consistency in their operations. So whether you're managing products and customers or looking to help your team stay organized, read on to discover how the HubSpot Workflows tool can help you optimize your processes and achieve your business goals.
Product End-of-Life
There are some products that have an easily predictable end of life, such as machinery parts used in manufacturing. When using HubSpot, buyers can be automatically enrolled in a workflow that will remind them of the product’s upcoming expiration, and encourage them to repurchase the product through you. The best part, it completely removes the need for a human to remember, or draft an email. Here’s a breakdown of how it can work:
- Customer makes a purchase of a product with 1 year end of life
- Customer is enrolled in “Product End of Life” workflow
- Seven months after purchase, Customer receives an email about signs of wear and tear on the product
- Nine months after purchase, Customer receives an email with a link to your blog, “When to Replace Product” and a typical shipping timeline so they are reminded of the replacement process
- Ten months after purchase, Customer receives an email with shopping CTAs encouraging them to replace the product before it expires
- If by eleven months after purchase they haven’t already shown intent to repurchase, there is a chance they are considering a competitor. At this checkpoint, another workflow is triggered to notify a sales representative to reach out to the customer.
- A year after purchase, Customer receives an email with a link to your blog, “My Product Expired, Now What?”
It is important to remember that if at any point throughout the workflow the customer makes the desired purchase, they can be pulled out of the workflow so that they are not receiving irrelevant messaging, and also re-enroll them into the workflow to start the process over again.
Milestone or Event - Entertainment Center Parties
One of our favorite workflows was created for a local entertainment center that had a significant amount of revenue attributed to hosting birthday party events. With this knowledge, our agency suggested an incentive idea to gather birthday information from parents in exchange for providing a $5 gift card to their arcade.
Once the entertainment center uploaded this information into HubSpot, each associated parent was enrolled in a workflow that was used to send out a series of emails to parents as the child’s birthday approached - three months, two months, and one month away. As the child’s birthday approached, our email messaging got progressively more playful about having the parents “covered” in case they hadn’t decided upon plans yet. This first piece of the workflow contained a link to sign up for a consultation with the events coordinator. Two weeks prior to the child’s birthday, they were sent one last email with a simple message: “Forgot to plan your kids’ birthday? We’ve got you covered. Give us a call.” This workflow, paired with excellent event planning and customer service from the venue, saved many stressed parents from headaches and upset kids. This is a great example of how an organization can use a workflow to generate leads, but also provide value to their potential customers.
Lead Nurturing and Pipeline Management
Lead nurturing is a crucial strategy for businesses looking to convert potential customers into paying ones. By building trust and maintaining engagement with leads over time, businesses can increase their chances of success in a competitive marketplace. Through interactions using personalization tokens and targeted content based on previous interactions, businesses can tailor their messaging to meet the specific needs and interests of their leads, effectively establishing themselves as a valuable resource. Moreover, lead nurturing enables businesses to identify potential obstacles to conversion and address them proactively, providing the information and support needed to encourage a purchasing decision.
Using HubSpot workflows for lead nurturing can help businesses automate and streamline their lead nurturing process, making it more efficient and effective. They can then set up workflows that automate the delivery of targeted content to their segmented leads based on their behavior and interests. By continually monitoring and optimizing their workflows, businesses can improve their lead nurturing efforts, build stronger relationships with their leads, and increase their chances of conversion. In practice, this could look like any of the following:
- If someone visits the website, and doesn’t return after 10 days, send them an email
- If someone completes a form, send them a thank-you email, then automatically create a deal and send a notification to a sales representative
- If someone doesn’t interact with your content, send them a silly gif :)
Ultimately, lead nurturing allows businesses to cultivate strong relationships with their leads, increasing the likelihood of a successful conversion and creating loyal, long-term customers.
Education & Training
Providing something of value is a great way to encourage your website visitors to interact with your content. By setting up an educational workflow, such as our HubSpot Email Masterclass, you can gain leads by having people enroll, and they will receive a series of educational emails that we only had to write once but will continue to provide value for anyone who subscribes. Another effective way to use this would be to send out a series of educational emails, then encourage them to sign up for a more in-depth masterclass on the subject.
The HubSpot Workflows tool offers a range of features to help businesses automate and streamline their marketing and sales processes, as well as providing a tool that can be used for internal housekeeping. By using workflows creatively, businesses can save time, reduce errors, and ensure consistency in their operations. Whether you're managing products and customers or looking to help your team stay organized, the HubSpot Workflows tool can help you optimize your processes and achieve your business goals.
