Every savvy marketer understands that using marketing automation workflows is the best way to streamline the sales journey and meet clients' demands. To market effectively in the current fast-paced technological world, you have to wear a million hats. There is a lot of content to be published, writing and setting up emails, engaging with prospects, and analysing tons of data daily.

Marketers have to find ways they can manage all these moving parts. Therefore, leaning on a robust automation tool will help remove repetitive tasks and ensure your results are always accurate. Sometimes, setting up marketing automation to streamline daily activities can still feel like a giant undertaking.

You have to go through an array of options to choose a tool that will work for you. Also, it would be best to optimize the workflows and make them scalable without compromising the experience customers receive when working with you.

Over the years, businesses have been looking for a powerful automation tool. Among the various options available, HubSpot stands out due to its features and ease of use. When used correctly, your business can significantly improve traffic, leads, and sales.

This blog post discusses several insights about the HubSpot automation tool and how you can use it for your marketing strategies. You will understand how it works, how to use it effectively, and the best practices for developing a working HubSpot workflow automation strategy. Let's dive in!

What Is HubSpot Marketing Automation?

HubSpot's marketing automation platform seamlessly uses sales teams to enhance their processes and simplify their daily tasks to remove errors and focus on accuracy. Teams can set up tasks and trigger them automatically based on a preferred action.

Therefore, instead of the marketing team checking their daily tasks to see if they gather enough quality leads, they can set up a system in HubSpot. It should help collect all qualified leads automatically and send them to relevant people at the right time for analysis.

There are various ways you can use HubSpot marketing automation tools. These include:

• Presenting data accurately: HubSpot has multiple reporting dashboards that you can use to customise your reporting options.
• Automatically take actions based on user data: When a new user makes contact or fills out a form on your website, HubSpot automatically enters them into a welcome email workflow. The sales team will also get notifications of the content the visitor reads, among other automated functions.
• Connect marketing efforts with revenue: It helps understand if your marketing efforts are paying off in the bottom line. HubSpot shows the success of all marketing campaigns and what you can do to improve.

These features and more make HubSpot the most appropriate among the various technologies you can use to automate your marketing workflows.

Getting The Most out Of HubSpot's Workflow Automation Tool

HubSpot workflows are arguably the automation tool you may use more often. It allows you to create a series of steps that helps to usher new contacts through the sales pipeline. You also have the freedom to automate your market outreach by basing it on your prospects' information.

However, you can still base your automation on other factors such as:

• Ticket-based
• Quote-based
• Company-based
• Deal-based
• Contact-based
• Conversations and feedback

Apart from these, there are also templates for the common workflows available. It's therefore wasteful to start working from scratch. After setting a workflow, you can choose the contacts you want to enrol in. For example, you can register contacts based on the number of pages they read or whether they submitted a form.

Optimising Your Automated Processes

You can set up your workflows in two ways: internal and external. The most effective marketing automation strategy tends to have the right mix of both. Here is how to optimize the two processes:

HubSpot Workflows for External Purposes

External workflows stand for all the process that enables you to communicate with your prospects and new customers. The marketing automation workflows will include automated emails sent to customers after fulfilling activities such as filing a contact form. You can also send them to customers looking for valuable information about using a service or product.

The trick to succeeding with these workflows is to ensure you send the correct information at the right time. For example, when a contact downloads a product or service guide. It would be best to send a follow-up piece with details on the same topic. It can be a blog post with information that will enable them to understand your products better.

Also, when you are setting up a marketing automation workflow, you should ensure it is timely, customized, and based on the contact interaction with your content and websites. You want your contacts to feel like they are getting exactly what they need.

There are different workflows you can use, such as:

Form Submission Workflows

Any time a contact submits a form to your website, action must be taken. Typically, it would feel appropriate to send blanket emails to anyone who fills out forms. Still, your automated emails should be valuable and have an intention specific to the customers. It is the best way to avoid sounding spammy and automated.

For instance, when someone submits a form asking for a quote for a specific service or product, the proper response to the submissions will be very different from another contact who subscribed to your email newsletter. This way, you only point to emails with tailored content based on what the new user wants.

Pro Tip: Whenever you need to update a current marketing workflow, check if people have already enrolled in it. If there is, leave the "allow contacts to re-enrol" box unchecked.

Otherwise, if you check the box, you will tell HubSpot to enrol them in the workflow again, and they could get emails that are out of context.

Email Lead Nurturing Workflows

By focusing your lead nurturing workflow on emails, the goal is to ensure your prospects are continuously engaged with your content and can easily move along the buyers' journey towards sales. These emails typically contain educational materials for people looking to weigh their options or details on the next steps to take when they want to purchase.

However, you ought to be very careful not to jam people into the next phase in the sales funnel when they are not ready. If you do so, you risk getting ignored or your emails marked as spam.

The automated email workflow should also serve as a platform where your prospects find valuable information. Value-driven emails help build trust, and when that happens, the customers are likely to buy your products.

Pro tip: It would be best to set these workflows with delays. It will reduce any chances of the automation software sending them all at once. Therefore, you can send one when a contact fills a form, then wait for a few days to send the second one.

Re-Engagement Workflows

With business growth comes the proliferation of the database. You will inevitably have contacts who have taken a long time to buy from you or engage with your content. Such contacts are "unengaged."

If the unengaged lists are small, then it is not a cause for alarm. But, remember that you pay HubSpot based on the number of contacts you have in your database. Therefore, you need to take a keen interest in updating your list regularly and have only engaged contacts.

Also, before you remove unengaged contacts from your list, send them an email that gets them to re-engage with the business or let them know you are removing them from your database.

Pro tip: After sending a re-enrolment email, you may experience a high unsubscription rate. However, it is a good thing. It will only leave you with people interested in your products and remove people sitting on the HubSpot lists.

HubSpot Workflows for Internal Purposes

There are three major types of HubSpot workflows for internal purposes. These are:

• Internal notifications refer to notifications that alert the members whenever anything happens, such as a contact reading a specific number of pages.
• Lead qualification and hand-off: You can automate this to make it easier to pass on marketing workflows to sales leads.
• Data management: It will help keep track of data to understand which efforts are working to eliminate those that do not.

Set your internal HubSpot workflows as explained below:

Internal Notifications

The notifications help keep every team member in the loop with any activity occurring in your marketing campaign. The alerts occur at a specified action like sending prospects to a sales team member when they require any consultation.

Also, anyone in the sales team may want to get alerts about particular enrollment triggers. In this case, a sales rep may want to know about recent leads who consume the most content. It will notify them to take the following action when this occurs.

Pro tip: You can set up your internal notification in four different ways:

• Emails with plain text created by an automated workflow tool
• Marketing emails created and saved on your marketing tool are then pulled into the workflow after setting up
• SMS for marketers who are often on the road
• In-app notifications that come directly from HubSpot

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to these setups. It will depend on what works best for your sales team and how they prefer to get alerts.

Lead Qualification and Hand-Off

Automated workflows eliminate all manual work by taking new leads and routing them to a relevant place. It means you are sending them off to another marketing campaign if they need to purchase your product or go to your sales team when they are ready to buy.

Automating this process ensures that they get an automatic redirect to a relevant team member or get enrolled in an appropriate marketing campaign whenever your leads come. It would help determine the qualification criteria and when the lead is due for handing off to sales.

Pro tip: Your marketing and sales team should set up and agree on your workflows. They should always have a say about whether or not they want to talk to a leader and at the point where they are most qualified. 

Data Management

It would be best to set up your workflows, allowing you to update property values.  A common property value that you can automate seamlessly is the contacts' lifecycle stages. It could include when the prospects read about ten pages of a website, fill out a contact form, or download a guide.

But it doesn't hurt to get creative by coming up with specific enrolment criteria and helping keep your data squeaky clean. It all comes down to what your sales team requires in terms of HubSpot contact property management.

Steps to Developing a Proper Workflow Automation Strategy

Developing successful marketing automation is a lifesaver for any marketer. But you can achieve it perfectly by taking the necessary steps such as:

1. Always check the stock of the manual tasks your team will do every day. Such things include updating information in your customer database.
2. Think about the various methods you can make your buyers' journey better. These include looking at response times or sending prospects information that helps the buyer move through the sales pipeline.

After understanding what you need to accomplish, lay out all your marketing automation to meet the goals you set. The strategy you select will depend on how much time and resources you wish to spend on your process. 

Equally important, every automation strategy requires a lot of work. Therefore, you need to plan it out perfectly, get going, and set it in action for a refined process. The most important thing is to have a strategy that works for you. Also, focus on testing and improving as you go.

Optimize Your HubSpot Workflows Better With DigiKat

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