3 HubSpot Workflow Examples for Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Marketing Automation is invaluable resource for companies to automate different business processes through workflows. Workflows save time and resources, and are an essential part of Inbound Marketing strategy. You'd be amazed how many routine tasks workflows can eliminate from our daily workday if implemented correctly. 

In you're interested in Marketing Automation, below discover three HubSpot workflow examples for different Inbound Marketing purposes. 

What is a Workflow?

A workflow is a series of automated actions that can be activated from a trigger. The trigger can be any element or property defined for a specific contact, company or business opportunity. From there, different actions can be triggered (such as sending a specific email, for example) at a certain time (for example, 3 days after downloading certain piece of content from your website).

We have prepared some specific examples of tasks to take advantage of automated processes.

HubSpot Workflow Examples for Inbound Marketing 

1. Assign leads to sales agents/send internal notifications

Every business needs to alert salespeople to new leads and have a system of internal notifications. In most cases, this "system" is sending an email directly to a team member. However, this can get quickly overlooked when work piles up or when you're not at work (on vacation, out sick, etc.)

Below, you can find a simple workflow to assign a lead from a request info form to a sales agent, and also send an internal notification to that sales agent, their supervisor, and any other involved parties.

The process starts when a contact fills out the form. This is called the "enrollment trigger", which is the action that sets off the chain of events for the workflow. This is highly customizable and can include multiple triggers.

Next, we designate a specific sales agent to handle these leads, in this case, John Smith. Within the HubSpot CRM, he is set as this lead's contact owner. 

Finally, we set up the internal notification alert, which will send an automatic email to the salesperson that contains all the information necessary to follow up with this lead. 

Image source: HubSpot

2. Chatbot workflow for follow up via email or telephone

HubSpot has made it easier than ever to include a digital chatbot on your website. You can even implement a simple chatbot for Facebook Messenger. However, you can't just set up your chatbot and leave it be; you also have to put some workflows into place. Discover the steps for doing so below.

To start out our chatbot workflow, we will first set up a list that gathers all of our chatbot leads in one place, and one of our triggers will be that our lead is a member of this list. We can also include any other necessary triggers, for example: type of lead, product/service interested in, location, etc. 

Next, it will be very important for our database that we identify these leads as chatbot leads, which will help us verify the success and ROI of the chatbot. We will also tag them as "in process" leads because they are actively interacting with us via the chatbot, and they may require additional follow up via a sales agent. For this reason, we set their contact owner to the designated sales agent, John Smith. 

Finally, we're going to send to the lead an automatic follow up email, with more information that they requested during their chat. It is also a good practice to include a personalization token with the name, email and phone number of their assigned sales agent, so that the lead knows who to contact if necessary.

Lastly, you can see that we send an internal notification to the salesperson, John Smith, so he is aware that this lead is in process and that he should remain alert for any emails or calls from this lead. He will also know to follow up with them personally if he does not hear from them within a short time period.

Step 1: Enrollment Triggers

Step 2: Property Values

Step 3: Follow Up Email & Notification

3. Nurturing emails for TOFU leads

A lot of the time, businesses have many "top-of-the-funnel" leads sitting around in their database. These are people who aren't ready to buy your product or service, but may still be looking for information. We can't let these valuable leads fall to the wayside, so one great workflow idea is to set up a series of nurturing emails to give these contacts valuable, relevant content. It will lead them down the Marketing funnel and closer to the sale. 

As you can see below, we set up this workflow with the enrollment trigger like always; in this case, the contact must be an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). It is not yet an SQL (Sales qualified lead) and thus cannot be passed on to the sales team.

The second stage is to set up a delay. We don't necessarily want to contact this person as soon as they give us their details. Maybe we want to wait a few days, let them explore our website a little more, and then if they don't take any sales-related action, we will follow up with them. 

So, we send out our first follow-up email, and then the next step would be to define the if/then branches. These are the potential actions you will take depending on if the contact takes the action you want (YES branch) or does not take the action you want (NO branch). In this HubSpot workflow example, we want them to click on a More Info CTA within the email. 

In this workflow, we have defined that if the person does click on the More Info CTA (YES branch), this signifies their interest in our product/service and is a sales-related action; thus, our next follow-up would be to send an email to talk to a sales agent.

For the NO branch, (meaning that the person has not clicked on the CTA), we will send a second follow-up email to them after a few days. The norm for the number of follow-up emails is around three to five; if too many of your emails go unnoticed by leads, this means they are disengaged with your content and may not be really interested in buying your products or services. 

Step 1: Enrollment Trigger & Delay

Step 2: Send Email & Delay

Step 3: If/then branches and actions

Another cool feature of HubSpot workflows is goals, which is the end goal you want your contact to achieve. It's a good way of measuring the success of the WF. Learn more about workflow goals. We also have to keep in mind the various settings we apply to workflows, the performance of the workflow (where we can view statistics), and the history (where we can see the path of each contact and any problems that have occurred along the way). 

The fact is, there are endless workflow designs that can be put into your Inbound Marketing strategy. If you're ready to optimize your business processes with workflows, contact mbudo today.