HubSpot's marketing automation software simplifies your marketing tasks, enabling you to enhance the efficiency and scale of your campaigns. In fact, businesses that utilise automation technology achieve a 77% increase in conversions due to lead nurturing through marketing automation.
With marketing automation, you can effectively prioritise leads, deliver targeted content, and focus on the most promising opportunities. Without marketing automation, prospects are forced through the funnel with random, unplanned touch-points and are sent irrelevant content.
In a market where the customer values the experience over the price and product, automation should be utilised to support your customer experience efforts. Backed by a PWC survey, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. And furthermore, 43% of surveyed marketers said that improving customer experience was the most crucial advantage gained from marketing automation.
This blog will explore some of the best automation features available within HubSpot that will help support your marketing, sales and customer services efforts.
Exploring HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Features
“When marketing automation is thoughtfully integrated, it creates a fertile ground for healthy, long-term relationships with your customers.” HubSpot.
Here are our favourite HubSpot automation features:
1. Lead Scoring Automation that Assists Sales & Marketing Efforts
Time spent guessing who is interested, who to follow up with or what content to send a prospect, is time wasted and taken away from other valuable tasks for both the sales and marketing teams. The ability to lead score prospects on pre-determined scoring criteria means these departments can focus their energy on opportunities more likely to buy and create personalised content. And depending on the goals of the campaign, focus energy on prospects who fall into the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but may not be engaging with your organisation.
Lead scoring is available to Professional and Enterprise users in HubSpot. You can also create custom score properties for your contacts, companies, and deals.
Here are some of the most popular lead-scoring methods:
- Demographic lead scoring: This method assigns scores to prospects based on their company size, industry, job title, and other demographic information. The advantage of this method is that it's easy to implement and provides a quick way to identify qualified leads.
- Behaviour-based lead scoring: This method assigns scores to prospects based on their behaviour, such as website visits, email opens, content downloads, and social media engagement. The advantage of this method is that it focuses on the prospect's actions, which are more indicative of their interest and intent to buy. However, it requires more effort to set up and may not provide a complete picture of the prospect's fit.
- Predictive lead scoring: This method uses machine learning algorithms to predict the likelihood of a prospect becoming a customer based on historical data. The advantage of this method is that it's highly accurate and can identify leads that may have been missed using traditional lead-scoring methods. However, it requires a large amount of data and is only available to Enterprise users.
Creating an automation that sends follow-up reminders to the sales team based on your lead scoring criteria, ensures contacts are followed up with relevant information in a timely manner. For example, a prospect who registered for a webinar that showcased a demo of your product will be highly scored, and the sales team can reach out with follow-up information for a personalised consultation.
A lead scoring model helps to ensure your sales reps can identify warm leads and automated workflows ensure they are made aware of changes and can act on these leads without the hassle of searching the CRM.
Marketing teams can use a collection of prospects who fall into a score range to send targeted content that is best suited to their needs. You can offer content according to their behaviour, industry, or the funnel stage they’re in.
Related: Lead scoring: examples, best practices and techniques
2. Email Marketing Automation
The most popular use case for automation is Email Marketing Automation. From welcome emails, post-purchase emails, newsletters, blogs etc. The ability to automate emails means more emails can be sent out at a time, to lists of prospects to who the email is most relevant.
In most cases, email automation is initiated by an action performed by a website visitor, lead, prospect or customer. Then the email is sent in response to that action. For example, if a prospect fills out a quote request, within the hour an automated email with the quote can be sent. Ensuring the quickest turnaround time and no quote request goes unanswered.
Email Marketing Automation is one of the top strategies practised by marketers to increase performance. The best part of email automation is how it saves time and energy by automating processes that would otherwise be timely. That is the purpose of marketing automation.
Another key benefit is the ability to read real-time data generated by email campaigns. These insights are full of valuable information to better future campaigns.
3. Social Media Marketing Automation
Automating social media can be useful for developing a content plan to maintain your social presence. To make the most of your social media platforms, consistent and regular posting is needed to maintain engagement levels with your audience. The ability to manage social media efforts with HubSpot’s social media management software makes the process easier. Publish content to social networks from the same place you build campaigns.
The best ways to automate social media posts is through these key practices:
- Social listening is the process of monitoring what people are saying about your brand or industry online.
- Chatbots can be used with sites like Facebook Messenger to offer customer support and improve the customer experience.
- Tracking analytics can be useful to your social media strategy.
- Engaging with your audience across several platforms at a time is one of the most important benefits of a social media automation tool. One post can be repurposed and shared across all channels.
- Social scheduling with social media automation tools can help keep a steady queue of posts.
4. Automatically populate contact properties with HubSpot AI
This AI tool that comes standard with any HubSpot user automatically scans emails to fill in contact details from emails. So, when a contact sends an email, HubSpot uses AI to check for information that is in the signature sign-off of the prospect's email. Provided that the property does not have a value and has never been updated by a user in your HubSpot account, the AI will automatically fill the contact with details like first name, last name, job title, phone numbers, address, country information etc. This data enrichment tool is a valuable time saver, because the better the quality of your contact data, the easier it is for you to personalise your content.
5. Lead nurturing automation
Lead nurturing is one of the key activities we most use HubSpot automation for. Nurturing your leads with relevant content helps move them further along the buyer’s journey.
For example, a website visitor could fill in a form to download a highly valuable whitepaper. As a follow-up process, you could set up an automation that sends another piece of content relevant to their interests a week later to further nurture and offer additional value.
Add in then/if criteria on the workflow helps ensure they don’t receive content twice. So, if the prospect has received content before, they skip the trigger and continue down the workflow.
Related: Automated Workflows for Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Conclusion
By implementing these five HubSpot automation's, you can boost your marketing and sales efforts, and streamline processes. Remember, automation is not meant to replace human interaction but rather to enhance it. Utilise this automation strategically by combining CRM technology and personalised content to build stronger customer relationships and increase conversions.
If you are looking for a HubSpot partner to offer expert advice, generate demand and help manage your pipeline with supportive sales automation, we may be able to help. Maven TM is a HubSpot Gold partner backed by years of demand generation experience.
If you would like to chat with one of our experts, why not book a free consultation with us?
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