COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO HUBSPOT WORKFLOWS

COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO HUBSPOT WORKFLOWS

THE IMPORTANCE OF MAPPING THE BUYER S JOURNEY Understanding where a lead is at within the Buyer s Journey allows you to create specific, targeted content to appeal to a contact. By realizing where a contact is in the marketing funnel, you can be strategic in the type and the timing of the content you are sending them. WHAT IS A WORKFLOW? A workflow is an automated set of marketing actions (marketing emails, or internal notifications) that execute based on a starting condition. This tool allows for multiple actions to execute at desired intervals and also includes the ability to use branching logic to perform specific actions based on how a contact has interacted with your content or website in a yes-no fashion. With this powerful tool, you can send email reminders when a lead completes a form, use time-based workflows to remind a lead about an upcoming event, and even have the control to send certain emails to a lead based on how they re interacting - or not - with the content.

TYPES OF HUBSPOT WORKFLOWS Workflows allow for the creation of three types of workflows: Standard, Fixed Date, and Property Based. The timing of your workflow actions will depend on the type of workflow that you select. STANDARD This triggers emails whenever they meet the starting conditions of a workflow. Delays are dependent on whenever a contact is enrolled. Some common uses of this type of workflow are as follows: 1. Triggering a specific follow-up email and setting a custom contact property when a contact fills out a form with a particular response. 2. Automating a series of actions once you capture a particular piece of information about a contact, such as their industry or persona. 3. Sending an internal email to the owner of a contact when that contact visits your pricing page. FIXED This triggers contacts whenever they meet the starting conditions of a workflow. Delays are fixed, and dependent on set date. Some common uses of this type of workflow are as follows: 1. Sending a reminder for an upcoming webinar. 2. Automating holiday emails with coupons or special offers. 3. Sending a conference invitation, reminder, and follow-up. PROPERTY BASED This workflow requires you to select a date-type property, and any delays set in this workflow are relative to the date value listed on the contact s record. Some common uses of this type of workflow are as follows: 1. Sending a welcome email and a series of emails with helpful getting started tips based on a custom contact property, such as account activation date. 2. Automating internal and external actions based on the expiration date of a contact s trial. 3. Sending emails to a contact on his or her birthday with coupons or personalized offers.

UNDERSTANDING ENROLLMENT CRITERIA Once you create your workflow, you are presented with the following options for starting conditions: MANUAL This option will allow you to set up your workflow to perform your desired actions and then manually enroll contacts into a workflow. Choosing this option will not enroll any contacts unless you decide to do so. To learn more about enrolling contacts and/or lists manually into a workflow, check out this article. AUTOMATIC This option will dynamically enroll contacts as they meet the criteria you set within the workflow. You ll be prompted to decide what criteria you want your contacts to meet in order to join the workflow. Here are the criteria you can choose from: 1. Contact Property - based on any property within a contact record. 2. Company Property - based on any property within a company record. 3. Deal Property - based on any property with the sales portal deal record. 4. List Membership - starting condition criteria enrolls contacts in a workflow when they join a particular smart list. Note: static lists cannot be used as starting criteria. 5. Form Submission - starting condition enrolls contacts in a workflow when they fill out a specified HubSpot form, either located on a specific website page or located on any page on your website. You can even narrow this criteria down further by choosing, Refine by. Within this section, you will see options related to date/time. 6. Email - based on specific email activity such as opens and clicks. 7. Page View - build out your workflow around a specific page URL view. 8. Event - (available to Enterprise only) enroll contacts who completed or did not complete a custom event you have set up. 9. Workflow Status - enroll contacts who are active in your workflow, completed your workflow, met a workflow goal, and more. 10. Call-to-Action - enroll a contact into your workflow if they have seen, not seen, clicked, or not clicked on a particular Call-to-Action of yours.

If you want to enroll contacts into a workflow that currently meet criteria you have set, as opposed to only enrolling contacts who meet it going forward, check the box next to Enroll contacts who meet these criteria. You can do this for any enrollment criteria listed above. WORKFLOW ACTIONS Once you have your workflow type selected, your starting conditions set, and your goal list added (when applicable), you can begin adding actions to your workflow. Actions are individual functions that execute as part of a workflow, such as sending an email, adding a delay between actions, or setting a contact property value. There are many types of actions that you can add to your workflow. To add an action to your workflow, click the plus icon in your workflow. 1. Delay - The add delay action adds a delay before the next action is executed. A. If used as the first action in a workflow, it represents the delay between when the contact is enrolled in the workflow and when the subsequent action after the delay executes. In a standard workflow, you can choose to delay in days, hours, and/or minutes. B. When a delay is used in a fixed date or property-based workflow, that delay is based around the date (fixed date) or date property (property-based) selected at the start of the workflow. In a fixed date or property-based workflow you will need to decide whether the step will execute before, on, or after the specified date and at what time. (You can find more information on Workflow Delays in a later section of this guide.) 2. If / Then Branch - The if/then branch action allows you to have your contacts follow one path or another based on whether or not they meet criteria you set in your workflow. For example, if you send someone an email as the first action in your workflow, later in the workflow you can send them different content or perform different actions depending on whether or not they opened the email you sent in the first action. (You can find more information on Workflow Branches in a later section of this guide.) 3. Send an Email - The send an email action sends an external email to contacts enrolled in your workflow, and allows you to select any of the automated emails that you have published. Use this action when you want to send personalized emails to your contacts, but be sure to be mindful of the timing and frequency of your emails.

4. Send Internal Email - The send internal email action allows you to send an internal email to either a specified email address(es) or to an email property, such as HubSpot Owner email. Here, you can find a quick guide on setting up email notifications in workflows. 5. Send an Internal SMS - The Send internal SMS action allows you to a SMS message to either a specified phone number or to the phone number linked to one of your HubSpot users, which each user can set by navigating to Account Menu > Settings > My Profile. You can use personalization tokens within the body of your SMS message by clicking the silhouette icon and selecting a contact property to include. 6. Create a Deal - The create a Deal action allows you to automatically create and associate a new deal with each contact that completes your workflow. You can set the owner of the deal and use personalization to customize the Deal name for each associated contact. You can also select the Deal pipeline, Deal stage, Close date, and Amount right from the workflow action. For more information about creating deals with Workflows, check out this article. 7. Create a Task - The create a task action allows you to automatically create and associate a new task with each contact that completes your workflow. You can choose to set the task s owner based on each contact s HubSpot Owner or select a specific HubSpot Owner for all the tasks set by this workflow. You can also set the task s status, due date, owner, and description right from your workflow. For more information about creating tasks in Workflows, check out this article. 8. Rotate Leads - The rotate leads action allows you to distribute your leads to different HubSpot Owners. You can set two or more HubSpot Owners using the dropdowns. The percentages will automatically update as you add more owners so that your leads are assigned evenly across your team. 9. Set Contact Property Value - The set contact property value action allows you to set a specific contact property s value, such as automatically setting a contact s Lifecycle Stage to Marketing Qualified Lead. Use this action when you want to set a value for a contact property for the contact that enters into your specific workflow. 10. Set Company Property Value - The set company property value action allows you to set a specific company property s value, (e.g. setting a company s Industry to Communications). Use this action if you d like to automatically set a company property value for the associated companies of contacts enrolled in your workflow. 11. Add to / Remove from a List - The two actions: add to static list and remove from static list allow you to add/remove contacts to/from an existing static list. You can use this static list for multiple purposes, such as viewing historic enrollment, viewing the number of contacts who have completed a workflow without

entering the goal list, or to send a manual follow up email to the list outside of the workflow. 12. Increment a Numeric Property Value - This action allows you to add to a numeric value to Contact or Company property fields. For example, if you have a numeric Contact property called Number of trials, you can increment this property by a value of 1 (or more) each time a contact submits a trial form. The same is true and can be set for Company property fields. This action also supports negative values if your goal is to reduce a numeric Contact or Company property value through a workflow. 13. Copy a Property Value - This action allows you to copy data from one Contact or Company property to another Contact or Company property. This is most useful in situations of data clean-up. If you no longer use a certain property but want the data copied to another, similar property, you can use this action to automate the task. Please note that some properties will not be able to be copied to if they have different types. Incompatible properties will not appear as options in the target property in your workflow action. 14. Trigger a Webhook - This action allows your workflow to communicate with an external system. For example, you can use a webhook to send a HubSpot contact s information (formatted in JSON) to an external CRM, when he or she submits a particular form. This action supports the use of the POST or GET callback method. Check out using webhooks in workflows to learn more. 15. Clear a Property Value - This action allows you to clear the value of an existing Contact or Company property and is best used in data clean up. You can also use it in conjunction with copying/setting a Contact or Company property value. An example would be if you d like to revert the Lifecycle Stage of your contacts. To do so, you can add an action to clear the Lifecycle Stage property and then add an action to set the new Lifecycle Stage. 16. Enroll a Contact in a Workflow - This action allows you to enroll a contact in any other workflow that is currently activated. Using this action prevents the need to modify the other workflow s starting condition for enrolling the present workflow s contacts. The other workflow is already live and performing other actions you ve set, so it s best not to alter the other workflow as it may disrupt its enrolled contacts flow to completion. 17. Set a Salesforce Task (SFDC Integrated Only) - If you are using the HubSpot integration with Salesforce, you can use Workflows to automatically set a Salesforce task on a lead or contact record. The task can be assigned to either the contact s Salesforce owner or the integration user. A status must be selected and you can include a subject line and comments for that task. 18. Set a Salesforce Campaign (SFDC Integrated Only) - This action allows you to enroll contacts in a Salesforce Campaign and to set their status in the campaign.

WORKFLOW BRANCHES By using branching logic in Workflows, you can further develop distinct nurturing experiences for your contacts, creating mini-goals that help you optimize each step of your marketing automation strategy to the fullest. Branching logic means that you can have your contacts follow one path or another based on an action in your workflow. For example, if you send someone an email, you can have that contact receive different content depending on which option they click, A or B. When we create nurturing campaigns, we want those to be personalized and relevant, too, just like the rest of our marketing. That means we need to anticipate and consider how our contacts will interact with the content in the campaign, and optimize around those possible actions using branching criteria. Because of HubSpot s integrated nature, the Workflows tool is able to branch on a slew of different criteria and triggers from every digital marketing channel. Now, we can provide much-needed context to marketing automation in an inbound way. WORKFLOW DELAYS In standard workflows, when a delay is added, that delay is relative to the previous action. When an action executes, the next action is scheduled. If that action is a delay, the workflow will wait the specified time before it moves onto the next action. When adding a delay in a standard workflow, you will set the delay in days, hours, or minutes, and that delay will be relative to when the previous action or enrollment occurred. Keep in mind that when a contact is scheduled to execute an action, the workflow does not check for an update to that action, whether it s a change in the subsequent action (you select a different automated email to be sent) or a change in the length of the delay, until the original scheduled time arrives. When that time arrives the workflow will check the action to see which email it should send, or if the delay should last even longer.

ADVANCED WORKFLOW SETTINGS When planning your workflow, you may determine that your workflow needs to be more specific, in terms of its logic and what it does and does not allow. Workflow settings can help you control your workflow s behavior. Some important questions to ask yourself before activating your workflow include: 1. Should contacts be allowed to go through the workflow more than once? 2. Should the workflow steps execute only on business days or within a certain time range? 3. When a contact is enrolled in this workflow, should they be removed from any other workflows? 4. Are there any contacts that you want to prevent from being enrolled in this workflow? If any of these questions apply to your workflows, then you ll want to change some settings in your workflow. Each workflow has its own unique set of options that should be considered and set before activating a workflow. You can access a workflow s settings from the top menu of a particular workflow, by clicking Settings. What days do you want actions to execute? By default, this option is set to 7 days a week. If you want your workflow actions to execute during business days only, then you d want to set this setting to Business days only (M -F). What time of day do you want these actions to execute? By default this option is set to Anytime during the day. If you want your workflow actions to only execute during a specific time range, select Only execute between the hours of: and specify your time range. Do you want contacts to be able to re-enroll in a workflow? Contacts will be automatically enrolled the first time they meet the criteria above - set for your workflow. You can click Change re-enrollment options next to this option and tell the workflow to allow re-enrollment if the contact is manually enrolled or the contact meets any of the selected re-enrollment criteria. The contact must also meet the starting criteria at the time they meet the re-enrollment criteria in order to be re-enrolled.

Enroll contacts who already meet these criteria This setting will allow you to check a box to enroll any contacts that previously meet this criteria. So if you re building out a workflow that is centered around the criteria that someone has to fill out a form to be enrolled, this will also enroll any contact who filled out that form previous to this workflow being set up and activated. If you have a workflow designed for nurturing leads that you want your sales team to be able to enroll their leads in, you can turn this workflow on and it will become available for them to re-enroll those leads directly from a lead or contact record Salesforce. Do you need to limit other workflows that contacts may be enrolled in? Sometimes you ll need to suppress certain contacts from your existing workflow. By default, this will be set to Do not remove them from other workflows. You can use this workflow setting to select if you want this workflow to Remove them from all other workflows or Remove them from a specific workflow (along with a drop down menu to select the specific workflow). If you have a master workflow that trumps all other workflows, then you would want to remove contacts from all workflows if your contact enrolls in that workflow. Does a contact no longer meet enrollment criteria? Sometimes you may need to change the logic of your smart list, and thus some contacts may no longer fulfill the smart list criteria. Or perhaps the contact takes an action that removes them from the smart list you are using as the starting condition for your workflow. This workflow setting controls whether or not those contacts will be removed from that workflow when they no longer meet the starting criteria of a smart list and will be set to No, keep them in this workflow by default. Do you need to add any suppression lists? Suppression lists allow you to choose a list of contacts that will not be allowed to enroll in that particular workflow. If you edit this setting to include a suppression list after contacts have already been enrolled, then the contacts on the suppression list will be unenrolled before the next action executes. You may not want a group of contacts to enroll in your workflow for a variety of reasons, such as not allowing contacts with the Lifecycle Stage of customer to go through your trial request workflow. In this instance, you d want to use a customer suppression list for your workflow.

LINKING MULTIPLE WORKFLOWS One can create workflows where the enrollment criteria is based around another workflow. For example, you can choose for a contact to be enrolled in a new workflow if they have completed, not completed, are currently enrolled, are active, have met the workflow goal, or didn t meet the workflow goal. Measure contact conversions and automatically unenroll contacts from a workflow when they meet the workflow goal criteria. A goal is a workflow s ultimate objective and allows you to track the success of the workflow. Once an enrolled contact meets the criteria of a goal, they are unenrolled and removed from that workflow. You can view your goal conversion rate on the performance page. Linking workflows allows one to map out large campaigns that can be dependent on one another. It also allows one to better map out the buyers journey from initial awareness workflows to consideration and decision phase workflows. TRIGGERING YOUR CRM HUBSPOT CRM TRIGGERS Have a workflow initialize when a contact fills out a specific form. You won t have time to get to each prospect right away so look to set form workflow triggers that will automate the process of nurturing them further down the buyer s journey. Determine what triggers you want to use to enroll a contact in a workflow: 1. Leads who have viewed a certain page on your website 2. Leads from companies with more than Xyz employees 3. Leads from companies in Xyz industry or Xyz location 4. Leads with a specific website history like page views, clicks, downloads, etc. SALESFORCE SYNCING You may have a workflow designed for your leads in HubSpot, but still want your sales reps, who mainly work in Salesforce, to be able to enroll leads or contacts in that HubSpot workflow.

When you re integrated with Salesforce, you get an option in your workflow settings to allow contact enrollment into the workflow from Salesforce. When this is set to Yes, your sales reps will be able to quickly add a lead or contact from Salesforce into your HubSpot workflow. In order to have access to this feature, you need to add the Lead Nurturing visualforce page added to your lead and contact layout to enroll contacts in workflows from Salesforce. Note: you will not be able to enroll a Salesforce lead or a contact into a workflow until that record syncs between the two. If you see No data on file within the visualforce layout, that lead or contact has not synced with HubSpot or no longer has HubSpot Intelligence associated with it, and you will not be able to enroll them into workflows in HubSpot. Once the record syncs, your available workflows will appear in the HubSpot Lead Nurturing section in your leads and contacts in Salesforce. You can also set the workflow to trigger a Salesforce Task for the workflow deployer or a sales rep to take care of. HOW TO INTERPRET WORKFLOW RESULTS A unique advantage of HubSpot s Workflows tool is its ability to track your workflow s performance towards a focused goal. Setting a goal list will be key to many of your workflows as you ll be able to see at a quick glance how the workflow measures up. After your workflow has been active for some time, you will want to assess the effectiveness of your workflow. Depending on the goal of the workflow, you may measure success in different ways. First you must decide which metrics you want to focus on as an indicator of your workflow s performance. For example, if you are running a lead nurturing campaign, you will probably be interested in your goal list s conversion rate and click through rates of the various emails. It is also important to benchmark your workflows against the historical success of your marketing efforts and track trends over time. The first thing you ll want to check is the workflow s Actions page, which you ll see once you select your workflow from the Workflows dashboard.

ACTIONS In the Actions page, you ll find the details of your workflow actions. Each step will reveal a little bit more about the engagement of that action, so you can see if contacts in your workflow are opening/clicking on emails, are in a delay, or have met the workflow s goal criteria. PERFORMANCE In your left-hand navigation, you ll find Performance. This screen displays your contact performance as well as your email performance per individual workflow. You ll see a quick overview, first, of your workflow performance in terms of its conversion rate. Below that, you ll see the section Performance Trends that shows a visual representation of how many contacts enrolled in your workflow, completed your workflow, were lost, and met the goal per any given time period. You can select the date filter at the top-right of this section to see a very specific time or change that to a custom date range so you can get a better idea of how the workflow has performed over an extended period. Here s a quick explanation of

what these terms mean: 1. Contacts enrolled: The number of contacts currently in the workflow. 2. Contacts completed: The number of contacts who finished the final step of the workflow. 3. Contacts who met goal: The number of contacts who were added to the goal list and subsequently removed from the workflow. 4. Contacts lost: The number of contacts who don t meet any of the other three criteria. This category includes those who were manually unenrolled, suppressed, or removed as a result of enrollment in another workflow. And, finally, you ll see a number of Email Performance sections that displays how your workflow emails are performing, showing the delivered number and rate for each workflow email, the open number and rate, and the clicked number and rate. You ll also find how many churned contacts happened from these workflow emails (contacts who either unsubscribed from all emails or flagged an email as spam) in addition to the delivery failure rate, expressed as a percentage of bounced emails.

When you hover over any of the bars representing your email, you ll find information in Email Engagement such as the step that the email sends, the name of the email, and the number of delivered/opened/clicked. In Engagement Rate, you ll find the same information but instead of a hard number, you ll find the rate. Below is how each rate is calculated: 1. Delivered = delivered/sent 2. Opens = opened/delivered 3. Clicks = clicks/delivered 4. Contact churn is expressed as the percentage of lost contacts divided by sent emails. 5. Delivery failure is expressed as the percentage of bounced emails divided by sent emails.

HISTORY You can access History from the top menu of your workflow. There may be a time when you want or need to check what happened throughout the life of your workflow. Maybe you want to check the steps that took place for a particular contact, or you want to view the history of a particular time range. Maybe you just want to view progress updates or alerts. Workflow s history allows you to view all the actions that have taken place during the life of your workflow. When you access history, the default view you ll see is the chronological order of each step that the workflow has taken for each contact. The most recent information is listed at the top.

WORKFLOW TEST VALIDATION Before activating your workflow, you may want to test it to view the sequence of events in action. When you are testing a workflow, it actually sends your test contact through the workflow. Some key points to keep in mind while doing this process: 1. Any contact used to test a workflow will be enrolled into the workflow and all actions saved in your workflow will execute for that contact. We recommended to use an internal or a test contact. 2. Because your test contact is actually enrolled in the workflow, if your workflow settings specify that a contact can only enroll in the workflow once in your settings, if your contact actually becomes eligible for the workflow, they will not go through the workflow again. Again, it is recommended to use an internal or a test contact. 3. All emails in your workflow will send and all actions will execute in order, but without any specified delays, which can impact your branching logic. Check out this article for more information on testing branching logic. 4. Test contacts will appear in your workflow metrics; they will count towards your total started and total completed contacts. DIRECTIONS TO TEST: 1. Click the test button in the top right corner. 2. Search for and select your test contact from the dropdown menu, then click the Enroll test contact button. 3. Note: this will execute ALL of the actions in your workflow to your test contact; therefore, it is imperative to use a test contact. 4. Once you click to enroll, you ll see a success message letting you know your test contact was enrolled. 5. View the workflow s History (tab at the top of your workflow) to see the details of the enrollment. All test contacts will be marked with a tag below their name that indicates they are a test contact.

DEVELOP A WORKFLOW STRATEGY 1. Determine which types of workflows are most advantageous to your business. 2. Determine the common workflows you ll want to use to automate emails. 3. Determine what internal workflows you ll want to use. I.E. SQL internal notification. 4. If looking for more options for workflows check out this article. 5. Determine suppression lists for specific workflows. 6. Make sure you understand the branching logic. 7. Determine time frames and set time parameters for sends. MAP OUT YOUR BUYER S JOURNEY 1. Determine the workflows that you want to use to help move prospects down the funnel. 2. Determine when your contacts engage most and set the time parameter in settings, look to turn weekend sends on or off. 3. Use smart lists in order to be able to group your leads based on different properties and behaviors meaning that you can very closely target your emails and your nurturing process to their specific interests and needs. Smart lists populate contacts according to the rules you set so if a workflow is based around a smart list then you can keep that workflow going for as long as you need.

MONITORING YOUR WORKFLOW After your workflow has been active for awhile, you will want to assess the effectiveness. Depending on the goal of the workflow, you may measure success in different ways. First you must decide which metrics you want to focus on as an indicator of your workflow s performance. For example, if you are running a lead nurturing campaign, you will probably be interested in your goal list s conversion rate and click through rates of the various emails. It is also important to benchmark your workflows against the historical success of your marketing efforts and track trends over time. The first thing you ll want to check is the workflow s Actions page, which you ll see once you select your workflow from the Workflows dashboard. In the Actions page, you ll find the details of your workflow actions. Each step will reveal a little bit more about the engagement of that action, so you can see if contacts in your workflow are opening/clicking on emails, are in a delay, or have met the workflow s goal criteria. Still have questions about workflows that you did not find here? Contact your Inbound Marketing Consultant at ManoByte to help walk you through your specific questions, and to reach your goals of engaging with and nurturing your leads through the Buyer s Journey.

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