Dan MoyleWith great power comes great responsibility. - Uncle Ben to Spider-Man
Just because it's what's done doesn't mean it's what should be done! - Cinderella
Here’s a lesson we learned at Impulse Creative. It’s about to get personal.
George and I run a team called Learning Ops. One of our functions is to help new HubSpot users start their adventure. We’re HubSpot Onboarding Specialists.
When a new client starts with us, we want to make sure they feel welcome and have all the resources they need to be successful. Plus we want to help them get set up with self-guided resources.
It’s a lot. And if we’ve never emailed them just to say hi, automated messages aren’t the best first contact.
But that didn’t stop us from setting up some amazing automation to send specific emails, set properties and send internal notifications.
Automation is a marketer’s dream after all … and George and I are marketers even when we’re teachers!
But…
We were finding that some of our initial emails weren’t resonating. Some of them were getting caught in spam filters. Others weren’t getting clicks and moving the readers along their journey.
Our amazing automation wasn’t working!
So George and I talked and decided that using automation to “set it and forget it” in order to make our lives easier just wasn’t worth it.
Even though our emails felt personal, the automation just didn’t feel authentic.
It was time to make the experience more H.U.M.A.N., aligning with our core values.
Thinking About How and When to Automate
This is how we think about HubSpot automation. Is it helping us while serving our clients?
If automated emails don’t resonate with the recipients— or don’t even reach them— what’s the point?
Instead of automating the emails, we turned our attention to the process.
- What emails are needed and what is each email’s goal?
- What is the timing of each email?
- What happens if an email isn’t fruitful? How do we remind the recipient a task needs to be completed?
- What automation can we build to help us stay organized and on track?
Now, when a new client signs up for HubSpot onboarding, we use a template to send the initial email introducing the guide and asking for one specific task, adding us to their HubSpot portal.
Then we have a custom property we change for the onboarding stage and if it doesn’t get changed to “added to portal,” we get an internal task to send the reminder.
If instead, the client adds us and we get that real-time notification, we know to move onto the next email. We repeat this process until we have our kickoff call scheduled.
The key here was to understand the goal of the emails, build templates in HubSpot to help increase efficiency while still keeping it authentic and personal, then executing automation for internal needs rather than email autopilot.
Our advice: Think about automation as more than a way to set it and forget it with your emails. Can you keep email authentic and personal, while using automation to keep you and your team organized?
- Map out the journey you’re guiding your contacts through
- Set your goal for each email
- Create templates for efficiency (while leaving room for customization)
- Decide what happens if the goal isn’t met
- Set up automation (with criteria like custom properties) to keep the process moving forward
- Execute and analyze
Need help thinking about HubSpot? Looking for HubSpot education? We’re here to help. From our content to our consulting, Impulse Creative is your HubSpot expert ready to empower you on your journey.
