Here are 8 best practices in particular that you should consider implementing to get the most out of this unique tool:
HubSpot Best Practices That Will Help You Maximize its Features
Create Customer Portals
When your clients are able to log into their account, check its status, and make certain updates on their own, without engaging with your team, it is often a big win for both parties. The customer has a convenient way to perform research, make edits, and find answers to questions outside of normal business hours... and your service team doesn't have to address minor issues that the customer can solve on their own. Definitely think about creating a client portal soon, perhaps with a dedicated knowledge base to supplement it.
Enable Native Payments
The new HubSpot Payments feature in HubSpot CRM gives customers yet another payment option when it comes time to check out. With this tool, customers are able to pay directly through the HubSpot system, instead of jumping through hoops with another platform. You're even able to set up your CRM to receive recurring payments!
Enabling native payments is one of the HubSpot best practices that can provide exceptional customer service. Offering clients another payment option is ultimately designed to make the overall experience more convenient.
Distribute Customer Feedback Surveys
Analytics and third-party data are great, but do you know what's even better in most cases? First-party data — that is information directly sourced from consumers.
If you want to take the pulse of your current reputation in the market, gauge how a particular product or service is performing, or gain other important insights about your business, then you should absolutely develop and distribute customer feedback surveys. HubSpot provides scores of template options and makes survey creation quick and painless.
Some metrics that HubSpot features include net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES). Use these and other surveys to accurately measure the impact of your efforts on your target audience.
Play in the Sandbox
That's right: HubSpot's sandbox feature enables users to test out new workflows and processes without needing to take them live. Think of it as a staging environment for marketers.
You can play with marketing automation, landing pages, CMS assets, or new content for your website. This is all within the safety of an enclosed process that won't disrupt your business or confuse your customers. So next time you're thinking of making a change, test it out in the sandbox first. Save yourself some time and embarrassment in case it isn't quite ready for the big time.
Develop Email Drip Campaigns
Email marketing is extremely cost-effective, and is associated with the highest ROI in terms of typical marketing activities. You can use HubSpot to turn your email marketing strategy into a lead nurturing machine. How? By creating email drip campaigns — that is, composing email templates to match different points in the customer journey, and then setting up specific conditions, or "triggers," that determine when those messages should be sent to prospects and clients.
Even after you've created all of the campaign assets, set the enrollment criteria, and deployed the campaign, you can still make any adjustments needed after it goes live. This is one of the HubSpot best practices that can allow you to continuously monitor campaign performance, and even perform live A/B testing to determine which messaging variation has the greatest resonance with your audience.
Personalize Your Communications
HubSpot empowers users to do more than personalizing their email marketing. You can also personalize your interactions with prospects by utilizing tokens based on your CRM object values. By tracking your website visitors via browser cookies, you can direct them to the right landing page for them, and keep their data stored in your system.
Integrate Your Social Media Accounts
It can be challenging to keep track of each social media account your company has, not to mention developing and sticking to an effective content distribution strategy for each channel. One solution to consider is to integrate your social media accounts with HubSpot's centralized platform.
When you do so, you'll be in a much better position to manage all of your social media channels. You'll be able to effectively monitor each for received messages, comments, and metrics like shares, likes, and so forth. This will help you to more effectively engage with your audience. It will also contribute to better customer support, as you'll even be able to create tickets from your social media inboxes if needed.
Set Up Automated Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a powerful tool in terms of streamlining the marketing and sales process. "Scoring" a lead basically means evaluating how likely they are to become a paying customer. Of course, each business' lead scoring model is at least slightly different, since each buyer's journey is different. However, having an automated lead scoring system in place can work wonders for your sales team's efficiency.
You can set up your lead scoring model in HubSpot by using the HubSpot Score feature in your contact properties. Criteria may include website visits, the contact's job title and industry (for B2B sales), previous purchase history, whether they've signed up for your newsletter or accepted a free trial offer for your product, and so forth.
Automated lead scoring can help your sales reps to target warm leads at the right time. It can also identify which leads should receive bottom-of-funnel content from your marketing team.
Final Thoughts
In summary, these 8 HubSpot best practices reviewed above can transform the way you use the platform. Instead of using it like a hammer (workable, but not always accurate), you can use it like a scalpel (efficient, effective, and precise).
If you'd like to learn more about how to optimize HubSpot for your business, reach out to our team at OverGo Studio today for a free consultation. We'd be honored to share our insights on HubSpot best practices with you.
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