Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

HubSpot 3 provides some great new features, and HubSync users may want to get a head start. We are considering some HubSync upgrades to better use the new Contacts functions. But, we won't be able to roll these out until HubSpot completes their migration (The latest estimate is February, 2013).

In the meantime, here are some things you can do. HubSync sends relevant data from orders into HubSpot. However, HubSpot won't let you use the data to build Smart Lists unless you do a few more steps.

First, there's a little homework. You need to identify the data you need. You can see the actual form submission data by going to:

https://app.hubspot.com/leads/app/list?portalId={Your Portal ID}

You have to lookup your portal ID and enter it after the "=" sign.

This will bring up the old HubSpot leads screen. Pick one of the leads submitted by HubSync. You can tell because the Event will be set to Completed Purchase, Abandoned Cart, or Admin Purchase.

Then, click View Full Lead Details > on the lower right.

Click the Form Data tab, and you can see all the data the HubSync sent into HubSpot for each Event. You'll see all the data like this:

Notice that for this order, Louise bought some Adult Comfort Tips. Now, here's what you can do to better use this information in the new Contacts area of HubSpot 3.

Go back to the main Contacts screen. Look for Manage Settings on the lower right.

Click the Blue Create Property button. Then copy the name of the data from the old leads form. For example, you might want to make a new property called item1_ProductName to hold the data for the first product purchased.

Normally, you can just leave these in the Contact Information group, and leave the input set to Single Line Text.

An easy way to do this is to have two tabs open in your browser — One for the new Contacts settings and another for the old Leads form data. Then, you can just cut and paste the names.

Now the new property is available to build Smart Lists and for other HubSpot 3 features!

This all works well for a lot of situations. Still, there are some limitations in HubSpot 3, and there's been some discussion about this on the HubSpot developer list lately.

There is currently no way to add multiple orders to HubSpot. So, if you have customers who make second and third purchases, item1_ProductName will contain the first item the customer last purchased. There is no way to have a complete history. We have some ideas for how to address this situation, but it is a difficult problem.

For a given order, we do submit data for multiple items purchased in a single order. You may see item1, item2, item3, etc. It's just that with a repeat order any new data will replace the old.

I hope this helps! If you have ideas or requests, please leave a comment.

HubSpot offers all-in-one marketing software including blogging, marketing analytics, social media, email, automation and more.

HubSpot helps businesses grow.

Marketing strategies are essential for a business’ success. Through the years, HubSpot has worked hand in hand with its customers make marketing easy, enjoyable and profitable. Because of their love for marketing and their dedication to their customers, they've given birth to HubSpot 3.

According to Brian Halligan, HubSpot’s CEO and Co-founder, HubSpot 3 helps marketers reduce the noise that has made marketing increasingly more fragmented and ineffective. Now, we can get back to the strategy and art of communication and make marketing people truly love.

The new features of HubSpot 3 include:

• Smart CTAs: Powered by data from Contacts, Smart CTAs enable you to create images and calls-to-action for your website or emails that dynamically adapt to reflect the viewer’s interests, industry, lifecycle stage, or other areas of segmentation.

• Smart Fields: Smart fields are a long-awaited answer to anyone who is sick and tired of filling out yet another website form with the same information. As you collect more information about your leads, Smart Forms remove any field that has been completed in the past, creating shorter and shorter forms for your leads without sacrificing valuable information.

• Email: Target specific segments and personalize your sender, subject, and message body content with any field or custom field from your contact profile.

• Workflows: Workflows enable you to trigger targeted communications based on a lead’s behavior. A divergence from traditional marketing automation, however, Workflows also allows you to update details in a lead's profile based on activity across channels, including social media.

•  Social Contacts: See which of your leads clicked on something you shared in social media, and quickly add them to a list to nurture. In the Contact profile, see how active each lead has been in social media and how recently they've engaged with you.

•  Landing Pages: Run an entire campaign from one view. Create, test and promote landing pages, then see which channels (email, social, search, etc.) are bringing leads to it. 

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”

Fortunately, HubSpot really is working hard on continual growth and progress!

The world of online marketing is buzzing over the newest breakthrough release of HubSpot — HubSpot 3. For weeks now, talk of the new and improved HubSpot have been swarming the internet, making online marketers curious and excited about the upcoming features HubSpot 3 will provide.

It's already common knowledge that HubSpot helps businesses grow. 

So who can resist Hubspot 3? As Rachel Ergo cited in her article, HubSpot 3 is quickly blossoming into being a marketer’s one true love.  Read the full article on “HubSpot 3 Workflows – Integrate, Automate and Love!” and discover what HubSpot is all about.

Change is constant in this world for only with change comes growth, especially when it comes to business. Innovation and modification should always be at hand especially if you know that you’re doing it for the love of something you truly believe in, which is your business.

True, iPhone 5 is expected to have a larger screen, work over higher-speed wireless networks, and have other goodies. But, will it help you grow your business so you can afford all those new iPhones for your employees?

At Inbound Team, we are a HubSpot partner, and yes, we love HubSpot. Still, it’s rare to see a new software release that offers as much as HubSpot 3.

Have you ever called a customer “service” number where they ask you to punch in your account number. Then, when you finally get a representative, what do they ask? “Could I have your account number please?” I cringe every time this happens, and it happens almost every time.

Unfortunately, too much online marketing works the same way. Come to our website and download our white paper. Just give us your name, email, company, phone, etc. The only problem is that we may have recently collected all the same information from the same person — Very annoying!

• What if you had a website that knew all about your customers and visitors? 
• What if it only asked for data it didn’t already have? 
• Even better, what if it gave them appropriate content based on who they are and where they are in the buying cycle? 

Finallly, HubSpot 3 solves the problem.

At Inbound Team, we do a lot of integrations between HubSpot and other systems. We know how hard it can be to make everything work well together. 

In HubSpot 3, everything revolves around contacts. The Contacts section has been completely redesigned so that you can associate much more data with a specific contact. This really lets you know who the person is and what interests them. 

Then, you can build dynamic, “smart lists” to focus on a specific group of your customers or prospects. What if a big social media influencer visited your site? Wouldn't you want to treat them with extra care?

In the example list shown below, we’ve found our Influencers by checking their follower count and recent history. Yes, HubSpot actually looks this up for you.

Lists can be used for email marketing, but the same idea is used to create Smart Forms that only collect the data you don’t already have. 

You can even change Calls to Action (CTA) and other elements of your website based on the Contact’s information. You can show a top of the funnel CTA for new visitors and offer a totally different offer to visitors that are ready to buy.

There’s only one downside to all this marketing power — It takes some expertise to use it effectively. HubSpot has made things very usable. Still,you have to know your customers, know their buying process, create  relevant content and design all these interactions. That’s where we can help. Get a free HubSpot 3 marketing review. 

I may never know why phone systems keep asking for account numbers and can’t integrate with customer service software. At least my marketing life just got a lot easier. My customers will love it!

Please leave a comment and let me know how you are going to use HubSpot 3 to delight your customers.

Getting traffic is a good way to increase revenue but for your business to grow, you must understand the behavioral patterns of your site visitors. 

A great tool for this is Google Analytics. Everything you need to know about your site visitors is shown. You can truely understand your site visitors.

In Melinda’s article, she cited how you can set up Google Analytics on your site and listed her favorite statistical ways to do it.

Google Analytics is definitely a must-have tool for you if you want improvement for your business at its finest.

Read more on “Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Website”…

Are you using Google Analytics for your site? Leave a comment and share to us how Google Analytics improve your site.

Get prospects into the funnel, work the leads, and make sales. Right?

If you're using Inbound Marketing to fill your funnel, you already know it's easy to get lots of people to your website. And, if you have good opt-in offers, you already know how to turn your visitors into leads. So, why aren't your sales and profits skyrocketing?

The Problem: Some "leads" aren't really prospects

Let's say you are a tax attorney -- You help people resolve their tax problems.

There are a lot of people with tax problems -- Especially in today's economy. And, a lot of these people are doing web searches for help. If you provide a useful opt-in offer, they'll jump on it.

Now you've got a funnel full of people, but many of them aren't qualified. They don't have any money (That may be how they came to have tax problems in the first place). Or, they only have a small tax problem -- It's not worth involving a tax attorney. Worse still, they don't have tax problems at all, but are just curious or bored.

You know the real customers are in there somewhere. So, what do you do? Hire a bunch of salespeople to start contacting your leads.

Now you've got a bunch of expensive, frustrated salespeople. They can't reach any of the leads, and when they finally do talk to someone, they aren't qualified. Even the leads that do seem to be qualified suddenly disappear and won't respond.

For some situations, you might be able to tune up your inbound marketing to reduce the problem. You could discover the keywords that only qualified buyers use, then adjust your AdWords, messages, and landing pages to only get the good leads. However, many times, there just isn't enough information in keywords to let you find the good leads. Everyone uses too many of the same search terms.

Marketing Automation

There's another answer -- Marketing automation. Separate the marketing funnel from the sales funnel, and protect your salespeople from lousy leads. It's marketing's job to filter and qualify leads and only send reasonably good prospects to sales.

Here's what you do:

1. Keep filling the marketing funnel with inbound marketing. Just don't immediately pass new leads to sales.
2. Send email messages to your marketing leads. Are they clicking your links and coming back to your site? If not, they aren't qualified.
3. Add tracking analytics throughout your site to detect when a lead visits a buying indicator page. If you setup the analytics well, you'll discover that visits to a few of your pages indicate buying intent. If they're visiting these pages, pass them on to sales!
4. Monitor social media sites like Twitter to see if your leads are mentioning relevant problems and asking for help.
5. Create middle and lower funnel content and landing pages. Leads who have a vague idea of their problem search with general keywords. They aren't qualified. Good leads who are closer to buying will respond to bottom of the funnel offers.
6. Use lead scoring to segment your list and know when they're ready to buy. Send messages to your leads based on where they are in the funnel to further qualify their buying interest.

With good leads, your salespeople can focus on building trust and resolving concerns. Your marketing automation platform can qualify and warm your leads.

It used to be that only the largest online companies could afford the technology required to implement marketing automation. Thanks to companies like Hubspot, the tools you need have become less expensive and are now appropriate for small businesses.

Takeaways

• Don't waste money and destroy the morale of your salespeople by sending them poor leads.
• If you're a business owner, stop wasting your time on poor leads.
• Use marketing automation to generate warm, qualified leads.

Image Credit: M Glasgow

Greased Skid Marketing is now part of Inbound Team --The Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow with online marketing.

Infusionsoft Automation & Multimedia Marketing Overall Grade: A+

Infusionsoft's follow-up sequences and automation take Autoresponders to the next level. Plus, you can do more than just send email -- Letters, faxes, voice mail, and more are all supported.

Nearly anything that happens in Infusionsoft can trigger an Action Set -- A group of actions that can including adding the contact to a  follow-up sequence:

• A new opt-in via a web form
• A purchase
• A recurring charge that failed
• A specific date passed (A birthday or an event date)
• A click on a link in an email message
• A manual trigger by one of your sales or support employees
• An event external to Infusionsoft that triggers via the software API

Action sets can include many actions like:

• Tagging a contact to segment your database
• Sending a single email to a contact
• Adding the contact to a follow-up sequence (multiple emails or other media)
• Assign the contact to a specific sales or support employee
• Create a task for an employee
• Create an Opportunity Record
• Create an Order

Follow-up sequences let you schedule a sequence of follow-up activities for a specific contact. People are busy, and staying in touch helps them learn about your company and use your products. More on how to use Follow-up Sequences ...

Follow-up sequences can contain many types of multimedia and activities:

• Email messages
• Fax (There is a per fax fee)
• Voice Message (There is a per message fee)
• Letter (You have to pay for printing and postage)
• Fulfillment (You have to pay for fulfillment costs like the product or printing, shipping, and handling)
• Add a task to one of your users
• Run some other Action Set

There is a lot of flexibility regarding how and when each of these follow-up activities happen. You can add rules that control most activities and can have people automatically removed or switched to another follow-up sequence.

In working with Infusionsoft customers, I have always been able to create workable follow-ups and automation.  Sometimes it takes a little creativity, but there's usually a way.

Automation and Multimedia follow-up are truly strengths of Infusionsoft.

Greased Skid Marketing is now part of Inbound Team --The Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow with online marketing.

Infusionsoft Integrated CRM Overall Grade: A

The best thing about Infusionsoft is that it integrates together most of the tools you need to run your small business. If you or your employees regularly speak directly with customers, then having a good CRM system becomes invaluable.

Infusionsoft's CRM has all the things most small businesses will ever need:

• An individual record for each contact

• The ability to associate contacts with companies

• Tracking of tasks and appointments

• Capture of contact history -- Emails, phone calls, notes, purchases (If you use the Infusionsoft shopping cart), etc.

• Import contacts from other systems

• The ability to add custom information to each contact or company

• Calendar

• Send email directly from the CRM screen

• Opportunity management (With the $299 per month Deluxe version). Track specific sales opportunities through your sales pipeline.

• Billing and Invoicing  (With the $299 per month Deluxe version). Create orders and invoice clients.

• Integration with Outlook. You can use Outlook for many CRM functions and still have all the information stored and sync'ed with Infusionsoft

In my work with Infusionsoft users, I have not found any feature gaps or problems with the CRM functionality. There are other more flexible systems available, but they are also more expensive!

You can use the CRM for your support team or your sales team.

The only time I would say Infusionsoft's CRM is not a good fit if you have a large number of users. Beyond the 2-5 users that come with their packages, each user adds another $59 per month. If you have more than 25 support or sales users, you've probably outgrown Infusionsoft.

Greased Skid Marketing is now part of Inbound Team --The Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow with online marketing.

Malcolm asked about marketing automation and follow-up:

Email campaigns based on purchases

Generate a “send person A written Thank You card″ or something like that.

I have no e-commerce or web-based sales… I just want something to manage email and real mail campaigns based on clients’ potential interests or recent purchases or referrals.

I’d also like to provide people the opportunity to “request information” off my website so I can (A) send them info, and (B) capture their contact info for additional contact later to try to win them over as a client.

Once you DO get someone as a client, how do you track their change in status?

Much of our business is run off a SQL database kinda program I suspect there would be a lot of manual data entry or updating as our clients buy things or refer people or what have you.

Since much of my business is run on a different program, I wonder if automating my email and regular mail campaigns is kind of like looking for a unicorn.

In another post, I explained Email Marketing & Lead Nurturing to Grow Your Sales -- This is really a strength of Infusionsoft!  This post goes into detail on how you can define customer follow-up sequences that:

• Send written Thank You cards or other physical packages

• Send different messages or items based various rules involving customer interests or recent purchases

• Have multiple steps over time to stay in touch with your prospect

But Malcolm also raises another question. What if you already have a customer database you're using to manage your business? Depending on your situation, there are two fundamental options:

• Replace your existing customer database with Infusionsoft. As long as your database is clean and well structured, you can easily import all your customer information. Infusionsoft allows you to create up to 100 custom fields for your specific situation. Amd, if you need to, you can integrate Infusionsoft with your external applications with the API.

• Keep your existing customer database, but synchronize the contact information with Infusionsoft. This may require using the Infusionsoft API to keep everything up to date.

Infusionsoft will only email contacts that are imported into your Infusionsoft application. So, you can't avoid keeping all your contacts in Infusionsoft.Either way, giving people the opportunity to “request information” off your website is simple. You just create an Infusionsoft web form and put the code on your website. Then, the propspects information is automatically captured in Infusionsoft.

For more information, see our special report: Infusionsoft: 7 Keys to Top Results.

And, thanks again for the great question, Malcolm!