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Recorded: Monday 27 March 2023 | Published: Friday 31 March 2023
We’re seeing fatigue across many areas:
If you are feeling exhausted, you’re in good company.
More on this in upcoming episodes.
But for now, let’s discuss the immediate concerns…
If you’re finding business a little tough lately, you’re not alone - most companies (large and small) are carefully evaluating spend and strategic initiatives. Marketing and training are the first two areas to attract scrutiny - including their related tech stacks and services.
So, what to do in times like these?
I’m not a business coach, so I won’t pretend to have the answers, but I will mention an obvious reminder:
Most of our clients could be sending more emails
But let’s start with our own activity first…
The following is a screenshot from our XEN portal - you’ll see we’ve sent just over 140K emails so far this month.
However, our monthly limit is 930K email sends ie we’re only at approx 15% of our send capacity.
(You can check your own limits from the Top right account menu > Account & Billing)
Most of our emails are automated (ie part of workflows) as opposed to campaign emails (ie monthly newsletter type emails). Plus emails like the one you are reading (if you’ve received this because you signed up for our Show Notes).
Some of the automated emails are sent daily, others are sent only when certain behavioural conditions occur (eg pages being viewed). By far the majority of our emails are informational (as opposed to promotional).
When reviewing our client’s portals we’re regularly recommending sending more emails - it’s essentially free to send (compared to paid ad spend).
The only stipulation: make sure the content is relevant (we’ve discussed this many times before). Relevancy trumps frequency every time. People will happily receive an email from you every day if it adds value, and they’ll likely unsubscribe from a quarterly newsletter if it doesn’t.
Key takeaway: check your email schedule - can you create additional emails that provide value?
Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:
Not related directly to HubSpot (but realistically this is going to impact just about every business):
A handy feature in Lists - the ability to quickly create a Random sample from your list. It’s available from the Actions menu (in the top right when editing a list):
It shows a form where you can select either a number of contacts, or a percentage:
It then creates a static list with the random sample.
Very handy.
Here’s a simple use case we had recently with a client. They want to send a selective survey to a segment of their database and asked us to prepare a list of 3000 contacts to send to. We used an Active list and then tweaked the create date range of the contacts to select the requested 3000. But if we’d had this Random Sample option it would have been much simpler!
On our XEN home page and throughout the site we’re testing tiny tweaks to our main CTA button.
We’re using a Multivariate CTA with the following variations:
Notice that they all use the word ‘Talk’, but switch the type of person you’ll talk with. We also put in a 4th variation to test case and the word ‘with’ instead of ‘to’, just for fun. Here’s the results so far (it’s been running a month or so):
Summary so far: very little difference between them - and given there are only 10 submissions related to this CTA, the submission rates aren’t statistically significant (eg one extra meeting booked would double the submission rates of C and D).
But it’s early days - once there’s been a few months of data we might have some more insights.
Main takeaway: start testing, even the small things - and then forget about it for a few months. Come back and review - if there’s a clear winner, action accordingly.
The power of Lists!
We’ve done whole episodes just on using HubSpot lists - they are the building blocks of HubSpot.
And that only scratches the surface.
Here’s another use case that came up recently - our client wanted to build a list of contacts who had received a specific email (sent from another system and BCCed into HubSpot).
It’s quite easy to do using a list that uses Activity criteria:
And then in the Activity properties, use Email activities eg Email Subject:
Once this list is created, you can then make it available in Views (which is where their Sales reps usually spend their time) by using the List Membership filter on a view:
This can be a useful distinction to be aware of:
Can be important when triggering workflows - we often trigger workflows based on last activity gaps (eg last activity was more than 14 days ago), but recently have been switching this to use last modified instead - because we found users were actually changing a record (eg moving a pipeline stage) but this wasn’t affecting activity - whereas it does update Modified date.
An interesting limitation of HubSpot Meetings is that the shortest scheduling window you can configure is 2 weeks (ie This Week and Next Week):
Why is this important?
Chatting with a new client this week and they described their sales process - and highlighted how important it was in their process to chat with a prospect as soon as possible. If a visitor to their site is interested in booking a meeting they don’t want to give them the option of booking 2 weeks in the future - by then they might have gone with another provider. So they want to limit the available meetings to be within 2 days.
The only way to manage this in HubSpot Meetings would be to use a custom date range and update it every day - ie very tiresome.
For this reason, they’ve switched to using Calendly.
There’s a community thread with people talking about this and how important it is.
Here’s hoping HubSpot updates Meetings to allow a shorter schedule window.
One thing that is underappreciated about HubSpot is that they actually keep your data if you cancel. Eg if you cancel a Paid subscription and downgrade to Free, your object data (contacts, deals, tickets, etc) is all retained. Which means if you upgrade again later, you can access your historical data again. Note though that this doesn’t necessarily apply to assets (eg web pages).
Thanks HubSpot.
This is in contrast to most other SaaS platforms that will be delete your data when you cancel your account.
The only thing you need to ensure is that you log in to your account every month or so - on free accounts HubSpot will delete dormant accounts.
For no good reason, here’s a picture of some quokkas I generated using Midjourney v5:
This is a common scenario:
Notes:
See also this quick video:
The ‘sudden’ rise of AI tools around image (and video) generation means you can confidently plan to remove any need for stock imagery in the coming months.
Here’s some simple examples of imagery we created using Midjourney for use on website pages (layouts, hero shots, people, etc):
Note: in the prompts below make sure you use two '-' in the directives (as opposed to them being combined into a single dash - as many text editors do) eg dash dash v 5
Prompt: a beautiful, organized living room in a modern house --v 5
Prompt: A wide landscape hero shot for a website that shows a professional woman working on a laptop in a modern office, looking confident and happy --v 5
Prompt: double exposure photography of a modern professional office --aspect 21:9 --v 5 --uplight --q 2 --s 750
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
-Benjamin Franklin
Check out our full walk through of everything to include in a campaign built in HubSpot.
Download a copy of the HubShots Framework A3 PDF poster (recently updated with colour coding and more).
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HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems and XEN Solar.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
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