I run a share economy work platform, where customers can order a “Runner” to come to their home and fix their bike. All orders (deals) are sent to Hubspot through API (and customers (with association label “customer”) are also created and associated to this deal, and the Runner (with association label Runner) that accepts are also associated to this deal).
A deal is always in a certain deal stage (custom field) - which is updated live through the API. It is for example in “Accepted” (accepted by a Runner), or “Awaiting payment” (an invoice is sent but have not yet been paid) etc.
What I want is for Hubspot to be able to send reminder emails to an associated contact on a deal in a certain stage. Sometimes it is the Runner (eg. "if a deal has been accepted 7 days ago and deal stage has not been updated, then send email to Runner and remind him to update it) and sometimes to the customer (eg. “if a deal is in stage “Awaiting payment” more than 7 days, send email to customer to remind them of paying their invoice”).
The thing is that I cannot afford to buy the Ops hub Prof or the Marketing Hub Prof to use workflows to set this up. But since Hubspot has so many different features that I don’t know what they do - I am thinking it might be possible to achieve what I want to do somehow through either Hub Starter, or Sales or Service Hub Proffessional.
I have talked to several Sales Reps, but they have not been knowledgeable enough about the different packages and features to be able to suggest a solution. Actually I even ended up buying Sales Hub Prof since my Sales Rep said this was possible in there, but turns out you can not get Workflows to send an external email based on a trigger with this package.
But I am thinking that maybe it is possible to for example create a list of contacts with certain criteria, and have Hubspot automatically send an email to any new enrolled contacts on this list every day? Or maybe the feature “Sequences” are possible? Or maybe even a third feature that I have not yet been introduced to?
Basically I am looking for the absolute cheapest solution for my company to achieve the need I have described. Is there a Hubspot specialist in here that can help me out?
Hey @BikeRunner, thank you for posting in our Community!
Although you mentioned you don’t want the Marketing Hub Professional, it’s worth noting that this package includes the ability to create workflows that can send automated emails based on triggers and conditions. If upgrading is not an option, you may need to explore other alternatives. Sequences in Sales Hub Professional allow you to automate email sequences for sales outreach. While this may not directly fulfill your requirements, you could potentially repurpose this feature creatively to send reminder emails based on certain criteria. However, it’s important to note that Sequences are typically more tailored for sales outreach than automated reminders.
Also, depending on your technical capabilities or resources, you might explore building custom solutions or integrations using the HubSpot API.
Hey @BikeRunner You’re looking for marketing emails, marketing email automation is really a marketing pro feature unfortunately.
The cheapest way would be as you said, have a list with a filter of “latest time in deal stage is greater than 7 days” and then manually send an email to this list each day from the marketing email tool. You’ll need to do some filtering to check you’re not continually sending people that email though.
If the people you’re notifying were users in the portal you could use the “send internal notification email” to email them, but if they’re not users then this won’t apply. So you would need marketing hub pro to automate all of this really.
Hi,
Thanks for your reply! But isn’t there a way to automize sending that email connected to that list out every day? Maybe that’s a feature in Starter or other cheaper package?
I believe marketing starter has access to “simple workflows” but this still won’t do what you need. It’s basically only “if a contact submits a form send them an email” or “contact has interacted with an email in X way”. There’s a breakdown of what’s in a simple workflow here. It really only covers very very direct “if this thing did a thing do the other thing”
Realistically what you need is “if contact has had a record existing in a certain state for a certain amount of time trigger an action” which unfortunately doesn’t fall under the remit of simple workflows. You would need to be checking 2 associated records (deal and contacts) to find out if a deal has existing in a stage for a set amount of time, then triggering an external email to the associated contact record. You would also need to be adding logic to ensure you don’t continually email a runner after they go beyond the 7 days.
It *is* quite simple to setup in HubSpot if I’m being honest, and again if I’m being honest I think workflows is at way too high a price point for HubSpot as seemingly simple things like this get locked out to a substantially larger bill each month.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but outside of an external integration I don’t see any way to do this without being able to automate external email sends in workflows (marketing pro).
Realistically the closest workaround would be to create your list, add in additional logic to remove anyone who has received your previous emails, then keep manually press send on an email daily.
Thanks for your reply. It seems you are correct.. even if I for example set up a sequence with a reminder email - there is no way for me to automatically enroll contacts into that sequence. I can only “bulk-enroll” them manually through a list. But even if that list is active, it still won’t automtatically enroll new contacts on that list to that sequence.
So either I send the email out manually every day, or I bulk-enroll manually new contacts to that sequence everyday. Same Same.
But I was contemplating if an external integration might work… I mean, I can set up the criteria I need in an active list.. so can that not then be sent to another system, like Mailchimp or whatever - and have Mailchimp automatically send out the email?
Hey @BikeRunner I’d imagine this is definitely possible. Honestly I haven’t used mailchimp in a minute. But if memory serves you can send an email in mailchimp based on a list membership, so you could set this up to email new members of your list each day. As long as mailchimp (or whatever you’re using) only emails upon list membership and doesn’t check for list membership each day. My main concern would be to ensure that it’s not constantly mailing members of a list.
Mailchimp is definitely cheaper overall than HubSpot for emails but I’d be curious to know if you’re really saving *that* much when you account for time involved and the inevitable issues that arise from a third party integration too.
Only way to find this out would be trial and error really though!