Advice for setting up an external company for follow ups

[Gary4]

Hi, We are planning to do a bulk marketing email which will then be followed up by calls etc. but as we are a small company, we are hiring an external company with 4 people to do the initial follow up. In your experience, what's the best way to do this?
We are Office 365 so I was thinking of creating 4 email only users and 4 HubSpot free users, linked to those email addresses. They can then use the meeting links to book meetings with our guys and cc in our HubSpot so the email is tracked.

Also, is there any gotchas using Office 365 to bulk send 1000 emails?

I'm sure this is a well trodden path, so was hoping for some advice.

Thanks,

Gary

[dianalcont]

@Gary4 a couple questions for you:

Why not send out the bulk email through HubSpot?

O365 is limited to 500 contacts for the same email so you would have to do it in batches. The send limit on O365 is 10,000 per day so the 1,000 emails shouldn't be an issue. But this all seems very manual.

You can create plain text emails for marketing for that 1:1 feel AND you can track it all in HubSpot.

Do you have Sales Pro?

I feel like a sequence would help offload follow-up work for your team and help you create those follow-up tasks (for non-email touchpoints).

You can set up appointments using a meetings link and all of that will remove them from the sequence when your team takes over the conversation.

OR at the very least if you have marketing email automation create a workflow with that initial follow up email and create tasks for your internal/external team to do manual follow-up for calls.

Let me know if you want to strategize on this some more. I think we can find an easier solution that's a bit more scalable.

Diana

[Gary4]

Hi Diana,

Yes, we would setup the Bulk email in Hubspot but I thought that HubSpot didn't actually have a mail engine so it would still feed them through O365, although it doesn't sound like this is anything for us to worry about.

Once the bulk email has gone, the 4 external guys will start calling the recipients. There will be some back and forth but if the recipient is keen to progress, they will use the HubSpot calendar meeting links to book an initial meeting with our Sales guys who will take over from there and yes, our guys will have a work flow.

The bit I'm not sure on is how these external guys will integrate. Should I set them up with HubSpot accounts and create O365 email accounts for them as HubSpot needs that, should they just cc our HubSpot account? Ideally, they would all use a single generic email address for correspondence but not sure if that is possible.

Yes, we do have Sales Pro. for our guys.

Thanks for your advice

Gary

[dianalcont]

@Gary4  got it - thanks for the clarification.

I don't think creating the O365 is necessary unless you want to be the owner of their inbox (for purposes of short term/temporary contracts) so you can keep and access all the data from O365 after contracted work is over.

You can also add the outside guys as free users in HubSpot and limit what they are allowed to do (prohibit exports, deleting contacts and restrict access to other parts of the portal like service or website). Having them in your portal will help you automate those tasks and help to keep data in a centralized location where you can even track performance of the outside hires.

Whether they use O365 accounts or Gmail or any other inbox - everything should work the same in terms of sending emails from within HubSpot they just need to connect their inbox. CCing the HubSpot account leaves a lot of room for error in my opinion - it's easy to forget to add as a recipient if you are moving fast.

Hope this helps!

Diana