Looking for tips on Hubspot workflows?

[zoejcwilliams]

Hi Hubspot community! I've recently moved to a company that uses Hubspot from a company that used Marketo, and I'm wondering if anyone here with similar experience could share tips/ticks for configuring Hubspot workflows to replicate the kind of automation that is possible with Marketo. 

I love how Hubspot makes a lot of things easy -- especially creating and managing email and landing page templates that look great and modern (a huge weakness with Marketo). However, I'm struggling considerably to build out the kind of triggered processes that are possible in Marketo with Hubspot's workflows, which seem limited and generally hard to work with by comparison. 

Here's an example of a scenario I just found myself in: I want to send an email to a list of leads, and then whenever people open or click on the email, I want to sync those people to a corresponding Salesforce campaign and mark them as "Responded." A fairly common, straightforward use case. 

But: I can't figure out a way to accomplish this by using only one email and only one workflow. If I use a workflow to send out the email (which seems to be required in order for me to be able to use a workflow to track and sync openers and clickers later on -- I have to "save the email for automation" and then am not able to select a group of recipients and schedule a send within the actual email), I have to create a second workflow that listens for the email to opened or clicked to handle the syncing to the SFDC campaign, because you can't re-enroll contacts based on an email being opened or clicked. 

This all seems needlessly complicated and cumbersome, and I can already anticipate it getting out of control based on our fairly granular Salesforce campaign tracking needs. So would really appreciate any advice or best practices from folks who have been around the block with Hubspot and have figured out the ins and outs of triggering workflows! 

[kmoranha]

You could try using a smart list.  When you build the smart/active list, you can add members who have opened or clicked an email. You can use any active email by going under the "Marketing email activity" criteria, and selecting the emails you want to include.

Once the list is built, you can then create the workflow. I would set the enrollment trigger to List membership -> Contact is member of list-> name of the smart list, then include the other activities you would like to do. Hope this helps!

[bradmin · Accepted solution]

Hi, @zoejcwilliams. The short answer is that the specific thing you're asking about doesn't exist. 

Delay steps in HubSpot workflows are always time-driven, not event-driven. So, while it sounds straightforward enough to want to kick off a workflow with an email, then develop a Yes/No branch on whether they've opened that email, that option does not exist. 

You would be able to accomplish what you're talking about if the criteria was "has opened the email in this workflow within an X day interval", as you could control that with the length of the delay. If the requirement is an open-ended "has simply opened this email", that step won't be any condition you can build into the workflow; it would have to come from a separate one. 

[zoejcwilliams]

Got it -- thank you for your reply! I was afraid this would be the case -- that we can't achieve a good level of fidelity with our Salesforce attribution and reporting without our Workflows section becoming unruly. 

[bradmin]

You may want to try list naming conventions which sort easily, unique for its purpose, and are immediately understandable, to avoid ambiguity. I've seen customers who use "[Automated email]" at the start of emails they plan on using workflows, and so on.