Introduction

[roisinkirby]

Hi 👋

Welcome to the HubSpot community! We are thrilled to have you here!❤️

We want you to know that this community has been created with you in mind to build professional connections, explore new ideas, access video tutorials, discover alternative solutions, and stay updated on events, product updates, and much more. 🎉

The best way to start is by learning about our community and how to participate in forums and events. You can also explore how to rank up in the community with our gamification model - but one step at a time, right? 😁  

We've prepared these guides to help you get started on your HubSpot community member journey. Please take a moment to review these tips below.

🖐5 tips for getting started on the Community

🤝 HubSpot Community Guidelines

💫 HubSpot Community Member Journey

The HubSpot community is mainly dedicated to all things related to HubSpot products. However, if you're looking to connect with professionals from other areas, like founders, marketers, and more, the best place to go is connect.com. There, you’ll find events for these groups and plenty of opportunities to network with people in your field. 

We can't say this enough, but we are thrilled that you have joined this space, and we look forward to seeing you in the forums.

Thanks,

HubSpot Community team 

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @Asfand_EW,

Thank you for this wonderful introduction!

We hope you enjoy your experience here and enjoy connecting with other community members 🙂

Best,

Kristen

[AAdegoroye]

I am Adewumi Adegoroye from Nigeria, I just joined the community. I am glad to be here

[MCattanach]

Hi there, 

My wife and I are new to the Hubspot CRM, using it primarily to build websites and offer web services to clients. 

We have moved from Wordpress due to the increased security features that Hubspot has, as standard. 

Best regards, 

Marcus. 

[PamCotton]

Hey @MCattanach, Welcome to HubSpot CRM! 

It's great to hear that you and your wife are diving into HubSpot to build websites and offer web services. The platform indeed offers robust security features and a range of tools that can enhance your web development projects.

If you have any questions or need assistance as you transition from WordPress, feel free to reach out. We're here to help you make the most of HubSpot's capabilities.

Thank you,

Pam

[SAgarwal72]

Hi This is Saksham, I am here to improve my Sales and Marketing skills. 

[Jnix284]

welcome to the community @SAgarwal72 !

[cscamacho]

Hello! I'm Catherine you can call me Cath. I just started today with this course. Hope to learn how to communicate fluently. 

[Jnix284]

Welcome to the community @cscamacho, happy you're here!

All the best in your journey ahead with HubSpot, the community is a great place to ask questions

[ARAnkit]

Hey it's Ankit here I'm sure you all will be good ,I am new here I don't too much about email marketing if anyone help me then I will be thankful for you 😊 Namaste. 

[BérangèreL]

Hi @ARAnkit,

Welcome to the Community! We are glad to have you here 🙂

Regarding marketing emails, I'd like to share these ressources that might help you:

- Create marketing emails in the drag and drop email editor
- Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide (+ Expert Tips)
- Email Marketing Course: Get Certified in Email Marketing (FREE certification course)

I hope this helps!

Have a lovely day!
Bérangère

[OOyinlusi]

Hello, everyone. I'm Olalekan. I'm new here. Looking forward to learning a lot about email marketing. Thanks

[Syeda_Fatima]

Hey @OOyinlusi, Welcome to HubSpot!

There are lots of great resources on HubSpot to help you learn more about email marketing. You can start by browsing our email marketing blog, which is full of helpful tips and advice.

Additionally, HubSpot Academy offers free online courses that can help you get started with email marketing.

They also have a number of live and on-demand webinars that you can watch to learn more.

Good luck on your email marketing journey!

[JCrozier]

Hi Community

My name is Jenn and I work in the UK for an independent healthcare services provider.

We're looking to utilise HubSpot to help nurture prospects and stay at the forefront of the buyer's mind ready for tenders coming out which we can bid for.

Does anyone have any best practice tips in this area that have worked well for their businesses? 🙂

[jolle]

Welcome, @JCrozier! And thanks for the mention, @kvlschaefer!

This is a great question — I don't know much about your business and team specifically, but I can offer some general HubSpot best practices! First up, here are some tips I wish I had as I was getting started with HubSpot:

1. Set up some sort of a "Contact Type" (and "Company Type," if applicable) property so you can clearly categorize contacts as prospect, customer, and any other relevant type. You should know who every single person in your database is and who's safe to market to
2. In that vein, consider using some sort of a "Lead status" property as well to identify leads that haven't been touched yet, leads that are showing some engagement, and leads that have dropped off. You can then develop contextual marketing and sales outreach
3. Keep an eye on your marketing contact count. Remember that HubSpot will immediately increase your contact tier (and bill) as soon as you exceed your marketing contact limit. Also keep in mind that a contact can immediately be changed from a non-marketing contact to a marketing contact, but marketing contacts that you change to non-marketing will not take effect until the first of the next calendar month. Unsubscribed/bounced contacts are not automatically set as non-marketing contacts, so be sure to keep an eye on those
4. Gather and store data in a standardized format whenever possible. Unless you're collecting unique values (like contact name, company name, message, etc.), use dropdown select or multi-select properties whenever you can. Doing so makes it so much easier to collect segmentable data and eliminate human error. It also creates for a better user experience when filling out forms and such
5. Leverage exclusion lists. It can be nerve-wracking sending out a big email (or turning on a workflow) in HubSpot and making sure that only the right contacts receive it. If anyone shouldn't be receiving marketing emails, be sure to group them in their own list (and set them as non-marketing contacts) so they aren't accidentally sent something

Next up, here are some general email marketing tips:

1. Always put yourself in your readers' shoes. What's valuable to them? What do they care about? What's the best way to easily share information with them in their preferred format? Your emails should be addressing all of these questions before you get into your sales pitch
2. Leverage secondary CTAs. If the only offer in every email is to schedule a call or talk to a sales rep, you're catering to the small group of leads that are ready to talk to you as soon as they enter HubSpot. You should always make direct contact available (i.e., footer CTA button, HubSpot Meetings link/callout in the email signature), but don't force it. The lead will come to you when they're ready to talk — you just need to make sure that the offer is always on the table alongside the other helpful content and offers you're sharing
3. In that vein, you will see pretty quick email fatigue if every email is a push to do the same thing. Like you said, you're looking to stay at the forefront of the buyer's mind. That means that some ongoing email outreach will be short, others will be longer, and the offers should vary for each (i.e., read this blog, download this eBook, sign up for this webinar, complete this survey, fill out this email preferences form, schedule a meeting, watch this video)
4. Let the leads determine the content and email strategy, not you. It's easy to think of a buyer journey linearly where the lead flows through the awareness, consideration, and decision stages in that order. However, most leads jump around! If your ongoing email strategy is designed to serve everything in a logical order (i.e., the assumed awareness contacts only get awareness-stage content or you assume someone is in the decision stage 30 days after their contact is created), you better hope that you and your target audience think the same way. Pay attention to their email engagement and the types of content that seem to help move them along
5. Keep an open feedback loop with the sales team. Since the sales team should be hearing feedback/reservations/wants from the leads, they're a great source of inspiration for new content (or the positioning of existing content). Remember that content used for marketing purposes doesn't need to stay with marketing. If the sales team knows that marketing wrote a blog addresses one of the biggest reservations typically seen in leads, they should know to leverage it during sales activities. And if the sales team uncovers a content gap, that's a great opportunity to address it through a blog/eBook/video and incorpoate it into your email nurturing

I know this is pretty general, but hopefully it helps as you're getting HubSpot configured and rolling out this lead nurturing plan! Best of luck to you, and Happy HubSpotting!

[crispyGTM]

@kvlschaefer  Thanks for tagging me in this one!

@JCrozier This is a fantastic question for the community. I would recommend leveraging HubSpot workflows to nurture your users via email. 

In addition to this, monitoring activities from the user by using properties such as: Last activity date, last marketing email open date, last marketing email send date, and more! These datapoints will allow you to analyze who has been engaged with marketing and sales efforts in real time. 

The phrase 'stay at the forefront of the buyer's mind' sounds a lot like content to me. A solid content strategy that includes blog posts, case studies, high value offerings, etc is a great way to stay relevant in the buyer's mind. These free offerings are a great strategy to do two things: stay relevant in the buyer's mind and qualify your organization as a leader/expert in the field. 

Hope this helps.

[danmoyle]

Welcome to HubSpot and the HubSpot Community, @JCrozier! Thanks for the tag @kvlschaefer. 

A few resources for content marketing strategy I would suggest include: 

• HubSpot Academy Content Marketing Course 
• Developing a Content Marketing Strategy (CMI) 
• The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Strategy (SEMRush) 
• The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing 
• Email Marketing Course: Get Certified in Email Marketing 
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): 8 Ways To Get Started (this is important, as you want to convert once your marketing is working)

Finally, I want to encourage you to keep doing what you're doing right now - lean on the Community for ideas, resrources, questions, and insights. It's a very smart, creative, and generous Community! (Which you'll see as others offer their tips and insights here.)

[Jnix284]

Thanks for the tag @kvlschaefer  and welcome to the community @JCrozier !

@danmoyle am I just allowed to say ditto? I think you covered it, your resource links are 🔥

[danmoyle]

😊 you got it @Jnix284 !

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @JCrozier,

Welcome to the Community and HubSpot! We're happy to have you here 😊 

I moved your reply to a new post to make sure it gets visibility among our community members.

I would like to invite our experts to this conversation to see if they have advice.

Hi @danmoyle, @jolle, @Jnix284, @crispyGTM, @Phil_Vallender - Do you have any best practices or tips for @JCrozier?

Thank you!

Best,

Kristen

[SAkpene]

Hello everyone, 

My name is Seraphina Akpene and I am excited to join the hubspot community. I deal in gift packages and creating content for my business is so hard and I get stuck along the way. I am hoping to learn from everyone in the community.

Thank you,

Fina

[TitiCuisset]

Hi @SAkpene 

Welcome to the community, we're glad to have you here! 🙂 you may be interested in joining the Content Marketing Study Group 🙂

Best

Tiphaine