How To Be Truly Customer-Centric with HubSpot and SMS

From its beginnings in 2005, HubSpot has been a favorite of sales and marketing departments. The company was built on the belief that customers no longer want to be interrupted by business communications, and instead want to be helped. Its intuitive platform has since made customer-centric sales and marketing easier for everyone from small businesses to large enterprises.

Over the 16 years since HubSpot came around, many companies have adopted HubSpot and focused their efforts on inbound sales and marketing. They’ve re-centered their campaigns, outreach, and content to focus on helping the customer solve their problems, rather than sending generic outbound messages about their business’s solutions. And in the meantime, customers’ communications habits have also shifted dramatically. While email was the primary vehicle for one-to-many business communications before, text messaging has taken over in the last few years as customers’ preferred method of interacting with businesses.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking at INBOUND 2021 about how sales teams can leverage texting alongside email and phone calls. It was an amazing experience to hear questions from reps across time zones about how they can combine texting and HubSpot. While I answered some of them, it’s clear that reps and marketers still have many important questions to address. So today, I want to spend some time exploring how both departments have used HubSpot to become truly customer-centric, and how using HubSpot with texting can help you strengthen connections with customers further.

Want to learn more ways to engage customers using texting in HubSpot? Read our guide.

HubSpot Centralizes Team Efforts

Every HubSpot plan includes lead and customer data, digital campaign creation features, customer communication tools, and performance tracking. Centralizing your sales and marketing efforts like this helps your team function more efficiently, stay on the same page, and get a big-picture view of marketing efforts. This makes it much easier for team members to connect with customers quickly. HubSpot SMS lets you streamline team efforts further to connect with customers even more efficiently.

Using HubSpot SMS to Streamline Team Collaboration

You can integrate your HubSpot platform with your business texting platform. A HubSpot SMS integration allows you to sync data between platforms, add texting to marketing campaigns, and text with leads right from the HubSpot interface.

When you integrate HubSpot with texting, you can access that same team collaboration when you message with your customers. Use HubSpot SMS to:

• Have multiple team members collaborate on lead conversations (e.g., having your reps loop in a CX team member to answer a lead’s question)
• Assign lead conversations to the sales team when they’re ready to have a purchasing conversation
• Reference your leads’ full interaction history from their HubSpot contact record, and use it to inform your text conversations, all from within HubSpot

HubSpot SMS makes teamwork easier than ever, so you can have efficient, meaningful messaging conversations with customers.

HubSpot Makes It Easy To Start Relationships with Leads Right Away

Some of HubSpot’s newer features and integrations empower you to check lead emails and messages within HubSpot. If leads respond to your email or social media marketing campaigns, you can reply quickly. With these new capabilities, you can both send marketing content and connect with your audience when they reach out. It’s a useful tool for those who are adopting conversational marketing and sales, new strategies that focus on interacting with inbound leads through person-to-person chats. Adding SMS into the mix gives you one more powerful lead touchpoint.

Have Conversational Marketing Chats Using HubSpot SMS

Transitioning to customer-centric sales and marketing means embracing those conversational tactics and answering inbound queries with helpful, authentic one-to-one chats. You can use HubSpot SMS to respond to lead and customer messages from within HubSpot. These include messages from native SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messaging, and WhatsApp—four channels that are popular for marketing campaigns.

HubSpot SMS allows you to:

• Create campaigns in a channel that encourages leads to interact
• Increase campaign engagement
• Save time by managing marketing communications alongside campaigns

By responding to leads quickly using the channels they prefer, you can model the inbound marketing mentality of meeting customers where they are. You can also provide helpful, engaging experiences to nurture leads along the flywheel.

HubSpot Mitigates Repetitive Tasks

HubSpot’s most powerful tools, like Workflows, automate simple tasks for you. These automations improve your marketing team’s performance, speeding up follow-ups and other key lead interactions. That way, you can focus on creating out-of-the-box, interactive marketing campaigns and engaging one-on-one with your leads. With HubSpot SMS, you can automate text workflows, too.

Connect with Customers at Key Moments with SMS Workflow Automations

SMS is a great channel for follow-ups. Customers are likely to read your texts, as 98% of SMS messages are read. They’re also likely to respond, as SMS has up to a 45% response rate. Automations help you reach customers at the opportune moment.

Setting up HubSpot SMS Workflow automation is easy. For example, to set up a follow-up for a marketing event, you would simply:

1. Create or select a follow-up SMS template.
2. Create a workflow with a contact enrollment trigger based on the HubSpot properties indicating a contact has recently attended a marketing event and that they’ve opted in to text (e.g.,  Lifecycle Stage is “Webinar Attendee” and SMS opt-in (custom property) is “yes”).
3. Set whichever delay makes sense for the situation (e.g., delaying the message send time until one day after the event).
4. Add an action for “Send SMS With Template” to your HubSpot workflow, and choose your follow-up SMS template.

Video credit: INBOUND

Automated SMS Workflows empower you to check in with customers at critical moments through a channel they’re more likely to respond to. See this post for four key examples of SMS Workflows to build in HubSpot.

HubSpot Helps Boost Engagement Rates Through Personalization

HubSpot tools make it easier for you to boost engagement rates with personalized content. For example, Workflows help you create chains of content that are dynamically sent to leads based on their actions, and personalized with each lead’s custom properties. By creating multi-step touchpoints, you can keep leads engaged and even spark conversations. It’s critical to send leads content across multiple channels, if they’ve opted in for them; certain channels, like SMS, are more likely to elicit responses.

Add HubSpot Properties to Text Marketing and Sales Campaigns

Automated SMS Workflows are especially useful for quick follow-ups at the end of other content Workflows, like email drip campaigns. Identify the moments in your marketing journey where a quick follow-up will help a lead engage further with your content. Make that connection via SMS, then scale it.

With HubSpot SMS, you might create Workflows that:

1. Send a personalized text after leads take particular actions (e.g., signing up for a product demo)
2. Send a personalized check-in text if leads don’t respond to initial emails in a Workflow
3. Send appointment reminders to ensure leads attend them
4. Include a personalized SMS follow-up after sending an email newsletter or a sales proposal

When you integrate HubSpot with your messaging platform, all of the lead and customer data syncs automatically. This includes customer contact information, custom fields, and customer interaction history. You can include this information in the templates you create for automated SMS Workflows to strengthen that customer connection.

HubSpot Simplifies Performance Measurement

HubSpot offers one last revolutionary benefit: reports. Since all of your marketing efforts are in one place, HubSpot acts as a central tracking system, empowering you to get an overview of your performance across channels and campaigns. In other words, you can see how customers are responding to your content—and whether you need to work on your response times or other factors. Reviewing SMS reporting alongside your other HubSpot reports gives you an even better idea of how leads and customers are interacting with your content.

Measure Messaging Engagement With SMS Reporting

There are certain conversational sales KPIs and conversational marketing KPIs that you’ll want to measure, like response rate and average response time. Leverage SMS reports to compare these with metrics from other channels, like email, to determine which channel helps you elicit the most direct interactions with leads.

Most SMS platforms offer reports that allow you to:

• Review performance in an easy-to-digest format
• Create custom reports for tracking metrics that are important to you
• Analyze critical factors like response times and inbound/outbound message volume

Having data about another communication channel is invaluable. You can expand your picture of the customer experience, better understand their needs, and more easily understand what you need to do to meet those needs.

HubSpot and SMS: The Key to Customer-Centric Sales and Marketing

HubSpot and SMS are a powerful duo. With their help, you can centralize team efforts, kickstart lead conversations, streamline communication workflows, make personalized connections efficiently, and get a better picture of your leads’ journey. Ultimately, HubSpot SMS makes your sales and marketing departments more customer-centric—and more effective overall.

Want to learn more about building strong customer relationships in HubSpot? Read our guide to texting throughout the customer lifecycle.