TABLE OF CONTENTS
What Are HubSpot Workflows? | Workflow Best Practices | Optimizing Workflow Actions | Testing Workflows | Advanced HubSpot Form Workflow Strategies
Data collection is valuable, but the true power of HubSpot workflows lies in streamlining your marketing, sales, and service processes. After all, return on investment (ROI) is generated not by collecting data but by efficiently applying it.
HubSpot workflows automate repetitive tasks, personalize customer experiences, and drive results.
This blog explores best practices to maximize efficiency and effectiveness when building workflows. We'll examine the HubSpot form workflow you should be using, analyze HubSpot workflow by activities for greater relevance, and share HubSpot automation workflow examples you can steal to elevate your HubSpot experience.
HubSpot workflows are a high-octane automation tool designed to simplify and streamline business processes. They allow you to automate those annoying tasks your team has to do repeatedly, saving a ton of time and potentially improving morale simultaneously.
HubSpot workflows improve team efficiency like nothing else, delivering a highly personalized experience you can scale to grow. Workflow types include:
You also have workflow by activities. HubSpot workflows allow you to automate processes based on various criteria, including specific activities such as meetings, calls, or emails, which may require different workflows to close the deal.
By leveraging activity-based triggers, you can enhance engagement and ensure timely follow-ups.
Workflows streamline processes, saving you and your team valuable time by automating routine tasks and allowing you to focus on high-priority exceptions and strategic decision-making. They also improve accuracy — fewer manual touchpoints mean fewer opportunities for errors.
Additionally, when it comes to scalability, workflows are a game-changer. Once you refine a process, you can expand its scope to efficiently manage more contacts, leads, and customers.
Here are some things you can simplify through HubSpot workflows:
In short — with HubSpot workflows, you can automate smarter, work more efficiently, and scale with confidence.
You design sequences for one-on-one communication, primarily for sales or follow-up tasks. But you'll build workflows for larger-scale automation to streamline marketing, sales, and service processes.
Email sequences are ideal for nurturing leads with personalized emails or automating follow-ups after a meeting. But workflows help you automate lead nurturing, task assignments, or customer onboarding at scale.
Sequence enrollment is a highly specialized, manual process that stops automatically when the contact responds. On the other hand, a workflow is fully automated from start to finish. It includes triggers, actions, and goals defined in advance for seamless execution.
Workflow best practices are starting points for building effective automation.
Align workflows with business objectives. Misalignments can create the appearance that what you're doing isn't working. Or it can give you a false confidence that generating leads automatically increases revenues.
Instead of focusing solely on the absolute number of new leads, focus on metrics demonstrating that you're engaging the lead and reducing the number of leads abandoning the process.
And don't forget to set goals to reduce churn, keeping in mind that it costs five to seven times more to generate a new customer than to keep one.
Map your way to ROI. Visualizing your workflow steps delivers clarity and prevents errors. It aligns your automation with business goals.
We encourage you to use tools like flowcharts or process mapping software to outline your steps. Consider the decision points for your triggers before you get started. This preparation will also simplify implementation, limit the need for re-dos, and ensure workflows do what you planned.
Define enrollment criteria with specificity and relevance. Be specific enough that there's no question when the event happens. Be relevant because that event is meaningful in the buyer's journey.
The truth is that overly broad triggers may lead to incorrect enrollments, wasting your time and resources. Mindful awareness plus customer data will help you home in on the right events.
Leverage lists and properties for precise targeting. This will allow you to optimize relevance without personalizing 10,000 contacts manually. While every customer is a little different, overlap exists. Find it, and demonstrate you understand each customer's goals.
Use "if/then" branches to create personalized experiences. This conditional branching depends on a particular property to send targeted, relevant content. HubSpot workflow examples include sending different emails based on lead stage or location.
Use naming conventions in your workflow titles. You could designate “[OPS]” at the beginning of an operational workflow, “[LN]” at the beginning of a lead nurture workflow, etc.
It's time to turn best practices on their heads and apply your first-party data to ensure your workflows work for you.
Put appropriate delays in place to prevent overwhelming someone who just activated multiple triggers in a short time window. This approach enhances engagement and reduces the risk of communication fatigue.
Apply data to determine the best timing for each segment to ensure relevance and prevent recipients from feeling bombarded.
This tracking code inserts key recipient-specific information into your communications to engagement by making messages more relevant and custom. Doing so can increase open rates by 26%, according to the American Marketing Association.
Example personalization token applications include:
Internal notifications improve team collaboration by informing team members of when tasks have been completed upstream. It enhances transparency and timeliness of information.
For example, alerting sales when a lead takes a key action enables prompt follow-ups. The result? Better conversion rates.
Define goals to measure success and automatically un-enroll leads. But also suppress irrelevant contacts to keep workflows clean and efficient.
Optimization is a process, not a destination. It comes down to your ability to continually watch what your workflows are doing, how contacts respond, and observe where you could improve a workflow.
Before activating a new workflow, test how it will work to catch errors before it goes live. Here’s how:
Monitor for any errors. HubSpot will automatically flag a workflow that has an error in the “Needs Review” view.
Take advantage of the centralized performance view and customization options to track what matters most. This makes timely and data-informed decision-making possible. Key metrics to track include:
It's important to audit workflows regularly. This allows you to identify inefficiencies that may be holding you back. Periodically review your data insights to prioritize areas that need work. For example, you may need to refine triggers or update content to improve performance.
Are you looking for lesser-known workflow strategies? These help you take HubSpot form workflows to the next level.
You might build a drip campaign that looks like this for long-term engagement:
Feeling overwhelmed? HubSpot offers fantastic workflow templates to help you get started. Instead of reinventing the wheel, take a moment to explore these pre-built options — they’re designed for many common scenarios.
The best part? You can start with a template and customize it to fit your exact needs, saving time while ensuring efficiency.
HubSpot workflows are a game-changer for saving time and getting results. But to really make the most of them, you need to set clear goals, test, and fine-tune along the way.
Wondering if you're missing out on workflow opportunities? Download our free HubSpot Audit Guide to find out!