Managing a contact database is hard. I’ve worked with over 20 HubSpot customers on multi-month (sometimes multi-year) engagements, and they seem to universally have problems managing their contact database and keeping their leads from going cold.
These issues are so common across the entire HubSpot customer base that HubSpot Academy has made a number of projects to help their customers solve these issues.
We spent some time to go through their tutorials (called Customer Projects) and found the ones that will help you better manage your contact database and engage with your leads.
1. Database Cleanup Single Line Text
What is this:
This project will help you get rid of duplicated contact properties, without losing existing lead intelligence that may be connected to the fields you’re deleting.
Why it’s useful:
Alright, that was a little buzzword-y. So let’s ground it in reality.
Imagine you want to call some of your warm leads and see if there’s a chance to work together. So you open up HubSpot, and you start setting up a Smart List that will automatically pull in anyone that has provided you with their phone number.
But you realize you have a problem: there are four different contact properties that ask for the phone number! One asks for “phone number”, one asks for “phone #” one asks for “mobile number”, and one asks for “best number to reach you”. That’s going to get annoying!
Your first instinct might be to delete every contact property except “phone number”. Step away from the keyboard! If you do that, you’re going to end up deleting the provided phone numbers provided on forms using the other three.
This project helps you merge those contact properties without losing that intelligence.
2. How to Set Up Lifecycle Stages
What is this:
This project will help you set up and manage lifecycle stages to ensure that leads are moving through your funnel.
Why it’s useful:
In case you don’t know, a lifecycle stage is an identifier that helps you understand where a lead is in their customer lifecycle, which is a companion to your sales funnel. By knowing this, you will be able to send them information that is most relevant to them. (For example, you wouldn’t want to send a “new customer” discount to existing customers.)
This project will help you understand which leads belong in which lifecycle stage, and will also walk you through the technical setup in HubSpot.
3. Contact Re-engagement Email
What is this:
This project will help you re-engage with the cold leads in your database.
Why it’s useful:
So you get a new lead from a download on your website. And just like a new relationship, it starts out strong. You’re sending each other emails, you’re talking with/about each other on Twitter and Facebook, and you may even be talking on the phone.
But, someday you just sort of fall out of touch. One day, you’re going through your address book, see their name, and think “man, we had some good times together, I thought there were big things in store for us...maybe I should reach out to them.”
This project helps you do that. It will help you identify which leads could use a little love from you, give you some ideas for what to send them, and help you with the technical setup in HubSpot.
4. How to Setup An Email Newsletter
What is this:
This project will help you create a recurring newsletter.
Why it’s useful:
Setting up a weekly or monthly newsletter is one of the best ways to stay in touch with contacts. They know your email is coming into their inbox every week/month, and it keeps you top-of-mind. If you work in an organization with a long sales cycle, your leads probably are not ready to buy on day one; but an email newsletter will keep you in their inboxes and might catch them on the day that they are ready. Plus, an email newsletter will drive engagement and bring traffic back to your content.
This project is a step-by-step guide to create and send an email newsletter, from start to finish. To make sure your newsletter is as good as it can be, here are two other excellent articles:
- 15 Email Newsletter Examples We Love Getting in Our Inboxes
- How to Create an Email Newsletter People Actually Read
5. How to Create a Behavioral Email Marketing Strategy
What is this:
This project will walk you through developing a behavioral email strategy using the reporting tools in HubSpot. For tips and tricks, read this article.
Why it’s useful:
Behavioral email is awesome. Having a behavioral email marketing strategy allows you to automatically send incredibly targeted emails based on actions and behaviors, in real-time.
Here’s how it works: imagine you’re on a website for a piece of SaaS software and you check out the features page and the pricing page. Five minutes later, you get an email from someone on the sales team to show you a demo or give you a free trial. That’s an offer that’s highly-relevant for you at this stage in your research, and it can be sent automatically through HubSpot behavioral email. Think of the things you could do, how you could support them, if you could communicate with your leads in real time as they browsed.
This project walks you through setting it up.
Conclusion
If you complete these projects from HubSpot academy, your database will be better managed and your leads will be more engaged. There are a lot more projects out there, but these are the five best for database management and engagement.
As always, if you have any questions, send me an email at rsimons@imrcorp.com and don’t forget to subscribe to the blog by filling out the form below :)