Explained: How to Use HubSpot Workflows for Your Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Lead nurturing campaigns are more than just tools for generating sales. They are about genuinely understanding and responding to the needs of your leads. 

The key is to provide relevant information and resources at just the right time without bombarding your leads with too many emails or calls. The ultimate aim is to create a positive and memorable email journey that builds strong, lasting relationships with your audience.

With HubSpot email workflows, you can meticulously plan your campaigns targeting specific groups or industries and personalize your marketing efforts to guide leads through their buying journey with the help of content that speaks directly to their needs.

Lead Nurturing: The First Principles

Before we turn the technical cheek, let us first understand what lead nurturing is. Lead nurturing is the process of encouraging and persuading prospects to buy. This is the broader goal of managed email campaigns; lead nurturing is specifically about this. 

Evidently, it is a time-taking process since you are seeking to build a relationship with your audience. You can’t hurry that. You are not primarily trying to sell. It’s an important point that many marketers tend to overlook. 

You are not generating demand but seeking to animate a “latent demand.” Your prospects are already interested in your brand. They are already in the funnel. Your job is to stimulate their interest, moving them through the stages of the buying cycle. 

Understanding The Nurturing Process

First and foremost, lead nurturing is not email communication as such. Instead, it is a workflow or a sequence of communications where every step has a clearly defined objective. 

You determine the objective based on what action you desire the lead to take according to what stage they are in. An effective lead nurturing process will include the following:

• Segmentation: Nurturing requires nuanced communication. Segmentation ensures that your content resonates with the recipient. 

(Importantly, you need not limit the nurturing process to leads only. You could also nurture one-time customers and gradually absorb them into the funnel.)

• Contact Profiling: You need to gather as much information you can about your leads in order to communicate with them on their terms. You may tune up the email frequency in the case of a new customer or when someone has shown some interest in your brand.
  
• Personalization: Personalization is indispensable to lead nurturing. Send the right content to the right lead at the right stage at the right time. In every communication, you must aim to answer a specific question or resolve a doubt.
  
• Progressive Profiling: With every offer you make, you ask for a bit of additional information from the contact — this is known as progressive profiling. 

For instance, the first offer could be a gated blog post where you can ask for the contact’s email address. Your next offer could be a detailed case study in exchange for which you can request more granular information, and so on. 

Now let’s take a brief look at lead nurturing best practices in our next section. 

Lead Nurturing Best Practices

Much of what constitutes lead nurturing is “learning as you go.” Because it is a gradual process, you need to adapt your strategies according to how your prospects engage with your content. No goal is final, and you may have to make adjustments frequently. 

Suppose you want to design a welcome campaign for ten new subscribers. The second email in the welcome program may introduce your products and services. So you need to send the same information about the same products/services to all ten subscribers. 

Now, as the subscribers engage with your offered solutions, you need to keep tabs on how each of the ten is interacting with your brand. Capture the digital body language of your new subscribers, and identify those who are actively signaling intent. 

The first 30 days of engagement is crucial. After this, your contacts may not be as willing to share information. Utilize the 30-day window to the max. Implement progressive profiling during this period. In this regard, feel free to use HubSpot’s automated email workflows to gather necessary information from maximally engaging contacts.

What about those who are not showing interest in your content? No, you don’t ignore them right away. Rather, transfer the dormant contacts to a re-engagement program. Now this workflow will help you determine if you should keep these contacts in your database. 

In another scenario, contacts who did show intent might suddenly not decide to engage further. It’s a real possibility that the most engaged leads will not end up making a purchase. In that case, you need to re-incorporate them into the nurture workflow. 

One important point: as a lead turtles down the sales funnel, remember to exclude them from the nurture workflow. You don’t want to send automated welcome emails to those who are ready to make a purchase! 

The next step is to measure the effectiveness of your lead nurturing campaign. Track the right metrics as per your goals. If your goal is to speed up the sales process, measure the number of days it takes for leads to traverse the funnel. 

The entire process is about you actively making necessary modifications according to changes in customer behavior. 

HubSpot Email Workflow Examples

Now we come to the practical part of lead nurturing. In this section, we will look at four HubSpot workflow examples. Let’s start with a re-engagement nurture flow. 

1. Educational Or Content Drip Nurture Flow

The Educational or Content Drip Nurture Flow takes a more subtle approach. It’s a systematic, automated strategy that delivers valuable content gradually to leads over a set timeframe. 

This means that Instead of overwhelming them, this approach provides a personalized and digestible learning experience, keeping leads engaged and boosting conversion potential. By gauging lead interest and engagement, you can focus on prospects with the most potential, establishing your brand as a thought leader in your industry/niche.

Here we have used the trigger as anyone who filled out any form published on our website. You can change it as you need. 

2. Trial Or Demo Nurture Flow

A Trial or Demo Nurture Flow is a strategic sequence of interactions designed to guide trial or demo users toward becoming paying customers. It emphasizes showcasing the value, features, and benefits of your product or service to optimize conversion opportunities. 

A well-designed Trial or Demo Nurture Flow plays a key role in the customer acquisition process, ensuring a positive user experience and optimizing conversion opportunities.

Those who have filled out the trial form will be added to the active list and is used as a trigger for the below HubSpot workflow example.

3 Promotional Nurture Flow

A Promotional Nurture Flow is a focused marketing approach that encourages leads to make a purchase or take a specific action. By strategically delivering promotions and exclusive offers, this flow guides leads through the funnel, turning potential customers into paying ones.

It aligns marketing efforts with sales goals, creating a win-win for businesses and leads.

In our final example, we have compiled an active list of leads we intend to target for the promotional campaign. 

To identify those who have shown interest in the promotional email, we have implemented a click condition. Our email includes a single click that redirects the recipient to the required landing page. Based on their response, recipients either receive further emails or do not. Those who have shown interest are further added to a separate list.

Note: Adjust the lead nurturing flow above according to your business goals, target audience, and buyer funnel. Choose the type of nurture campaign that aligns with your business goals, the buyer’s journey, and the characteristics of your target audience.

4. Re-engagement Nurture Flow

The Re-engagement Nurture Flow is all about rekindling the spark with contacts who’ve grown distant. It’s a targeted email strategy designed to bring back those who are slipping away, thereby keeping your email list robust and active. 

This approach not only renews connections but helps in segregating the uninterested contacts, ensuring cleaner data and more focused targeting in the future.

In the example below, we have used an active list as the trigger. The active list consists of contacts who need to be re-engaged based on our requirements. In the flow, whoever opens any email gets added to a static list, which we will nurture further. Those who don’t receive an email will receive another email, and so on.

Wrapping Up!

Lead nurturing is an integral part of email marketing. It takes time, but if implemented to a T, you can convert leads to paying, even long-lasting, customers.