If you’re already running marketing automations through HubSpot, you likely can see people on your business’s website that you already know and that you can see visiting your website. If you see those same people in your ecosystem researching your product, whether on blog posts, pricing pages, or anything in between, it’s easy to wonder how to get that visitor from inaction to action.
In these situations, we recommend building workflows based on page views. Essentially, this is a marketing automation that triggers when a person views the website, sending a sales message to them. Of course, the timing of this and the way the message is sent can impact the effectiveness of this strategy. It’s important to strike the balance of feeling like it’s a human connection, while utilizing the efficiency of marketing automation. With that in mind, we’ve put together this quick guide with 3 essential tips for crafting a successful pageview automation in HubSpot.
More than anything, when it comes to building out marketing automations, you need to think about the human element. While it would be incredibly inefficient for a business of any size to devote one person to send a personalized email for every single pageview from someone in their marketing ecosystem, an automation still shouldn’t feel robotic.
An easy way to build in that humanity is by adding a delay to the message sent to the page viewer. If an email is sent within a minute of viewing the website, that can feel more artificial than if it was sent 30 minutes later. If the email comes later, someone could conceivably believe that the email was written by someone after looking at page metrics, rather than something automatically sent. That delay adds a more organic feel and makes the message more likely to be successful.
Beyond the specific delay, it’s also important to think about the time of day. Even if a person was on your site at 1 o’clock in the morning looking at your different packages, you don’t want to send them an email in that time frame. Limiting the email to business hours and even just times you personally would be comfortable receiving an email feels more professional and more like a human sent it. By setting these time-based rules, your messages will likely reach someone ready to receive them, rather than left unread.
While using pageviews can be useful for inciting your site visitors into action, it doesn’t mean that you want it running all the time in every situation. There are often large groups of people visiting your site whom you do not want to receive particular emails. For example, if your existing customer is on a pricing page, it’s unlikely you will want to trigger out a sales email to them. Since you might already be in direct conversations with this customer, getting an automated email like this out of the blue could feel false or robotic, potentially damaging your ongoing relationship in the process.
That’s why it’s a good idea to set clear parameters of who these messages should not be sent to. In HubSpot, you can easily establish that this workflow does not re-engage current customers, current leads, and unqualified leads. That way, you can make sure emails are always going to the right visitors.
Beyond that, in setting parameters, you also should build in ways to prevent weird interactions. For example, you don’t want to send the same email every time someone visits your site. That’s why we recommend setting these workflows to only send a message once, or after a certain period of time. If someone gets the email again and again, it will feel inorganic and spammy.
Setting these borders around the frequency of messages and the users who will receive the messages allows you to hone in on customers you can actually reach, making success much more likely.
A small side note on setting up your conditions in HubSpot workflows: it’s easier to set your workflows to not allow reenrollment. Reenrollment settings determine whether a contact that’s entered your workflow can go through your workflow again. This is important since reenrollment can produce some weird interactions for your HubSpot leads if not thought out correctly.
More than anything, it’s important that these automated messages come from a “real person”. People respond so much better to emails that could be from the head of marketing at a company or another perceived employee, rather than the company at large. Even if you end up making up this person or position, when a future customer receives the email, they should feel like they are replying to an actual person.
As a part of that, for these automated messages triggered by a page view, you need to make the subject line seem like something this person would say— not a call to action or something that reads like an ad, but a subject line that feels like an honest check-in. That way, the person receiving the email can feel like this is an organic conversation that could be continued.
With a signature at the bottom of the email that feels like one someone at the company would have, paired with an actual name and an email that reflects a real check-in from the company— the customer could be inspired to take action and reach out.
By keeping those 3 points in mind, you can get started on a pageview marketing automation workflow to start reaching those visitors. Of course, as a note, we’d like to express that you can only do this if the contact has previously filled out a form in your system, otherwise these visitors will be anonymous. These automation triggers really only affect people that are actually in your ecosystem.
For more help with automations or building your own automated marketing ecosystem in HubSpot, Vaulted always happy to help. We’re dedicated to working with clients to help them make data-driven decisions that shift how they engage with their audience, improve metrics, and assert why their company matters. No matter the type or size of your business, we’re passionate about helping brands find the correct solutions to their unique marketing challenges.