Kirill Ougarov
Do you want to squeeze more shameless cold emails out of your overworked SDRs? Try this trick! One of the most valuable sales automation tools (unlocked with HubSpot Sales Professional) is Sequences, which enables automated personalized sales-focused emails, plus automatic outreach reminder tasks. Allow us to break down what that means exactly: MARKETING can schedule automated personalized sales follow-ups that come directly from the sales rep's email. Now, do we have your attention?
Originally created for sales teams, Sequences is a powerful tool. And there are ways you can use Sequences for Marketing and Customer Success team goals by using meeting links and leveraging automated email functionality. Recently, HubSpot made it possible to enroll contacts into a Sequence with a Workflow, significantly increasing the potential use cases.
Regardless of how you use Sequences, one crucial detail to remember is that you can only enroll and manage a contact in one Sequence at a time. This protects your contacts from accidental email spam and excessive task creation for your teams. And while tasks are useful, in this post, we’ll focus on the automated email function within Sequences as that’s the most valuable one for marketers.
How are Sequence emails different from other automated emails?
Unlike marketing emails, which come from a pre-defined (and typically generic) account, Sequence emails look like any old Gmail or Outlook email. They come from a personalized email client account – which is typically the email associated with your HubSpot account.
Spam or other email filters are less likely to catch these emails. As a result, they’re more likely to be seen by your target than a typical HubSpot marketing email. Additionally, the recipient is more likely to open an email sent by a person rather than an organization.
Setting Up Sequence emails
Before you set up a Sequence, create the emails you’ll be sending. Unlike marketing emails, you do not create these through the Marketing menu. Instead, you can find them via the Library menu item. There you will see the Templates option.
In Templates, you can view all the templates you have created in HubSpot and generate new templates. The “New template” button is on the top right. You can create a template from scratch or use a pre-existing template from HubSpot’s template library.
You can (and should!) use personalization tokens in your template’s subject and body. Keep in mind that your email signature will be included as part of the email as well. Note that there are great options for personalization from the Sender (e.g., sales rep), including “Sender’s Meeting Link.” HubSpot can even generate template copy for you with AI that you can use as a starting point if you're stumped.
Setting up Sequences
Once your templates are set up, you can go to the Sequence screen in the Automations menu and begin configuring your Sequence.
Clicking the Create Sequence button at the top right will let you choose between creating a new template from scratch or starting with a pre-made Sequence, though all pre-made options are designed for sales teams.
Regardless of which option you choose, you have the choice of four actions to include in your Sequence (plus an extra one for LinkedIn Sales Navigator that's only available if you have a connected account). You can include any combination of actions in a single Sequence.
For every step after the first one, you can specify how much time elapses before the action is taken. By default, steps will only execute on business days (you can change this on the Settings tab). You will also be asked whether you want your emails threaded when creating an email action.
You should wait at least 2-3 days between steps to avoid spamming your contacts.
In addition to the business day toggle, the Settings tab lets you select the time window during which emails go out and if (and when) automated reminders for your tasks are sent.
On the Automation tab, you can change un-enrollment rules for the Sequence. By default, contacts will be unenrolled from your Sequence if they respond to one of your emails or book a meeting on a scheduling page.
On this tab, you can also create Workflows using your Sequence (you can also do this via the regular Workflows menu item). One catch with using the “Create Workflow” function here is that you cannot edit the workflow from the Workflow screen.
Using Sequences in Workflows
Enrolling contacts automatically into a Sequence from a Workflow is a straightforward and awesome feature. However, it does require HubSpot Sales Enterprise. We have had clients upgrade to Sales Enterprise just to get this feature, which allows marketers to help their Sales SDRs by automatically enrolling download content leads directly into a sales Sequence specifically for content (higher funnel leads).
After selecting “Enroll in a Sequence,” you’ll choose the Sequence you want to enroll the contact in and the sender type.
NOTE: You can only select ONE sender, and only users with a paid sales seat and a connected personal email address will be available for use.
Whether you want to send to a specific user or by using a contact owner will depend on the purpose of the Sequence.
When should you use automated sequence enrollment?
While leveraging Sequences for all of your nurture flows might be tempting, the “one Sequence per user/sales rep” limitation makes this impractical. Not only would you be potentially getting in the way of your sales team’s outreach efforts, but contacts that convert again while in the Sequence wouldn’t receive emails for the additional offer they opted into. Additionally, Sequences are limited to 500 sends per user per day, and even that may raise suspicion from the spam gods.
Instead, it’s best to use Sequence enrollment to workflow actions for strategic initiatives aligned with your sales team’s processes. Here are three examples:
- Targeted webinar attendee outreach. You don’t want to enroll your entire contact list into a Sequence (nor can you). But you can create a list of your highest-value prospects (such as senior employees at target companies) that you can enroll in a dedicated nurture Sequence that encourages them to attend a webinar or similar event that you are hosting/promoting (This works great for tradeshows!).
- Sales outreach/nurture process. Above, we mentioned the example of using Sequence workflows to automate SDR outreach as a potential use case, which would help you scale outreach efforts without adding headcount. However, you can automate sales outreach as a secondary, sales-focused nurture flow regardless of how your sales team is structured. You just have to make sure that you set up branches for all of your sales reps so that Rep A doesn’t end up contacting a contact assigned to Rep B, muddling the process.
- Customer surveys. Because they’re targeted and personalized, Sequences are a great tool for surveying your customers and gathering reviews. You can use automation with Sequences to send surveys to targeted customers based on predefined rules (i.e., 30 or 60 days after the Deal Close Date). Or you can send them in a single batch to a selected list using a senior person as the sender (i.e., your CEO or Head of Customer Success) to significantly increase your response rate.
Get The Most Out Of Your HubSpot!
HubSpot Sales Pro and Marketing Pro aren’t cheap (let alone Sales Enterprise). Since you’re paying a significant amount for these powerful tools, you want to ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment.
We’ve helped dozens of B2Bs unlock the full power of HubSpot, driving growth and productivity. Check our recent case study on how we helped RISA, a leader in structural design software, harness HubSpot automation tools, ROI tracking techniques, and innovative sales strategies to transform and elevate their customer engagement to new heights!
Additional Resources
You Finally Bought HubSpot - Now What?
Eloqua To HubSpot: Unpacking The Switch To Simplified Marketing Automation
HubSpot Sales Enablement Tools - Creating Sequences Step-by-Step
How Salespeople Lose Big By Not Using Meeting Links