Kirill Ougarov
Do you want to squeeze more shameless cold emails out of your overworked SDRs? Try this trick! One of the most valuable tools unlocked with HubSpot Sales Professional is Sequences, which enables the automated sending of personalized sales-focused emails plus the automated creation of outreach reminder tasks. Let's translate in case you are missing our point. 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, there are ways you can use Sequences for Marketing and Customer Success team goals by leveraging the automated email function. 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 keep in mind is that you can only enroll 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 are sent from a personalized email client account – which is typically the email associated with your HubSpot account.
These emails are less likely to be caught by spam or other email filters. 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 in the email menu but via the Conversations menu. In there, you’ll see the Templates option.
Once there, you can see all of the templates you have created and create new templates. The “New template” button is on the top right. You’ll have the option of creating a template from scratch or using 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.”
When naming templates that are meant to send in a specific order, we recommend numbering them so that you can keep track of which one is which when creating your Sequences.
Setting up Sequences
Once you have your templates set up, you can go to the Sequence screen and begin configuring your Sequence. Depending on your permissions (and whether or not your organization has HubSpot Marketing Professional), the link will be located either under the Automation drop-down or as its own menu item.
From there, you’ll see the overview screen, where you can see the performance of your Sequences. By default, the metrics filter only to contacts or companies that you enrolled.
Clicking the Create Sequence button in 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 two for LinkedIn if you have a Sales Navigator account). You can include any combination of actions in a single Sequence.
For every step after the first one, you’ll have the option of specifying how long to wait before the action is taken. By default, steps will only be executed on business days (you can change this on the settings tab).
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 choose whether your emails should be threaded, the time window during which your emails are sent and whether you want to receive email reminders for your tasks.
On the automation tab, you’ll be able to change unenrollment 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.
Pay attention to the settings as well. Some, such as “threading,” may be something you want, or may not - some perceive it as overly salesy. Your business’s industry may also care about the “business days” vs. “days” setting.
Using Sequences in Workflows
Enrolling contacts automatically into a Sequence from a workflow is straightforward and an 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, the user name, and sending email address. Note that you can only select ONE sender user, and only users with a paid sales seat and a connected personal email address will be available for use.
Because the sender is pre-selected, segmentation by fields like Contact Owner is not available. In cases where you want user-based segmentation, such as automating SDR outreach, you’ll need to set up branches for each individual HubSpot user Sequence emails will be sent.
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, 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 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 too.
- 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 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.
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Additional Resources
How To Get the Most Value From Your HubSpot Investment
HubSpot Sequences vs. Workflows: What's the Difference?
HubSpot Sales Enablement Tools - Creating Sequences Step-by-Step
How Salespeople Lose Big By Not Using Meeting Links