Hubspot is getting more and more adopted in the world these days. This really nice marketing machine is now used by companies who are interacting with non tech-friendly customers. And when your customers are not tech-savvy you often want to replace email conversations for something more traditional like phone calls or text messages. Here I’m going to give you a short tutorial to show you how you can use SMS into a Hubspot workflow to get a better engagement.
Let’s take for instance a fitness club which needs to advertise a special event that has to happen in a few weeks. It’s quite likely that they will get a better open rate if they sens SMS to their members in addition to a traditional email.
To make the campaign a bit more complex, we will ask people to register to the event (a Hubspot landing page) to confirm their venue (attendance?). This will allow us to send a couple invitations until our contacts sign up, and it will also allow us to send an SMS before the event to reduce no-shows.
Tools we will be using
In this tutorial we will be using the following platforms:
- Hubspot (Pro): a marketing/sales automation software. We need to have “Workflows”
- Zapier: an API connector and automation tool
- Twilio: an SMS provider
- Front (optionnal): a communication hub for emails and sms
The summarized tutorial
To avoid you spend time in reading all the implementation details, I summarize here the main ideas behind the scenario.
- We will create custom contact fields in Hubspot. One field will be keeping the textual content, the second one (boolean) will act as a trigger to send an SMS.
- We will set up a workflow in Hubspot ; when the second field is activated, the workflow will send our contact details to Zapier via a Webhook.
- Zapier will pre-process contacts fields to extract information like {{first_name}} or {{last_name}} from our message
- Zapier will then send the mobile phone recipient together with the text message to Twilio
- The SMS emission is done by Twilio
- (Optional steps)
- To receive and save the discussion history, we will bind Front with Hubspot
How to do that technically ?
Well, I’m updating this post in 2020, and many explaination that were described here are not valid anymore. If you want to setup a similar scenario, try to do it by following the several documentations available (HubSpot, Twilio and Zapier). Most of the steps are self explanatory but I don’t want to rewrite an article that might be deprecated in a few months.
So, good luck with the implementation, and if you need help, contact me (💵💵💵).