Difference between Workflows, Sequences and Personal sales emails

Introduction

In order to make sales, you need to stay top of mind. And doing so means staying in touch with the leads you’re working and the customers you already have. All those repetitive follow-ups take time, and when you’re already busy, it’s tedious. That’s where automation comes into play.

In today’s episode, we look at how to use automated emails to move forward sales conversations and nurture customers, meaning you can stay top of mind without the grind.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

demodia.com/brandscript-worksheet

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Episode Transcript

The great thing about working in a small business is that you are in charge of your own time. You can do what you want, whenever you want. Well, that's the theory in any case, but as anyone that's ever tried to do their own sales and marketing knows, it's not like that in the real world. In order to make sales, you need to stay top of mind. And doing so means staying in touch with the leads that you're working and the customers that you already have. All those repetitive follow ups take time. And when you're already busy, it's tedious. That's where automation comes into play. So in today's episode, we're going to look at how to use automated emails to move forward sales conversations and nurture customers, meaning that you can stay on top of mind without all the grind. So let's get started. Hi there, I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice and help you create marketing that works. Ah, email. The one thing that I truly have a love hate relationship with. On one hand. It makes staying in touch with people so easy. But on the other hand, it chews up so much of my day. I'm sure you know what I mean. I'm sure you know. I'm also sure that those listeners out there that have your own business know that sales and marketing are typically a chain of communications. You know, they, they start when someone connects with you. And they go through to the point that they either sign a contract with you, or ultimately they remove themselves from your mailing list because they're not interested. So, in times gone by I know I've spent probably around an hour a day following up with contacts, you know, after events, sending out emails, chasing up contacts that I've made through LinkedIn or other networks. It's time consuming, but as the leader in a business or the sort of person in charge of sales, it's a necessary evil. The truth is though, that there is an easier way of working. And you know, like so many things in life these days, emails can now be automated. No matter what your personal experience is. I've found that it really does save me hours of time each week. The one thing that I would say that I've learned though, is that writing an automated sequence of emails is definitely an art, especially if you want them to come across in an authentic way. There are typically two sorts of emails that I automate these days. So the first group of these is marketing nurtures, like caring for the planet or for a child, the idea of a nurture email is to educate and inform a prospect. So you are helping them to grow from their experiences and moving them ultimately closer to buying. If you want to see a great example of these, why not try downloading the Brandscript template from our own website. You can go to Demodia. com and look for resources in there and find the Brandscript template there. I'll put a link to that in the show notes below. But the nurture emails that you'll get when you fill that in, they guide you through the process of completing the script and they end with a nudge that introduces you to the related services that we provide. The best nurtures tell a genuine personal story, specifically tailored to the lead magnet that they're linked to. Readers learn a skill from them. They shouldn't be overly salesy. Readers should be able to unsubscribe from them if they want. And, you know, if they're written correctly, then readers can hit reply at any time and talk to a real person and follow up with them and get further advice if they want. So that's a nurture email. The second group of emails that I tend to automate are sales emails. These are the emails that I send quite often to cold leads, you know, people that I've never met that I'm trying to engage. For these emails, I use a slightly different formula, and I thought it was worthwhile sharing that with you. If I don't know this person, my goal is really to get them to reply and hopefully to connect with me. And again, telling a story I've found in the best way that's worked for me. The starting point is always the problem. So something that I can tell from their website or something that I know through experience that companies like theirs struggle with. So that's the first email that I send them to introduce things. The second cold email that I send in a sequence typically tends to dive into that problem a little bit further. It looks at the symptoms of the problem and I tend to try and explain what will happen to their business if they don't resolve those symptoms. The third email that I tend to find works well is you then go in and you offer them a solution. You've now set the scenes, you've told them a bit about who you are, you've linked that through to the problem that you're helping them to solve and now they're open to actually listening to a solution. So you can outline your services and how you address the challenge and also of course tell them how they're going to engage with you. If I haven't got a reaction by this point, then I move on to the fourth email. This is typically the time that I use authority from the brand script. So I use my customers to continue the story and, for example, insert a quote or some information from a recent project that we've won. Finally, in the sales sequence, I move into the sales mode. And I asked them to suggest a time that we want to meet. So I found that including a calendar link in my emails rather than just asking them to reply gets a far better click through rate and you ultimately get a better commitment from somebody afterwards if they can select the time. You don't get lost in that email thread. So that's the ways that I use automation to help me out with some of my emails. So sales emails and marketing nurture emails. So I think I've said enough for the moment about some of the theory in here. So let's have a chat with Daniel and see how he's doing with his own campaigns and how we can actually implement some of that stuff using HubSpot. Cool. So, uh, yeah, welcome back, Daniel. How's your week been?

Thank you, Simon. My week, it was great. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. I did a lot of, uh, sports. Good. You know, I'm always happy when I can do a lot of sports.

How did your email sending go? You know, we were talking last week about creating emails. You managed to send anything out yet?

Uh, no, I haven't. I haven't sent anything out yet. I'm a little bit stuck in the personalization process and I wanted to ask you some questions regarding that maybe after recording this episode.

Cool. Yeah, we can pull those in and if they're interesting, well, maybe we can record those and put them into a future episode or a sort of an outtake section behind the scenes. That's not a bad idea. Yeah. Yeah, could do. Cool. So anyway, yeah, today we've been talking a bit more about some of the technical stuff with HubSpot with regards to automation, particularly when it comes to emails. So I know you've been sitting listening in. Any questions on how to use automations and how to tie that into the emails that you're sending?

Yeah, actually, I do have some questions. It confuses me a little bit. There are different types of emails that you can create inside HubSpot. How can I use those email features to be effective? And, uh, which one of those features should I use in which use case?

Yeah, okay. So HubSpot got three different types of emails that you can select. Yes. Uh, first one is regular, second one is automated, and then the third one is what they call a blog or an RSS email in there. Actually, I'll start with the third one, um, because that's probably one that most people will use less. The blog or the RSS one in there, that's basically an automated email that HubSpot will send when someone updates your blog post. So it's like a notification email in there. So there's really not too much that you can do other than change some basic design parts in the blog email. And you can put a section inside there that just includes the summary of an individual blog post. So that's the blog and RSS email. The other two, so regular emails. This is more like a sort of a single send email. So basically with a regular email, you're going to create the email content. You're going to select a list at the end of that. And then you're going to say, send this email to this list at a specific time. So it's literally just a single send email. The other option that you've got in there is an automated email. So with an automated email. What this is going to be doing is it's going to create a template email, basically, which is stored in the back in HubSpot, but not currently sent. But then you can use that automated email within things like workflows, for example, or when somebody fills in a form, you can send an auto response email in there using a workflow. So those are the automated emails that you can create.

Okay, I think I understand. So the regular one is just to do single send outs if you need to send something to a small list of people once. The automated one is an email that you create and reuse for specific triggers, like specific actions that customers take. Uh huh, yeah. But the block RSS one, uh, I didn't quite understand that.

The blog RSS one is, it's a little bit like an automated email. It is an automated email, but it's just not a workflow based email. So when users come to your blog, often you'd see a form in there that says subscribe to blog. What happens then is when you go into the back end and you post your next blog post within HubSpot, if one of your contacts has subscribed to the blog, then this Email will be used to send to them, basically.

Okay, so it's basically also an automated email, but it gets triggered differently than a regular automated email.

It's specifically associated with the blog and it will automatically include the content or a summary of the content for that blog post, exactly.

Okay, alright, I understand. So, talking about these different types of emails. I also came across the automation features for sending out emails in HubSpot and I came across workflows. But I also came across sequences, and I didn't really quite understand what the difference is between those two features.

Actually that's a really good question, I get that frequently. So just to explain the difference then. Workflows. tool that you use for just general automations within HubSpot. So you can use a workflow for sending a sequence of emails or sending a set of emails, not to confuse terms. So for example, a nurture flow, a drip nurture, you might use a workflow for. So when somebody. fills in a form, they might fill in a form to download a workbook, and when they download the workbook, you might want to send them three or four emails as to how to fill in that workbook. So that would be an example of how you'd use a Nurture workflow in there. But the other thing that you can do with workflows is you can automate all sorts of other activities in there. And you can make those workflows much more complicated by using branching. So you can have, if this, then that type statements and options. So in the case earlier, you might set something up so that when somebody downloads the workbook, it triggers that workflow. And then if they have looked at a certain set of your website. Or if they have downloaded the workbook, when that step comes up, you can say, send them an email with the first step. If they haven't yet downloaded that, you might send them a different email that says. Hey, you haven't yet downloaded our workbook, go and download it to get started. Okay. The other thing you can do is automate actions. So, for example, within the workflows, you can use it for what we call lead scoring. We'll go into it some future time. And you could say when somebody fills in this form, look at the properties associated with that person. So the company that came from, the country that they came from, the job role or something like that. And then you could update a score field within HubSpot. So you can use the automation for running rules to do other things, moving people around, adding people to lists, updating CRM data in there. All of that stuff can be done through workflows within HubSpot.

Okay, so you can even trigger Internal processes within your system, like updating data inside

workflows. Absolutely. That's exactly the point. Yeah. Okay. That sounds

quite useful. And what about the sequences? What's the difference

there? So sequences are really designed for sales emails. So they have one very specific use. And the big difference between a sequence and a workflow, a sequence can only send emails and assign tasks to the person that sent those emails. They're very sort of limited as to what they can do. The key thing is as well, when you send an email from HubSpot, That email will go out from one of HubSpot's email servers, which is great, but the trouble is that there's many corporate email servers that look out and say, okay, this email has come from HubSpot, it's been flagged as a marketing email, and it will put it into like the newsletter box, for example, in your Gmail. The thing with a sequence is that sequences integrate directly in with your corporate mail server. So when you send an email through a sequence, if I sent an email, it would come literally from my Demodia email address, and you would see it's from Simon at Demodia. And the mail server knows that this has come directly from the Demodia email server. And also I will be able to actually see, you know, in my outbox, for example, there, I'll be able to see all of the actual emails that come to here. And if somebody hit reply on one of those emails, then it would come directly back into my inbox. So the sequences is a really good way of sending sales type emails. And the use case I use frequently is when I'm doing a follow up, for example, after an event or after I've met somebody. I might send them an email to say, you know, thanks very much for meeting us at the trade show. And sometimes people will reply straight away and get back to you and you can start a conversation. But very often what will happen is you'll sit there for three or four days and you won't hear anything. So at that point in time, With a sequence, you can automate that next action that then says, you know, we talked about this particular problem while you came to our booth. Have you had any more thoughts about it? And then you can wait a period of time and send the next one in there that sort of says, we've got a case study of a company similar to yours that's done this sort of thing before. How about let's have a chat, whatever it is in there, but they're much more sales emails, basically, and it's about simplifying the life of a salesperson. Okay,

I think I understand the difference. So the main benefit of a sequence is that it sends the email directly from your email server. So it looks like you sent it out. From your email client.

Yeah, exactly. One thing I did forget to mention actually with a workflow. Workflows are triggered based on actions or something that's happening within the CRM. It's completely automated. So as I said earlier, with a sequence, the only way of getting enrolled into a sequence is if I select you. So I have to say, I want to send Daniel an email. I want to send you a sequence basically. And then I go in and I trigger the sequence and I select you and I can then say, I send this email to you. So it's not an automated thing like with workflows. Uh huh.

Okay. So you have to manually. Trigger the sequences yeah per

person exactly that and the other thing is that when you're manually triggering them is that when I send that sequence to you the first thing HubSpot will do is it will show me all of the individual emails that are part of that sequence and basically I can then personalize those emails manually. So it will put in some automated personalization. I can include that in the templates, but then I can go through and say at this trade show, we talked about this so I can type in very specific stuff that's directly related to conversations that you and I have had or to things that I've learned about your company in there before those emails get sent out. Okay,

so sequences are not a good way to send out to a lot of people or a big list of people, but If you have to send sales stuff to an individual.

Yeah, if you're gonna send stuff to an individual, that's the way to do it precisely, yeah.

Alright, that answers, uh, most of my questions

here. Good. Thank you very much then, Daniel, and catch up again next week. Thank

you, Simon. I hope you have a great week.

Thanks as always, Daniel, for joining me. It's great to have you around. And of course, listeners, if you have any questions about implementing anything that we've discussed on these podcasts, then feel free to send them through to either myself or Daniel. We're both on LinkedIn, or you can reach us through the website. There's a contact form on there, so just fill that in. Say you've listened to the podcast, you can ask your question, and we'll answer them in a future episode. One of the most important things to take away, I think, from Daniel's questions, It was the difference between sequences and workflows in HubSpots. That's, as I mentioned, a question that comes up so frequently, people are very confused about that. So as a reminder, sequences typically tend to be used for sales conversations. So they're when you just want to send a chain of emails and you want them to be personalised. You know, you want to be able to change each one of those template emails to base it around the person that you're sending it to. On the other hand, workflows have far more broad applications. So you can use those for sending bulk emails, of course. Uh, and you can use visitor activity or other things to trigger those emails and to route those emails. But the other thing that they can do is automate changes to data and other things within your system. So workflows really are, and you should think of them much more like a sort of a process automation engine that's really there to help you automate other backend sales and marketing processes. So if you're having problems creating or setting up your sales emails or workflow automations. Then of course you can hire a member of the Authentic Engagement team. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire an expert who will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your marketing and give you an easy way to grow your business. So we're at the point in the show again where I want to give you a set of concrete actions that you can take away to help you improve your own marketing and to drive business through your sales pipeline. Today I'd like to do something that will really benefit your business. It's the thing that will make the most difference to your early success, I guarantee you. What I want you to do, is I want you to write me a sales sequence. If you're using HubSpot, you can set this up as a sequence of emails. If not, you can draft the emails in a Word document or a Google Doc or something like that, ready to send out. So here's what I want you to put into those emails. For email one, I want you to introduce yourself, and I want you to tell me about the problem that I, I'm gonna play your hero, have, and I want you to tell me how you can help me to solve that. Doesn't have to be a long email, doesn't have to be a detailed explanation of your solution. We're going to come on to that in a bit. In the second email, I want you to elaborate on that problem. I want you to dig into it and explain to me the symptoms that I see within my business. So what pains do I feel? And I want you to tell me where they're going to lead if I don't do something about them. In email three, you're going to introduce me to your solution. So this is the time now that you can dive in to how you do what you do, whether that be a service or a product. You can tell me how you're going to solve that problem for me. So don't forget at the end of this, tell me how I can engage with you. Tell me to reply. Tell me about a form on your website. And if I'm ready, then I can go through to that. But don't be overly pushy at this point. For email four. We're going to use some authority. So in email four, I want you to talk about a customer. Use a quote from there. Talk about a customer testimonial or tell me something about a similar project that you've done before for a related company. This is the point where you need to start to show me as your customer what success looks like and how my life is going to look like once I've actually engaged with you. So we're moving on a bit to email five. This is optional but I found it to be pretty useful, particularly if the people haven't yet contacted you or replied. This is your opportunity now to address an objection. So often when you're going through and you're talking to people People as part of a sales cycle. You'll hear the same things coming back over and over again. You know, your company is the wrong size for our company. This is the wrong product for our markets. Uh, you know, you've not got experience in our industry. Your prices are too expensive, whatever they happen to be. Put those things down. Whatever you commonly hear, address those up front, and I guarantee you that your customers will see you as more honest and authentic. Then in your last email, I want you to go for the sales pitch. This is really where we're going to get into the sales side of things, and you're going to use that three step plan that we've discussed in earlier episodes to explain how to engage with you, what will happen when they do, and what the outcome is that they can expect once they've worked with you. So I know there's a lot of work in there. It's more effort than I typically tend to ask you to do for these particular sections, but once you get this right, that's when you're going to start to see interest in your business increasing and the money start to roll in. What I really don't want to see at this point in time is a chain of hard sell emails pushing me to book a meeting from the very first instance. You know, I don't care if your sales rep is in my area. I get those things so often through LinkedIn or email and I just hit delete. Delete. And if you don't get a mail back straight away, then don't just send a follow up saying, it seems like you missed my earlier message. I'll try again. No, I didn't miss your earlier message. I just don't care about it enough to reply. You didn't give me enough of a reason to reply. So think about those things. There's quite a bit of work there, but once you get this right, that's when you're going to start seeing interest increasing and the money start rolling in. Once you've done that, send me your documents or add me to your email sequence and I'll give you my honest feedback. And I promise that I will give you ideas to improve your communication. Just send them through to me at simon at domodia. com Typically, I get around 5 or 6 people a week that send me examples through to review. So the one thing I will ask is that if I take a few days to get back to you, I haven't forgotten you. That's all for today's episode of the authentic marketing podcast. Thanks as always for listening and don't forget to bookmark podcast and follow us on LinkedIn. I love to hear what you want to know and how I'm helping your business succeed. See you next time.