Many businesses need competent tools to help them capture leads and follow up with them in a timely manner. These tools can be hard to use and cost a small fortune. Thankfully, HubSpot now has tools that give anyone the ability to generate leads and automate the follow-up process.
Here’s the best part, these tools are 100% FREE! In the video below, I’ll show you how to get started using them in less than 15 mins.
Table of Contents
Video Transcript:
All right, so some of you may know, HubSpot has a pretty awesome all-in-one marketing, business suite nowadays. It’s CRM, it has marketing tools, sales tools, customer service tools, and more. There’s a lot of things that HubSpot can do. The great thing that HubSpot has been able to do over the years is to develop a lot of free tools that help businesses grow no matter how big or how small and also no matter what budget you’re on, because honestly, you can’t beat free.
Get Started for Free
To get started with HubSpot for free, all you need to do is go to hubspot.com and click Free. As you can see, there’s a couple of different options and you don’t have to do a demo or any of that stuff. You can get started. Now, marketing hub, sales hub, those cost some money, service hub cost some money, but CRM is free. The cool thing about CRM is it’s not just CRM. There are also free marketing tools and sales tools with it. So we’ll click that right now.
I have a HubSpot account, so I don’t need to create a new one, but all you need to do is fill out this information. You don’t have to have a credit card and once you’re done, you can start to install it on your site. After you get started with HubSpot, there’s a number of ways to set it up. They will always give you this checklist, stuff that you need to do. But for me, we don’t really need to set all this up right now. Some of these have to do with sales, which is customized. You can do deal stages, importing your contacts, any of that information you have, you can do that as well. Connecting your email tools to this, which we will start using some of the emails, and then inviting users. I don’t really need you to invite anybody, so we’re good to go there.
Connecting your email box allows you to actually email people straight within HubSpot, which is pretty cool, especially if you’re using it for your CRM, your sales tools like we do. But again, this video is really about leveraging some of the automation tools available with HubSpot free and more importantly, how do we build what they call lead flow, but really it’s a pop-up.
Leverage the Automation Tools
All right, so let’s take a look. The first thing we’re going to have to do is make sure that we install the HubSpot tracking on our site. There are a couple of ways to do that. Probably the easiest way, if you’re on a WordPress site like this template site that we use just for testing purposes and doing these kind of videos, is go over to WordPress and go to your plugins, add a new plugin, and type in HubSpot. There are a couple of different plugins. The one that you want to pick is this one right here, HubSpot-CRM. Click Install Now and activate. Once this is activated, it’s going to have you connect yourself to HubSpot right here, so you need to choose your account and check that account and then just connect with it.
As you can see, I’ve got quite a few HubSpot accounts, but yeah, now from in here, this is going to allow you to use a lot of the tools right within your WordPress site, so you don’t have to always go back to HubSpot.
HubSpot’s a great tool, great CRM. We have a lot of videos that we’ve done on HubSpot. We’re going to continue to do more. So like I said, we’re not going to go into those right now. We’re going to be talking about turning our visitors into leads.
Create a Form
I think this is a thing that a number of businesses really want to do and don’t know how. So right from in here, from your WordPress site, you can click Start Now. It’s going to walk you through. I can create a form, I can collect information from non-HubSpot forms, so let’s say I already have a form on this site, but it’s not HubSpot, HubSpot will pull that information in for you. I can even set up live chat. This is something that a lot of people want to do. Now, the thing with live chat is if you’re going to do it, make sure you make it very human and connect with people and otherwise it can be kind of frustrating.
But we’re going to create a form. This is going to give us a couple of options. We have a regular form we can just put it on our website, but today we want to talk about pop-up forms. A pop-up form is something like this. Kind of funky here with the way the screen’s popping up, but there we go. Did you see that? That subscribe right now for updates. I guess the formatting gets weird inside of WordPress sometimes. We’re going to click Next.
When you’re creating a pop-up form, the most important part is the ask. What are you asking people to do? You can ask for people to subscribe for email updates. You can say, “Hey, check out our free ebook,” but it has to be worth the value and you’ve got to make sure that the offer you’re giving them is something that they’re going to see as valuable enough to give you some of their information. You can add an image here. You can say sign up for email updates. I would like to typically say, “Download our free guide,” and then in the body you would want to talk about why they should download. “In this guide, we will give you awesome insights into growing your business. Get access.” Take some time to customize it and make sure that it makes sense. You can also rebrand these with your colors. This is really cool, because it allows you to make it look like your website. Now with the free version, you are going to get this HubSpot branding here. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, just know that will happen.
Offer Something With the Email
Now if you have a guide, it’s always nice to have an image that you can use. It will show up on the side, but if you don’t have one yet, that’s fine as well. Once you’re done, make sure that this goes to a form step, because you don’t want them to download it just yet, if you want to collect some information. Then we’re going to hit Next. On this right here, I would put their email. This is a simple guide, because, I’m giving them a little bit of value asking for a little bit of information instead of asking for a whole lot. Again, I would put some text in the form body, something like, “Claim your free guide today.” I’m being very vague, because I obviously don’t have a guide to give them on this.
Make it compelling. Right now, I noticed that I had way too many exclamation points. That can be annoying and also cause people to go, “Why do they have so many exclamation points?” You can do a couple different things from here. Put your form text in. If you are in an area where you need to really worry about GDPR, this is something that’s probably coming more to the United States as well, you could always add in your GDPR consent checkbox, your language, also the level of lead that they’re going to be. If you’re thinking, okay, lead subscriber, these are the ones that you can do here in HubSpot. You can also add a RECAPTCHA.
That way you don’t get a bunch of spam. The next step, as you can see it’s walking us through there. You can have a thank you for your submission. Maybe you want to add a button that says, “Download it here,” and this is where you’re going to need to have a URL for your actual guide itself, or you can do a file download. Maybe you have a file here in your HubSpot account where you can add files and you can link it there so they can just download it.
Let’s say I’m going to use one of our older case studies for this example. I can take my file and I can drop it right in here. Now I can connect that file, insert, and now when somebody clicks this button, they’re going to download this case study. Right there, I have a call-out form with a popup and they can download it, but we’re not done yet. Now that you’ve given them the download, one of the great things to do is follow up with the visitors and make sure that maybe they understood the content and see if they wanted to have a further conversation with you. In HubSpot free, you can now create follow-up emails. All you do is click follow-up email and now we can write them an email.
Send a Follow Up Email
I can put in my subject line say, “Hey there.” So now I’ve got my first email written. As you notice, I can’t save it just yet. The reason why I can’t save it is that I have not added an email footer. This is critical for HubSpot as well as other marketing automation tools, because you need to be able to verify that you’re not spamming people. Click this, and it’s going to open up this form here for you. 234 Main Street. Fill out your real information, obviously, because you want to be a real human being. Once you have a footer, now you have met the requirements, and you have an address people can contact you at in case they want to be removed. You have an email ready to go and we’ll hit Save.
Now with this tool, I can only do one follow-up email. If I want to do a three-sequence email, that’s when you have to upgrade, but at this point, what we’ve done is we’ve done a call out box, we’ve added a form to it, we’ve created a thank you page and we’ve done a follow-up email right within our WordPress site, and this is all using HubSpot. We haven’t even had to leave our website.
Where Does Pop-up Go on Website?
Now we go to our next page and this is going to tell us where do we want this to show this. We can show this when the URL is all pages and we can add some different rules, maybe an exclusion rule, don’t hide the pop up on this specific page. Or I could say only this page.
Now I can say visitor information and behavior. Select segment user, so I can actually say if it’s on a certain country, if they’ve done something specific, so I can break this down and decide how I want to show it and which types of visitors I want to show it to. It allows us to segment pretty deeply, and then I can say, when does it trigger? I can do it on half a page scroll, I can do it on exit intent, or I can do it after a certain amount of time. Maybe you’ve been on a site where maybe five, 10 seconds in, a pop-up shows up. I like to use exit intent because this is if somebody on our website, maybe they are like, “Ah, I don’t know, maybe I’ll go somewhere else,” and they go to leave. Well, this can pop up and say, “Hey, before you leave, we have something free for you.” That’s really what I like to do.
Next, we go to our options. We can turn them on, we can turn them off, we can dismiss. Let’s say if someone has turned it off, I can dismiss it for a certain amount of time. I like to do one day just in case, and now we can preview. That’s how it’s going to look there. Boom. I’ve got my consent there. I want the free guide, they give me the email, we’re good to go. Now I hit Publish. Set it live.
All right, so in about 15 minutes, we’ve signed up for HubSpot free. We’ve installed it on our site, we’ve created our first lead gen pop-up and a follow-up email, and now we can collect leads and send an email to them to make sure that they are liking the content we’re sending. Let’s take a look to see what it looks like. Here’s the website. Boom. I went to leave it, it did the exit intent, get access. It’s going to go through everything that we did right there. I can put here in my email in here. Yes, I’m cool. I want this free guide. Here’s my guide. Now let me download it, and in just a little bit, I’m pretty sure I’m going to get an email from myself asking me how I liked the guide I just put on this website.
I hope you found this workshop helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. This was allowing us to leverage HubSpot free to start doing lead generation and some basic automation on our websites. If you’ve got any questions, comment below, and until next time, Happy Marketing.
