Full Service Inbound Marketing Agency - DKKMA

The 4 Stages of a Successful Inbound Marketing Campaign

Sat, 09 May 2015 12:30:00 +0430

Today we’ll have a closer look at the 4 stages of a successful inbound marketing campaign and how top performers such as Salesforce, Evernote and 37Signals (Basecamp) execute them. You will not only learn what inbound marketing is all about but also how to either improve your existing campaign or get started in the first place.

Let’s get you started:

1. Attract New Leads

TURN STRANGERS INTO VISITORS

It’s no secret - If your company is able to generate more relevant leads, you generate more business and increase your revenue. Your goal should be to generate as many relevant leads as possible.

What are relevant leads? Consumers or companies that are most likely to purchase your product.

1.1 Create A Great Website

Your website is the most important tool when it comes to lead generation.

Make your website as easy to navigate as possible
Place your most important services on the front-page
Avoid going into too much detail on the first page

Evernote did an incredible job at simplifying their homepage. All key elements are there:

A quick introduction (visual, simple, easy to understand)
A sign-up / download button to obtain the product
Pricing information (I find this to be absolutely critical for most SAAS vendors)

1.2 Start Blogging

A great website should be complemented with a blog, ideally on the same domain (yourbusiness.com/blog). Here you can publish relevant, interesting content that is worth sharing.

Publish content worth sharing
Focus on a specific topic / area
Invite guest writers
Try not to sell. Nobody likes to be sold to.
Use smart call to action

Groove does a great job at not talking about themselves. If they do, you can learn something from it anyway - Totally worth reading, especially if you run or plan to run your own startup: Visit the Groove Blog.

1.3 Keep Keywords In Mind

Use keywords and phrases that your prospects use to find you or a close competitor on Google. Don’t hesitate to ask your customers how they found you and listen carefully what sort of problems they are looking to solve - there’s something to write about right there!

1.3.1 Write For People

SEO can play an important role in your content creation strategy but at the end of the day, the stuff you publish will be read and shared by real people. Nobody likes to share content that’s written for a search engine.

1.4 Publish Your Content

Share your content to maximize reach. Concentrate on 1-2 social networks where your prospects spend most of their time. Do not try to do everything, everywhere. It’s only natural that one network will work better for you than another.

1.4.1 Be Personal

Salesforce sells enterprise grade CRM software subscriptions. Still, they don’t fail to give their product a personal touch. After all, they are selling to people and people want to talk and interact with people - not with companies.

Their LinkedIn page does a great job at adding that personal touch.

1.4.2 Schedule for Highest Impact

If you want to reach a larger audience, you need to schedule your posts. We’ve recently written about How To Schedule Posts on Twitter for Maximum Impact.

2. Convert Leads

TURN VISITORS INTO LEADS

Now that people are on your website, you need to prompt them to take action. Sure, you can wait for them to get in touch with you but a pro-active approach has proven to be much more effective at converting visitors into leads.

Here’s what you need:

2.1 Call to Action

Calls to action are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action. Make them stand out - do not hesitate to experiment with the design, wording or placement.

It’s important that you design your call to action around your visitors needs. Here’s how Evernote differentiates between a personal account and one designed around business needs:

Headline: 8 Tips to Master a More Paperless Life With Evernote

Headline: Keep Your Small Business Organized With Evernote

2.2 Landing Pages

When a visitor clicks on a call to action button or link, they should be taken to a landing page. Your landing page should focus on a single product or service - your goal is, to collect your visitor’s details.

37Signals does a great job on the landing page for Basecamp. All key elements are there:

Social-proof: “Just last week, 4,868 companies signed up for Basecamp”
Pricing: “Prices start at just $20/month”
Reassurance: “60-day unlimited-use free trial”
A really short form to sign-up (+ no credit card required)

2.3 Forms

In order for visitors to become leads, they must fill out a form and submit their information. Don’t overwhelm them with a long list of questions but keep it simple and collect only what you really need to get the process rolling.

Salesforce recently updated their landing page to feature a social-sign-up. I’ve always found their sign-up form too be to long. This is great way to get people started with Salesforce - faster.

3. Close The Deal

TURN LEADS INTO PAYING CUSTOMERS

If you’re selling a complex product or service, your lead may require additional nurturing before they are ready to pull the trigger - we’ll talk more about lead nurturing and prospecting next week. Skip ahead to 4. Delight Customer.

If you’re a SAAS business or online store, read on.

3.1 Email (DRIP Marketing)

If your lead is not ready to become a customer, a series of useful, educational emails can builds trust and help the lead become ready to buy.

Thank everyone for signing up.

Here’s a great example of an online store in the UK. After your initial sign-up, they send you a thank you note with a few interesting details:

The imply that you will be the first to know about their latest news (Isn’t that great?)
There are over 2000 designers to chose from
The offer free returns with pick-up service (convenient!)

The obvious goal is to get people back online: SHOP WOMAN / SHOP MEN

If you’ve selected a few items but left the site prematurely, you will receive an email reminder. What’s really interesting is, that they not only offer free shipping on the two items you’ve selected previously but they also add some urgency - 2 Days Only. That’s not it - they also re-assure you that they do free global returns. You have nothing to lose.

It’s free shipping and returns for online stores and free trials or a 30 or even 60 day money back guarantee for SAAS businesses.

3.2 CRM

Your CRM plays a very important role on your inbound marketing journey. Here you keep track of all your contacts, past interactions and upcoming events to get in touch with the right person, at the right time.

Tip: Integrate your website and CRM to automatically add leads to your sales funnel.

4. Delight Customer

TURN CUSTOMERS INTO PROMOTERS

Your inbound journey doesn’t end after you’ve closed the deal. After all, a happy customer may not only send more business your way but will also talk about you - to other potential customers.

Want to receive a free, no-obligation, inbound marketing report? Request now.

3 Steps: How To Reach Your Twitter Target Audience At The Right Time

Sat, 02 May 2015 12:30:00 +0430

Let’s face it: Twitter is an incredibly busy network. Every second around 6,000 Tweets are send out to the world. On the busiest day in Twitter history, the number of Tweets totaled 500 million. With that in mind, how do you make sure that your Tweets are seen and reach the maximum number of people?

1. Find Out When Your Followers Are Active

To ensure that you maximize your reach, you need to tweet when most of your followers are active. Here’s how you can find out when to tweet (+ how to automatically apply your ideal schedule to your Buffer account):

Visit followerwonk.com
Enter your Twitter account name
Select ‘analyze their followers’

This chart breaks down the hourly Twitter activity of our followers.

Most of our followers are active between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. (UTC +2); 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. (UTC -4). That’s because the majority of our followers are based in the US.

2. Schedule Your Tweets To Be Most Effective

We decided to tweet 6 times a day. Our schedule works out to be

4.20 p.m. (UTC +2); 10.20 a.m. (UTC +4)
4.42 p.m. (UTC +2); 10.42 a.m. (UTC +4)
5.03 p.m. (UTC +2); 11.03 a.m. (UTC +4)
5.24 p.m. (UTC +2); 11.24 a.m. (UTC +4)
1.03 a.m. (UTC +2); 07.03 p.m. (UTC +4)
1.38 a.m. (UTC +2); 07.38 p.m. (UTC +4)

If you are using Buffer, you can automatically copy your ideal schedule. Simply set the number of times you’d like to tweet per day and press ‘Schedule at Buffer’. If you do not see the button, you will be prompted to sign in with Twitter first.

Pro Tip #1: Don’t Over Automate

A word of caution: Do not post too frequently and only share content you and your audience genuinely cares about. We strongly advise against RSS feeds (automatic posting) unless it’s your own blog’s feed.

Pro Tip #2: Schedule Your Tweet With Twitter

There are a lot of great tools that help you schedule tweets. The two most popular ones are Buffer and Hootsuite. However, if you prefer not to use any third party tools, you can schedule tweets from within Twitter. Here’s how:

Visit ads.twitter.com and look for Creatives > Tweets

Now you can compose and schedule your tweet:

3. Optimize Your Twitter Schedule

It’s important to remember that these times are subject to change. Make sure that you come back regularly to make adjustments. You can keep track of your past performance at analytics.twitter.com.

Pro Tip #3: Find Out When Others Tweet

It’s always a good idea to find out when others in your industry tweet. This is great, especially if you’re looking to reach a similar audience. In this case we have a quick look at HubSpot’s account:

Most of HubSpot’s tweets are sent between 3 p.m. and 1 a.m. (UTC +2) or 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. (UTC -4). Interestingly, the majority of these tweets are directed at individual users. The number of regular tweets stays consistent throughout the day and night. We can only assume that this is because they are aiming to reach a global audience.

Voice out in the comments and let us know what timing works best for you and your business.

The Most Overlooked Element of Inbound Marketing [The Buyer Persona]

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 12:30:00 +0430

We’ve all been told about the importance of having great content, but before you start writing one article after another, define your target audience. Who are you actually selling to?

Your Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

HubSpot

The thing is, if you don’t know whom you’re selling to, you’re not only wasting your time but the time of those you approach. Think about it: If you’re the VP of Marketing, you don’t necessarily care about accounting software or automating server deployments (What?).

On the other hand, if you have a clearly defined buyer persona, you can approach the right prospects (segmentation) at the right time, to help them solve their pain points.

Why You Need Buyer Personas

Having a well-defined buyer persona will help you achieve a number of things

Higher conversion rates
Higher margins (You know exactly what they want and how to give it to them)
Clearly map out the individual lifecycle stages

Read on: Why Buyer Personas Can Skyrocket New Customers external

How-To Define Your Buyer Personas

Which demographic do they fit in?
What makes them tick / what would they like to achieve?
What are their frustrations and pain-points?
What will engage them?
When, where and how do they buy?

If you haven’t defined your buyer personas, it’s about time! There are a lot of great resources to help you started but we’ve found that HubSpot really does the best job: You can either define it online or download their free template to help you get started in no time.

Calculate Inbound Marketing Lead Acquisition Cost Savings vs. PPC Advertising

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:30:00 +0430

If you are not living behind the moon, you have probably already heard of inbound marketing and it’s numerous benefits. The reason for it’s recent success is, that buyers simply do not want to be told what to buy but rather venture out themselves to find the most suitable product or service. That’s where inbound marketing shines in comparison to outbound marketing, which is basically all about reaching out and trying to make a sale. You know, cold calls, email blasts, TV ads, PPC.

As such, inbound marketing is often being praised for having a much lower lead acquisition cost compared to traditional outbound marketing such as PPC (pay per click) advertisement. That’s because the core of a successful inbound marketing is the creation of valuable, relevant content that attracts, educated and hopefully converts visitors.

Also, unlike PPC advertisement, your money doesn’t disappear in Google’s growing wallet but much rather becomes an asset in form of content. Once your PPC campaign stops, traffic stops. However, with inbound marketing, traffic will continue to grow and quality content often receives clicks months and even years after it’s been published. How cool is that?

Since we are all businessman, what we really care about are stats - lot’s of them!

Calculation

I’ve taken the time to put together a spreadsheet that will help you calculate and compare the cost to acquire a lead via inbound marketing compared to PPC. Since you probably already have some data from a previous PPC campaign, simply enter your monthly spending and the average number of leads you have been able to acquire.

If you have no data to start with, you can still play around to find out about the worst and best case scenario. In any case, we usually expect the lead acquisition cost to drop by around 50%.

Download

Preview and download the file from Google Docs. Simply go to File > Download As > Microsoft Excel. (You do not need to have a Google Account to download the document.)

Apple Siri Inbound Marketing Content Creation Hack for the Busy Marketer

Sat, 11 Apr 2015 12:30:00 +0430

When it comes to Inbound Marketing, there’s a lot to write about but if you’re like me, you either don’t find the time to sit down and start writing or once you do, your mind goes into hibernation. However, I have recently discovered the perfect productivity hack that got me creating more content in no time. Plus, I don’t spend as much time sitting and thinking and more time walking around, talking. (Who likes to sit at their desk all day?)

How dictation can help you save 50% of your time

Dictation has been around for many years but I’ve never found it to be very useful. There were always a number of problems that kept me from using it. I tried but usually gave up within the day because it turned out to be eating more time than it saved me.

Unreliable recognition. The results were usually garbage
Expensive software that only runs on your desktop
Awkward set-up and speech-practice routines that left me feeling like an idiot
Human supported speech to text, which I simply didn’t want to pay for

Meet my Siri + Evernote Combo

Siri never got much of my attention because in the early days it was just as unreliable as these high-end text recognition packages that they have been selling for years. However, since Apple is gathering millions of voice snippets a day, they ought to become pretty good at what they are doing. Surprisingly Siri has advanced to a point that I’m able to pick up my iPhone, open Evernote and start dictating.

Find out what works best, below this giant screenshot!

Here’s what I found works best:

Take some time to think before you start recording. It helps to do some research and take down some keywords to give you an idea where this is going.
If you feel that the last portion was nonsense, simply continue recording. You can open up Evernote on your desktop later to delete these parts and make the necessary corrections.
Use your iPhone headset or any other, reasonably good headset. This may also work hand-free but I prefer to put the phone in my pocket. (Imagine you’re in front of an audience and they are waiting to hear from you!)
Look for a quiet place and do whatever you want! Sometimes I find that it helps to walk around in the office or even at home. It happens that something hits you in the morning or middle of the night.
Try not to take make long pauses. Siri will assume you’re done and you’ll need to re-activate the service.

I haven’t tested this on Android but I’d imagine that Google’s voice recognition technology has become rather sophisticated over the years. You probably see similar results like I do with Apple’s Siri. If you’re an Android user, let me know how that works for you in the comments.

Here's Why Your Own Real Estate Website Doesn't Have To cost a Fortune

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 12:30:00 +0430

If you are the in real estate business, you know how important it is to get your properties noticed. Great looking images, video material and an established background help with that. Unfortunately your options are often limited:

You have to rely on third party companies to host your properties
You’re paying a lot of money for them to do so
Most of these portals are not very streamlined
They don’t have the features you want
You’re listed along with your biggest competitor
As soon as your listing expires, your company disappears

There is a better option!

It may sound crazy at first but I’m sure you’ve already toyed with the idea of setting up you own property portal / real estate website. Many larger players do just that because they are well aware of the limitation of other solutions. This is especially evident if you’re selling luxury properties. The ‘usual’ portal just can’t transport the image you and your clients are looking for.

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is cost: Let me convince you why your own, niche real estate website may be the best investment you’ve ever made and why it won’t cost nearly as much as you’re probably imagining.

Why you need your own Real Estate Website now

Let’s start with the good stuff: Having your own real estate website comes with a huge number of benefits. I would argue that the most important benefit is, that you’re in a position to establish yourself as a leader in your own niche, with your own branding, your way.

Establish yourself as a leader in your niche (ex. Luxury Properties)
Brand the hell out of it! It’s your website, your rules
Have the features you’ve always wanted: High-resolution images, HD Video, Beautiful Maps
Don’t ever pay another company to host your properties ever again
Make it as easy as possible for a prospect to get in touch with you

Why your own Real Estate Website won’t cost as much as you imagine

Real Estate Website Development

Hiring and dealing with a designer and developer can cost a lot of time and money. While this still holds true, it may surprise you that you will soon start saving money: Rather than developing your portal from scratch, we use a framework called ExpressionEngine. Think of it as the base to get us started: It already comes with the structure to hold and manage your data, enables user management and keep the site secure. The best, neither you nor your agents will ever realize what your website is running on because the experience is 100% customizable to suit your needs.

Real Estate Website Maintenance

Apart from the initial development cost, you’re also thinking about future maintenance. Let me re-assure you, aside from the hosting and basic maintenance that any website requires, you’re basically set. This is because the framework we’re using to develop your real estate website comes with strong commercial support and regular updates. Talking about ExpressionEngine 2.0 which was released in 2009 - by now you would have already received 6 years worth of free updates, just for paying a one-time licensing fee of $299 USD.

Imagine how much it would cost to get a developer to constantly update his own, in-house solution? Much, much more. Not to mention that if that developer disappears, your site is basically history.

5 Reasons for ExpressionEngine

So, why would you go with ExpressionEngine? ExpressionEngine has proven itself as a powerful platform. It’s fast, completely customizable, and secure and comes with commercial support. That means, if ever anything goes wrong and we can’t fix it, EllisLab, the company behind ExpressionEngine, will stand by and help us figure this out.

A powerful platform, able to handle millions of hits a month
A stable base, high security standards and strong vendor support
Save money compared with starting from scratch
Free software updates till the next major update (Version 2.* since 2009)
100% Customizable

You may wonder whether there is a catch. No. Almost everything is possible. Think of subscriptions. Think of HD property videos. Think of beautiful images and image galleries to showcase the properties that you’re looking to sell.

I hope I sparked your curiosity! If yes, please read on. I’m going to answer some of the most common questions we receive:

How long does it take to develop the website?

It depends on your individual requirements but no less than 3 weeks. Here’s how the planning, design and development process looks like:

1. Initial research

We want to know more about your company, your goals and the people you work with. It’s important for us to better understand your customer as to work out the most suitable solution, both in terms of branding and functionality.

2. Mockup

Once we know more about your business and the direction we’re going to take, we will start working on an initial mockup. At every step of the way, we get you input to see whether there’s anything you’d like to change. Only once you’re completely satisfied with the design, we will move on to step 3.

3. Development

At this point of time, we have everything to get started. Give us around 1-2 weeks, depending on the complexity of the before we can showcase the initial prototype.

4. Pre-Launch

Give us another week to make sure everything works 100%. During this time, you will be able to follow the development trough a private URL. You’ll also be able to invite your property agents to try out the new platform to get initial feedback. We will stand by to answer any of your questions and help you make the most of the platform. You’ll be publishing new properties in no time!

5. Launch

If you already have an existing client base, it’s time to get the word out. We will help you kick off a marketing campaign to not only inform existing clients about the new platform but also to excite new, potential clients for your services.

Conclusion

If you want to find out more about having your own, ExpressionEngine based real estate website, we’d be happy to provide you with additional details and an individual quote. Request additional information now

Inbound Marketing How-To: Getting Started in 5 Minutes

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 12:30:00 +0430

If you are a busy person, and I’m sure you are, this how-to will help you get started with Inbound Marketing without spending too much of your valuable time AND money.

Let’s start with the most important question:

What can Inbound Marketing do for you?

Essentially, inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing. Rather than reaching out to your prospects via email, phone or advertisement, you are aiming to get to the point, where prospects reach out to you.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Personalized: Targeted, quality content that answers prospects and customers questions and needs.
Multi-Channel: Reach prospects where they are and want to interact with you.
Timing & Analytics: Publish the right content at the right time and measure the reach (Number of visits, shares)

What does Inbound Marketing look like in action?

There are a total of 4 stages:

1. Attract

Website

Your website is likely the most important tool when it comes to inbound marketing. It’s critical that all content is easy to understand and relevant - try not to go into too much detail on the first page but instead focus on answering the questions that are on your prospects mind.

Blog

Having a great website is not enough. In order to get found by the right prospective customers, you must create educational content that speaks to them and answers their questions.

Keywords / SEO

2. Convert

Call to Action

Calls-to-action are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action. Make them stand out - do not hesitate to experiment with the design, wording or placement.

“Download your free Inbound Marketing Guide”

Landing Pages

When a visitor clicks on a call-to-action button or link, they should be taken to a landing page. Your landing page should focus on a single product or service - your goal is, to collect your visitor’s details.

Forms

3. Close

Email

If your prospect is not ready to become a customer, a series of useful, educational emails can builds trust and help the prospect become ready to buy.

We usually refer to that as drip marketing campaign

Salesforce Pardot: The Basics of Drip Campaigns

CRM

Keep track of all contacts, companies, and deals in your pipeline, and easily get in touch with the right prospects at the right time.

Tip: Integrate your website and CRM to automatically add leads to your sales funnel.

4. Delight

Our inbound journey doesn’t end after you’ve closed the deal. After all, a happy customer may may not only send more business your way but will also talk about you - to other potential prospects.

We will talk more about this in our next article.

Next Step

Now that we know a bit more about inbound marketing, let’s look at what you should do to get started:

1. Research

Have a good look at your existing customer base
- How did they find you?
- Why are they working with you?
Have a look at your website
- Is your content relevant and enticing?
- Do you already have any sort of call-to-action? Do they work?
- Is it easy for a visitor to get in touch with you?
- Does your website work on mobile devices?
Check out your analytics
- Where do your visitors come from?
- Which pages of your website perform the best?
- Where and when do people leave your website? Find out why.

Don’t have analytics software?

For your website, Check out Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. If you are willing to invest a few bucks a month, I’d suggest having a look at the excellent GoSquared (Much easier to use! DKKMA clients get free access!)

If you’d like to find out about your social media stats, Facebook, Twitter and Google+, each have their own, free, built-in analytics tools.

2. Action

Come up with a list of headlines and set a publishing schedule for those. If you’re really busy, start with two posts a month. Alternatively you may hire a copywriter to do that for you.
- It’s important that you stick to your schedule. Inbound Marketing is only effective if you publish regularly.
- It is also important to remember that your content should not focus on selling but educating. Don’t talk too much about yourself.
Create a landing page for your most important product or service and link to it from the product / service page on your website. Keep making small changes every once in a while to see how they affect the conversion rate (number of visitors / number of people that get in touch).
Start using a tool such as Hootsuite to streamline your social media efforts. It’s easy to share or schedule a post and to publish to all networks at once.

If you are just getting started with inbound marketing, you probably don’t have enough data to make an informed decision what channel to focus on. If that’s the case, have a look at where other industries acquire their customers: Is Facebook an effective marketing tool for your business?

Conclusion

This concludes our first post, in a series of how-to’s. Feel free to ask questions in the comments below.

The 20 Largest ExpressionEngine Sites

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 11:30:00 +0330

In over 6 years of developing with and for ExpressionEngine, we’ve found it to be one of the most flexible and powerful CMS systems around. To proof just how powerful ExpressionEngine is, we’ve assembled a list of the 20 largest ExpressionEngine sites, based on their Quantcast rating.

Results

Domain	Company	Quantcast	Alexa	Visits*
~~advertise.thechive.com~~	~~RESIGNATION MEDIA LLC~~	~~145~~	~~1071~~	~~11,177,000~~
visit.today.com events.today.com	Today	205	1146	11,463,000
publicpolicy.verizon.com	Verizon Trademark Services LLC	293	591	19,698,000
democrats.org	DNC Services Corporation	571	34659	599,700
~~www9.toysrus.com~~	~~Geoffrey LLC~~	~~736~~	~~1264~~	~~12,086,000~~
infocus.gettyimages.com	Getty Images Inc	849	1833	6,684,600
mynewsletterbuilder.com	Blue House Works Inc	907	77068	286,700
order.pizzahut.com	Pizza Hut Inc	961	2475	6,018,600
help.verticalresponse.com	VerticalResponse	1055	5336	2,776,600
altpress.com	Alternative Press	1118	19298	1,006,400
fodors.com	Random House LLC	1261	5495	2.257,500
eeorigin.barackobama.com	Organizing for Action	1265	38672	651,800
blog.lenovo.com	Lenovo Group	1494	564	20,576,000
lostlettermen.com	VaynerStudios, LLC	1670	54714	554.275
smilereminder.com		2015	47529	412,766
id.garmin.com ph.garmin.com developer.garmin.com	Garmin Ltd.	2501	1717	9,000,700
saleshub.trendmicro.com	Trend Micro Inc.	2581	6369	2,527,600
~~pb.com~~	~~Pitney Bowes Inc~~	~~2643~~	~~8042~~	~~2,300,000~~
religionnews.com	Religion News LLC	3075	42254	516,600
mediasolutions.lohud.com	Journal News Media Group	3284	25199	771,700

Last update on 20th March 2015; Data collected on 18th March 2015; *Visits in the last 30 days. The number of visits differs from visitors. Visits includes multiple visits from the same individual.

Findings

20 / 20 sites are based in the United States
20 / 20 sites use Google Analytics
17 / 20 sites are running on Apache
12 / 20 use Akamai CDN

With over 20,000,000 visits / month, sites like blog.lenovo.com need to keep up with around 28,000 visits per hour. Can your CMS do that?.

Easily add Incoming Emails to a HubSpot CRM Contact

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 12:30:00 +0330

There are a number of ways to add incoming emails to a HubSpot CRM Contact. Unfortunately none of the available solutions is truly automated (you cannot simply forward all incoming emails).

Let’s have a look at the options:

Filing Options

1. [hubspotID] @ forward.hubspot.com

Must be forwarded from within your email client
Looks for you as the sender
Looks for your contact within the forwarded messages

If the emails do not show up in HubSpot, make sure the forwarded message contains a similar snippet:

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: FROMNAME <from@example.com> Date: Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 2:45 PM Subject: Easily add Incoming Emails to a HubSpot CRM Contact To: TONAME <to@example.com> Cc: CCNAME <cc@example>

This snippet is missing if you have your email server / Gmail simply forward the email to HubSpot.

2. [hubspotID] @ bcc.hubspot.com

Only works as BCC address
Looks for you as the sender
Looks for your contact as the recipient

3. Sidekick by HubSpot

Sidekick comes with a number of plugins that allow you to log emails from within the following clients:

Gmail / Google Apps
Microsoft Outlook
Mac OS X Mail.app

4. General [has not been implemented]

Automatically forward some / all incoming email
Looks for you as the recipient
Looks for your contact as the sender

Once HubSpot implements a general forwarding email address, we will be able to automatically file all incoming emails.

Set-Up forwarding in Google Apps

Note: Until HubSpot implements Option 4, we cannot take advantage of this feature.

Tip for Google Apps users: Since you cannot actually verify the HubSpot address, you need to add the email address trough the Google Admin console.

Open your Google Admin Console
Navigate to Users > USERNAME > Account > Email Routing
‘Add another destination’
Enter the desired email as ‘Destination’
Leave ‘Change SMTP envelope’ checked
Save Changes

Gmail / Google Apps Email Sync

HubSpot is apparently also working on another treat for us:

[…] the ability to connect directly to your gmail inbox to pull messages and replies for the timeline.

We will update this article periodically.

Connect Wufoo with HubSpot CRM (Create Contact)

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 11:30:00 +0330

Manual data entry is not only time-consuming but really boring! Luckily we have tools such as Zapier to help us connect cloud apps that would have otherwise been ‘incompatible’.

Anyways, let’s get started! Here’s what you need:

Requirements:

Wufoo Account
Zapier Account*
HubSpot CRM Account
Around 10 minutes of your valuable time

*HubSpot is a premium connection. You will require a Zapier subscription.

Get started:

First log in to your Zapier account and create a ‘New Zap’. If you do not have a Zapier account, you can sign-up for a trial here Sign-Up for Zapier (+ Receive 100 extra tasks per month).

Log into your Zapier account and create a New Zap

1. Choose a trigger and action

Wufoo “New Entry” - the trigger
HubSpot “Create or Update Contact” - the action

2. Select Wufoo Account

Select your Wufoo Account

3. Select HubSpot account

Enter your Hub ID “000000” (Usually 6 digits)

4. Filter Wufoo triggers

Only trigger a “New Entry” from Wufoo when…

Choose the form you’d like to watch for new entries.

Optional: Add filters based on other Wufoo fields to only allow some items: Here you could filter out all submissions that do not contain a message.

5. Match up Wufoo Entry to HubSpot

Match all Wufoo fields. Example:

Email
First Name
Last Name
Company Name
Website
Message to Notes (You can add always multiple values: [Message] send via [PageURL])

Optional: Set the Lifecycle Stage to ‘lead’.

6. Test this Zap

Here you can test the ‘Zap’ you’ve just created. Note: Your Wufoo form should contain at least one entry.

7. Name and turn this Zap on

Give your ‘Zap’ a meaningful name and turn it on!

This Zap is instant. It will trigger immediately when we receive a new Wufoo Entry.

All Done!

If everything has been set-up correctly, the next submission trough your contact form should automatically create a new contact in your HubSpot CRM account.

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Easily add Incoming Emails to a HubSpot CRM Contact

Filing Options

1. [hubspotID] @ forward.hubspot.com

2. [hubspotID] @ bcc.hubspot.com

3. Sidekick by HubSpot