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Read this article to learn more about SMS-based solutions, and more importantly, how this can work in tandem with HubSpot.
Now, up until now, HubSpot and SMS have been quite disparate in terms of how the two channels can interact. However, in recent days at the time of recording this video, HubSpot actually released their native WhatsApp integration in addition to their improvements for CMS for HubSpot.
So how does this work for SMS? So when you want to send messages from a mobile carrier outside of platforms such as WhatsApp. If we jump into HubSpot and within the ecosystem, you have a variety of different providers that can provide SMS out of the box - each of which comes with its different pricing models.
The two main players that we can recommend here at Fuelius are Sakari SMS and Message Media. This kind of integration charges you for the usage of the SMS, both going out and coming back into your account. Now, in terms of how these come together and how these work, let's jump into the actual inner workings of HubSpot.
So as you can see, when you are on a contact record in HubSpot, you've got all the standard stuff that you may have in terms of basically the different information. You also have your timeline activities, and the first thing that you will notice is you have the ability to see all the SMS that have been not only sent but also received from that contact in the CRM, meaning you have got full end-to-end visibility on when and where you are interacting with your prospects.
As you can see, you can see the content of the message, any links, as well as the phone number it went to, which convolutes and works in tandem with the phone number you store on the actual CRM record. At the top you can filter this activity in and out, meaning that you can create a timeline that is needed for you.
So we can look at how our emails are going out and how often we're sending a cadence of SMS. So again, you're not getting crosswires when it comes to duplicate messaging, and you know when these emails and SMSs are going out. As you can see in this example, you may want to set up a workflow to ask for feedback, which may go out via an email, and then a few minutes later if we have a phone number we can actually send that out via Sakari SMS automatically.
So you have all the visibility on the timeline. But on the right-hand side, what you also have the ability to do is actually send native SMS from your connected Sakari account all within HubSpot. So we could put, this is a demonstration message, press send and what that will then do, you can see here it is added the SMS to the actual timeline at the time of sending, and that came natively from the actual system as well.
You can also see historic ones, so essentially you can do the SMS both on a one-to-one base level and also on a one-to-many if you choose to automate that further.
How this can be elevated on the topic of automation is this can be used in conjunction with the Marketing or Sales Hub. If you were to go down the route of a sales hub, what you can actually do is in your pipeline, where you would normally build, generally how the pipeline looks and customise in the stages, if you go to edit your actual pipeline, under automate, you have newfound abilities to actually use in these automation strings.
So if we add and press see more, if we scroll down you will see by connecting an SMS platform through the ecosystem, we can now send SMSs when deals reach certain stages. You could pick a stage, so for example, when a deal goes into shipped, we may want to send an SMS to say ‘Your order is on its way’. So we could actually go into Choose Action select, send SMS and we can actually choose who it's coming from, whether it's an alphanumeric sender, such as a client name, such as Fuelius. Also, these carriers or SMS providers can provide you with a number that is completely separate from what you may already be using. So you have a variety of options at your disposal.
You can choose who that comes from, so the actual name as well as your opt-out suffix if you wanted to be GDPR compliant, and you can say ‘Your order has been shipped’. Similar to workflows you can also inter-weave tokens within that so you can put the actual name of the deal ‘your order “name” has been shipped'.
You can also input media URLs in certain geographic locations such as the US, if we press save you can see we've just added an SMS action to that stage, and this was all done through the ecosystem. We can obviously see how this ties together in terms of how the contact record can now have SMS, how we can send it one-to-one, and how we can also trigger that based on opportunity movement.
But for those marketing teams out there, you can also use it in your marketing work stream as well. So when you're creating a workflow, you can do what you always do, you could, for example, do a contact, a company, a deal-based workflow, or even tickets, and you can choose any of the different workflows.
So for example, if you're promoting a webinar and you want to put SMS into that, you could maybe fixate on a specific date, so a fixed date workflow, or we could do it on a trigger. So we could say next and we have a lot more control over how we build our automation. We could say when someone fills in a form, we then might want to send an email saying, ‘Welcome to our database’ and what we then may want to do is say if the contact phone number is known, press applies - press save. We can then choose to scroll down and send an SMS from our SMS integration provider so you can select ultimately what phone number that's coming from, or what phone number it's going to.
So we could put the contact's phone number in, the message if it's transactional or marketing. You could add more media, and as you can see, we've now set an SMS into a workflow, meaning that you can use this kind of SMS-based integration, whether it's Sakari or Message Media, they all work in a similar way. However, the pricing structure is slightly different depending on your use case. It allows you to really bring in a mobile-first approach to how you approach your sales and marketing alignment. Everything is fully able to be reported on, meaning that whenever you send an SMS out of the system, it will flow into contact fields.
You will be able to see essentially at any point in time if we go into the actual properties for this contact. You can see here that we have the Sakari SMS integration with all the message fields that you have, so you can see where it was sent, what the message sent body was and when it was sent, what the price was to send that SMS and ultimately where it came from. These fields can then be used in custom reports and added to dashboards, so you can monitor your usage of SMS on an ongoing basis, either as a sales or a marketing function.
And that's pretty much everything for today. I just wanted to show you more about how SMS can be incorporated into your HubSpot instance and how more importantly you can take that leap into a mobile-first yet integrated world.
If you want to support or advice on how to bring SMS tools into your business via HubSpot speak to our team today - Book a call. We are a HubSpot Elite Partner Agency that specialises in all things HubSpot.