The ONE biggest mistake you can make in marketing automation
… And it’s a really easy mistake to make. Because our CRMs aren’t perfect.
Beware of accidentally double, triple, quadruple enrolling contacts in multiple workflows.
It’s a quick way to create an awkward embarrassing moment for your brand and ruin the customer journey experience.
How does it happen and how do we prevent it?
Managing Duplicate Contacts
I was astounded by the mass numbers of duplicate contacts the company I work for had. Thousands. Continually. People who filled out multiple forms, sometimes with the same email (a true duplication) and some with the same name but an alternative email (lets keep in mind some people will have multiple email addresses syncing into the same inbox, as I do). On Hubspot, we had to manually review and merge every single duplicate, to choose which email we’d like to make their primary. It was monotonous, but worth it, because for example we (a school), we had very different workflows, processes, and pricing for our international students, so if they also accidentally got domestic student emails, it would make for a very confusing user experience.
Enrollment & Unenrollment Rules
This is the part that’s usually all on us, in our control not the CRM/automation systems job. At the start of every workflow, we need to decide who gets enrolled that that email workflow based on things like a list you’ve created, an action they’ve taken, a date range, what city they’re from, what product they have, whatever. I know you know this part. When it comes to enrollment, the more conditions the better, don’t generalize with “all leads with original source Facebook + became a lead this quarter.” I also made the mistake of paying much more attention to the enrollment rules and less on my unenrollment criteria, so try and balance your attention on both (and suppression lists). Find Hubspot specific advice on this here.
I personally also noticed a flaw in the systems we use (Salesforce + Hubspot)— in the delayed sync between Salesforce and Hubspot, I believe Hubspot enrolled contacts in a workflow IMMEDIATELY, as in, before they had a chance to sync with Salesforce. If there was a short delay, the contact info would have synced with Salesforce in such a way that said contacts were not enrolled or unenrolled. In hopes of fixing this, I made sure this workflow had a 2 day delay in sending the first email, rather than sending it immediately, to give Salesforce and Hubspot a chance to sync the contact data first, then decide if they were enrolled or unenrolled. Check on this if you use multiple CRMs, and this is an area where I always reach out to my Account Manager / Tech team to double check my work, and double check how our CRMs are syncing.
The “remove from other workflows” button
When I was first starting out with automation on Hubspot, I found this very important button to be quite hidden in the workflow settings, AND frustratingly defaulted to “Do not remove them from other workflows.”
Double checking, spot checking, peer reviews
In the complex world of automation and big webs of workflows intersecting with one another, no matter how diligent I feel, I always ask someone to double check for me. Even if it’s someone outside the marketing team. In fact, making our sales team aware of the possibility of contacts being in multiple workflows helped me identify a lot faster when issues were happening, the staff on the frontlines noticed it and reported it to me. And going deeper than checking my enrollment, unenrollment, suppression, and duplicates, I take it one step further and spot check random individual new contacts in that first week of knowing them, to ensure they’re receiving the right cadence of information between myself (marketing) and sales emails and calls.
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This frustrating automation mistake happens sometimes, no matter what we do, I believe (a) we can’t trust our tech 100% of the time, and (b) sometimes a user really has done all the actions and criteria to meet the conditions of multiple workflows. All we can do is fix it quick and, if it fits your brand, get playful with it, make fun of yourself in an apology email to a customer list, or even have your sales team call it out the next time they’re on the phone with that customer, they might appreciate that you noticed, and that you’re human.
