There are many tools available now to help businesses grow their sales. One of the most powerful categories of tools is sales and marketing automation. As one of the originators of this technique, HubSpot is a leader in their field. Implementing their software with your e-commerce store will help you reach your revenue goals faster. HubSpot to WooCommerce is a popular integration. In this post, we'll talk about what sales and marketing automation is and how a HubSpot integration for WooCommerce will benefit your business.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a tool that uses powerful algorithms and machine learning to automate large portions of your sales, marketing, and customer service operations. In doing so, it frees up the staff in those departments to spend more time delivering excellent service to your customers, improves your bottom line, and makes your whole operation run more efficiently. HubSpot currently has several different products, all of which integrate nicely with one another to provide a complete solution for your business automation needs. Let's take a look at them.

HubSpot CRM

This is HubSpot's base offering. It’s available for free so you can see for yourself how HubSpot's powerful tools can supercharge your business success without having to spend any money. HubSpot CRM (customer relationship management) will import all of your customer data and provide useful tools for engaging with those customers to maximize sales. It also has tools and reporting features that everyone in your company will find useful, from marketers to customer service reps, all the way up to management. If any of those teams need more features, HubSpot has other free offerings and paid upgrades that can extend its capabilities.

Marketing Hub

HubSpot's Marketing Hub brings additional features that will help your marketing team bring in, qualify, and nurture more leads so your sales team has an easier job closing sales. Some major features of Marketing Hub include:

• Use built-in tools to build landing pages and email templates with designs that are proven to convert and use A/B testing to see which ones work best for your business.
• Get SEO suggestions that keep up with changes in search engine algorithms, use social media tools to promote web pages, and use proven call-to-action designs to drive even more leads.
• Personalize your messaging based on user location, source of traffic, device used, buyer personas, and more.
• Use machine learning to tailor the sales funnel for each specific lead. The algorithms use big data to know when to email leads and which follow-up will work best.

Sales Hub

After Marketing Hub helps get qualified leads to the sales team, it's time to close the sale. That's where Sales Hub comes in with some nice features that take advantage of the data that HubSpot collects to automate your sales team's efforts.

• Personalize follow-up emails based on data gathered about your customers and deliver them automatically at the perfect time to make a sale.
• Create email templates, measure their performance, and share the best-performing ones with the rest of the team.
• Follow up promptly by getting notifications when prospects open attachments, read emails, or click on leads.
• Use live chat to talk with leads.

Service Hub

After you turn a lead into a sale, you need to make sure that the customer remains happy with the product you provided. Competition is fierce and customer standards are high now. Service Hub helps you provide your customers with the type of customer support that will turn them into advocates for your company.

• Merge all communications channels, from email to social media messages, into a single universal inbox so the entire picture of a customer's history is available at once.
• A complete help desk with automation and reporting tools that make it easy to convert messages from your inbox into support tickets.
• Easily organize and track support tickets after they've been created.
• Powerful knowledge-base tools and chatbots help your customers get answers to problems instantly without having to go through human support channels.
• Customer feedback tools for gathering customer satisfaction and net promoter score data.

What is WooCommerce?

While HubSpot is a great tool for increasing sales and improving every aspect of your customer journey, it doesn’t provide the actual store that’s required to facilitate the journey. That is where e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce come in. Built on WordPress using open-source components, WooCommerce is a full-featured e-commerce solution. Like most options in its class, WooCommerce has four main sets of features for building out your online store:

1. The store: You can't have an online store without a website. WooCommerce provides the tools and templates you need to turn your WordPress site into a full-fledged e-commerce store.
2. Payments: Taking payments is tricky. There is not only the matter of connecting with all the different payment processors, but there are also laws that must be obeyed. WooCommerce handles all of that for you, so you can focus on selling your products.
3. Marketing: E-commerce platforms generally don't provide the level of marketing support that a product like HubSpot does, but they do provide some store-related features such as support coupon codes, gifts, and reward points.
4. Shipping: WooCommerce will allow you to automatically print shipping labels for your orders through USPS. This helps to speed up your fulfillment process.

How Does Integration Work?

HubSpot integration into WooCommerce can be as simple as installing a plugin that will allow the two pieces of software to communicate. For many businesses, this will be enough. There are several plugins available to make the connection and a good IT partner, like Eniture Technology, will help you pick the one that suits your needs the most.

Sometimes, though, your needs are more specific than what any off-the-shelf plugin would allow for. In these instances, you can have custom integrations programmed that will handle the unique needs that your business may have. Although this option is more expensive upfront, it will pay for itself if it allows HubSpot to better work its magic for your business.

What Benefits Does Integration Provide?

We've talked a lot about the wonderful, profit raising, features that HubSpot has and the features that make WooCommerce one of the most popular e-commerce platforms around. What we haven't talked about yet is exactly how integrating the two services makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Let's talk about how the two products empower each other.

HubSpot relies on big data to do its job. It needs to know everything it can about your customers so that it can properly segment them into the different buyer personas and determine how to personalize all its algorithms to that customer. This type of machine learning is what makes HubSpot such a powerful tool in the first place. When integrated with WooCommerce, it suddenly has access to all the information WooCommerce has about your customers. It will know their purchase history, product browsing history, and many more bits of data that it can use to more accurately target those customers.

The only way to get HubSpot's features in your WooCommerce store is via integration, so that is already a huge benefit of integrating the two. There are some other ways that integration may benefit your business, though. If you run multiple WooCommerce sites, you'll be able to integrate all of them into HubSpot to make managing them and tracking your KPIs easier. It will also give you features HubSpot offers that require an e-commerce site. Things like targeted coupon codes and abandoned cart recovery.

About Eniture Technology

Eniture Technology specializes in helping e-Commerce merchants grow by providing useful information, digital marketing services, off-the-shelf apps that solve common problems, and custom programming services. Please contact us if you need help growing your online business or implementing the concepts presented in this blog post.

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