Advantages and disadvantages of setting up workflow goals

Advantages and disadvantages of setting up workflow goals

Video transcript

Using goals in HubSpot workflows can be very useful or not. Let me tell you what we learned about the advantages and disadvantages when using goals in workflows for our clients.

Welcome to HubSpot Tips and Tricks! I'm Katarina from Actuado, and in this video, I'll explain why you should or shouldn't set goals for your workflows. 

Goals, goals, goals! What do you want to achieve with this blog post, landing page, call-to-action, email, chatflow? And what do you want to accomplish with workflows?

Setting goals for your workflows is great because they tell you the conversion rate, which means that they show you how successful your nurturing campaign is.

Another advantage of setting goals is that when a contact reaches the goal, they will automatically be excluded from the workflow. They don't need more nurturing emails because they already did what you wanted them to do.

If you want to set the same goal for the workflow 2 as you already did for the workflow 1, contacts who already reached this goal in workflow 1 won't enroll in workflow 2. It doesn't matter that the enrolment trigger is different. The fact is that they have already reached the goal, and that's it.

So make sure you set up unique goals for your workflows.

You can only set the goal for contact-based workflows.
This is great; just make sure what kind of actions you will use in the workflow.

Let me tell you what happened when we suggested that one of our clients sets up a nurturing workflow for a list of their contacts.

All contacts enrolled in this workflow should receive one email. As next action we placed a delay for two days, followed by the if/then branch.

After two days, the automation should check if anyone clicked the CTA in the email. If yes, an internal email notification about this contact must be sent to one of our client's sales reps. For contacts who didn't click the CTA, another email must be sent.

We also set up a goal for this workflow because we wanted to have the conversion rate.

After a week, our client told us that the sales team didn't receive any email notifications even though we could filter out all contacts who reached the goal.

After researching this issue, we figured out that contacts who reached the goal were instantly excluded from the workflow, which means they were also excluded from the two days long delay before the sales team should receive an email notification.

The lesson we learned is this... Setting goals for your workflows is a great feature. But think about what you want with it before you set one. Goals should be unique.

And remember, once a contact reaches a goal, they will be excluded from the workflow, and they won’t even enroll in a new workflow with the same kind of goal.

Do you have any questions?

Send an email to hubspot@actuado.com.