When Chris Henderson started working on product growth in 2017, Easyship was already growing rapidly. In fact, the cloud shipping provider with headquarters in both Hong Kong and New York was well on its way to becoming a global solution to connect Ecommerce merchants with fast, easy shipping options worldwide.
Chris has a background in helping businesses automate more of their processes. When he looked at the methods Easyship’s team was using to activate leads, he knew the process wasn’t scalable.
“At that stage in our journey, our process looked like this: sign-ups would come into the platform, and they would go into a Slack channel,” he explains. “Then, we would have somebody jump on the phone to reach out to that sign-up, to try and onboard and troubleshoot on the fly.”
Chris knew that it wasn’t feasible to have team members on the phone all day. Plus, he had found that many users now strongly preferred not to have unnecessary interactions for things that could be solved in other ways, with tools like videos and written tutorials that directly addressed their use case. He knew he needed to work on creating automatic sales and marketing processes.
“Our first focus was on building a self-service channel for onboarding and activating users,” Chris says. “Our sign-ups were at 1% of where they are now, but even then we could see that we needed to have something in place that would be scalable.”
Easyship was still in its early stages as a company, and were in the beginning stages of building out their sales and marketing programs. Because of this, the company was growing and adapting every day, and they needed sales and marketing automation that could scale well and keep up with their rapid growth.
Chris wanted a solution that was flexible and that he could implement quickly, without requiring six to nine months of work with an outside agency to set up.
He needed a marketing and sales automation solution that was fast, flexible, and that could serve as the perfect tool for his rapidly-expanding company, both now and in the future.
Marketing Workflows
Chris and the marketing team began by plotting out different user journeys. Then, they used HubSpot’s workflow tool to quickly and easily build those journeys.
Thanks to the tool, they were able to create many different workflows for journeys that were narrowly tailored to each user.
“Now, our email retention flow is very specific to the user itself. We tried to customize that as much as possible,” Chris says. “We built out a lot of different workflows, making sure they don’t conflict with each other. And then it was a matter of testing and iterating upon those to bring the most value to users.”
Plus, tailoring the workflows has allowed them to identify and contact sales-qualified leads at the moment of activation.
“We can identify sales-qualified leads based on activation of features or behavior within the app itself,” he explains. “That has the tremendous value of allowing us to communicate the right message at exactly the right time.”
Sales Playbooks
On the sales side, the playbooks tool has allowed the team to create standardized processes for collecting information from leads.
“The playbooks have been very helpful, and ensure that reps are capturing the information they need for future reference and action,” Chris says.
Plus, the playbooks tool makes it easy to create sales processes that work and quickly share them with their global team.
“The sales team uses the playbooks tool a lot,” Chris says. “The sequences, email templates and analytics available there have been really valuable for the team, and the tool makes it easy to share them internally. It also makes it easy for management to optimize emails and see which emails are most effective.”
A Unified Platform for a Global Company
Most importantly, Chris says that HubSpot has created a centralized, all-in-one platform that makes it easy for Easyship’s global team to communicate and collaborate.
“HubSpot allows all stakeholders to stay on the same page. Nobody is siloed off,” he says. “It makes it easy for sales to share playbooks or email sequences they’ve found effective, for example. And from a marketing perspective, we’re able to localize very easily for different markets, without having to recreate assets. It has definitely aided in alignment across teams and distributed markets.”
Easyship has changed and grown enormously in the last three and a half years, but even as they grow, they still like to stay focused on their core product and keep things lean.
“Having this all-in-one tool means we aren’t constantly building integrations, and we’re not taking dev time away from building our core product,” Chris says. “We have a big roadmap ahead of us. We don’t want to be taking up too many dev resources or design resources. The fact that HubSpot is an all-in-one tool that allows us to stay focused is a big win for us.”
Since setting up their marketing and sales automation in HubSpot, Chris has seen improvements in metrics across the board.
In their onboarding workflow specifically, he’s seen a 2x increase in email open rate, and a 2.5x increase in click-through rate.
Self-service onboarding has increased by 60%.
And thanks to the marketing automation, they’ve also seen a 40% increase in product-qualified leads (PQLs).
He’s thrilled with the changes—and with Easyship’s partnership with HubSpot.
“It’s clear that the HubSpot team is very passionate and excited to see companies they work with grow,” he says. “I think that’s the biggest driver for them.”