From HubSpot marketing free to 420% growth in customer acquisition

Starting from HubSpot's free CRM, sales and marketing tools, we implemented incremental changes to deliver a 420% increase in customer acquisition, 74% increase in sessions and 34% increase in contacts. And our journey with Inkpact is just getting started!

UPDATE: We're delighted to announce that we were awarded a HubSpot impact award for marketing! Six & Flow was chosen from other agencies based across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) based on our work with Inkpact, and we couldn't be prouder.

Six & Flow first became a HubSpot partner agency in 2015, and within three years we climbed all the way to diamond tier. It’s fair to say we’re huge fans of the growth platform, and we like to think this enthusiasm is contagious. For this reason, marketing enablement is a perfect project for us!

The client

Established in 2015 (just like us!) Inkpact provides a personalised handwriting service for businesses, helping to make corporate communications more human and rejecting faceless mass marketing strategies. Their core message is about creating meaningful moments with your customers – so they needed to be setting the standard when it comes to delivering customer delight.

Inkpact first met Six & Flow when the brand was experiencing growing pains, and suffering the common problem of providing an innovative marketing service to clients while neglecting their own ambitions.

Inkpact started their HubSpot journey using HubSpot’s free CRM, sales and marketing tools, but saw limited success due to a lack of processes and absence of automation. As an agency, we used the free tools to demonstrate the value in a singular growth platform, provide an entry point to HubSpot and develop a more streamlined approach that would work to grow the business efficiently and nurture leads properly.

Automation, we explained, could help by taking the bulk of repetitive work off the team’s shoulders. At the top level, combined reporting would also give them more actionable insight and reduce the overlay of time generating reports.

Inkpact were a perfect fit for HubSpot – and the free tools helped us prove that to them.

The problem

As the brand grew, Inkpact increasingly struggled to manage existing marketing activities, and there was concern that leads were not receiving their best level of service.

Core challenges included...

Using numerous marketing tools

A disparate collection of marketing tools was loosely linked together, reducing efficiency as the team was forced to juggle various activities.

Not having a centralised CRM

With various marketing tools in place, customer data was in turn siloed across Mailchimp, Inkpact’s bespoke platform, Typeform and various excel sheets. As a result, a single customer view wasn’t a reality for our client.

No insight into sales and marketing efforts

Not surprisingly, with all these different tools and data stores in place, it was hard if not impossible for Inkpact to effectively monitor and analyse every part of their disparate process.

Lack of lead nurturing

Sporadic newsletter communications were distributed, but a lack of targeted engagement meant that individuals often signed up but placed no orders, or didn’t complete payment. Additionally, only 30% of customers placed repeat orders despite strong results being achieved across prospecting, retention, sales and customer service campaigns.

Time wasted on administration

Sales tasks, prospecting and pipeline management were managed across excel sheets, and marketing activities such as social media management and email marketing was run manually, taking too much time and effort. Inkpact needed a way to scale activities and increase efficiency without losing any effectiveness.

Lack of buyer funnel

Without marketing automations in place, there was no buyer funnel. Top tier content led straight into a call to action to start an order (effectively becoming a customer) with no content in the middle to educate leads or show the value of the offering.

The solution

Six & Flow hosted a half day inbound workshop with Inkpact, digging deep into the brand, its offering and its audience. We then created a comprehensive strategy to support them through a sustainable and scalable growth model, outlining the full integration of social, content and email within the lead nurturing process.

In following calls and screen shares, we demonstrated the benefits of email, automation, centralised activity, sales alignment and what was possible with their current marketing versus the paid HubSpot products.

Having educated the client on the true value of HubSpot done right, they upgraded from the free CRM to Marketing Professional and Sales Professional. We then led Inkpact through incremental product adoptions and upgrades to solve the challenges they faced.

Quick wins...

Having analysed their existing marketing and sales processes, we quickly identified several opportunities where we could make an instant impact.

By establishing quick wins, we were able to make immediate improvements and demonstrate real value from the get-go. These included:

Installing popup forms

While free product samples had previously been available on the website, the offering wasn’t clearly placed or promoted. Since implementing the popup forms, we have seen a regular stream of new and highly relevant lead conversions, with existing traffic now converting on page when given the opportunity.

Implementing deal stage automations

In order to better manage the sales process, mandatory value fields were added to various deal stages to ensure that important data was compiled.

Cleansing ‘dead leads’

By removing hard bounces and unsubscribes from the HubSpot CRM, we made room for new leads and can ensure a high quality of data moving forward.

Setting up meeting links

Once Inkpact realised the benefits they’d get from a paid marketing platform, they introduced three Sales Professional seats. We set up meeting links for these users and educated Inkpact on how to use them.

Training

We held a series of Zoom calls and occasional Loom videos to educate the client on various elements of HubSpot functionality, both across the sales and marketing side. By ensuring key team members are confident using the platform, we can promote adoption.

Integration support

We worked closely with the team to orchestrate an integration between Inkpact’s bespoke platform and HubSpot, enabling lead nurturing workflows to be built in response to key interactions in-app.

Next steps

After the initial quick wins, we supported the client through the process of cleaning their HubSpot data, ensuring consistency in value fields used and advising on data integration from the bespoke Inkpact platform. This will ensure we are maximising the results of marketing automations and giving Inkpact a single client view.

We also helped Inkpact's marketing team phase out the use of Mailchimp,replicating them in HubSpot, in order to gradually transfer over active leads from Mailchimp to HubSpot. HubSpot now forming the singular hub of all Inkpact marketing and sales communications.

The blog is also being moved across from Wordpress to HubSpot, enhancing the hub-like effects of integrating fully across HubSpot.

We are also migrating live chat functionalities from Intercom to HubSpot conversations, integrating FAQs and sales activity across the board.

The results

The outcome of educational workshops, strategy creation and staggered implementation was ultimately a carefully thought-out, fully-functioning sales and marketing enablement project which is now evolving into a full-service marketing retainer.

Inkpact are benefitting from better visibility on leads, increased efficiency across various marketing activities and a clear plan moving forward. New products are set to be added to Inkpact’s offering, such as corporate gifting, and the foundations laid with HubSpot stand them in good stead for scaling the business effectively.

These changes did coincide with Christmas, typically a seasonal peak for Inkpact. However, since upgrading from the free HubSpot to the professional package, Inkpact has seen…

What the client says...

“We were looking for someone to support us with HubSpot and inbound marketing activity,” said Jon Seymour, Head of Marketing and Sales at Inkpact.

“Rich offered to give us an audit for free, just to help us out and give us some direction. We took him up on that offer, and quite quickly it led into us coming on board with them.”

“We were using HubSpot on the free trial and wanted to ramp that up. Being a top tier HubSpot partner, Six & Flow really stood out to us.”

“With Six & Flow, we’re able to pick up the phone, and there’s great people at the other end who can support our small team.”