How do you connect with your contacts?
Is it through email, chat, meetings? Reaching your leads and customers where they want to be found is an essential part of an effective inbound strategy.
If you’ve ever been interested in trying a new channel or you're just not sure if you can swing a certain strategy because of cost, check out this list of free apps for chatting, emailing, and meeting with your contacts. Plus, they're all integrated with the HubSpot CRM.
Buyers want to engage with companies on 13 different channels, which becomes a huge challenge for companies trying to manage the data and deliver a great experience in each one of these channels.
To keep up and effectively respond to customers, businesses need their customer communication software to be connected. By integrating apps with your CRM, you reduce manual processes and keep the full context for the buyer’s journey all within your central contact database. More importantly, you can provide a more personalized customer experience.
That’s why we’ve put together a list of free tools you can take advantage of when communicating with your visitors, leads, prospects, and customers.
Each one of the featured apps below has a free product and a free integration that connects to HubSpot’s free CRM. Keep reading to learn about the numerous channels through which you can communicate with your contacts with these free apps in HubSpot Connect.
Add Chat to Your Website With Pure Chat
Let’s face it: No one likes waiting for an answer. In fact, at every stage of the customer lifecycle, the majority of people rated an immediate response (10 minutes or less) from a business as “important” or “very important.”
Customers have high expectations, and to deliver a positive customer experience, it’s important to provide instant responses to questions. Pure Chat offers free live chat for your website so you can start delighting your visitors and being there when your customers need help.
It’s also imperative to have the customer chat experience tied to the rest of your marketing, sales, and service efforts. A third of consumers report that the most frustrating aspect of getting customer service help is repeating yourself. With the Pure Chat + HubSpot integration, you can send new conversions directly to HubSpot, along with the chat transcript. With the full context in the CRM, your marketing, sales, and support teams can provide a more personalized experience at every touchpoint and maximize every interaction.
Nurture Contacts Through Email With MailChimp
Even with all the new channels and strategies for connecting with your audience, email is still growing. The Radicati Group predicts that there will be 3 billion email users worldwide by 2020 (that’s almost half of the world’s population).
Email remains a core element of a marketing strategy and being able to nurture your leads. MailChimp has a free plan that allows you to send emails to stay in touch with subscribers, nurture leads, and send updates to customers.
The MailChimp + HubSpot integration connects your HubSpot forms and lead flows to your MailChimp account so that new contacts are pushed to your lists in MailChimp (learn how to set this up here). Once these newly converted leads are in your MailChimp lists, you can start building out email campaigns to move your contacts along in the customer journey.
Set Up Virtual Meetings With UberConference
Sales meetings are an essential piece of the sales process, but it’s important to make it convenient for the prospect and easy for the salesperson to schedule and join a meeting. UberConference makes it easy to have everything you need for an effective meeting, so you can focus on closing the deal.
Connect UberConference to HubSpot with the integration so you can schedule and track meetings with your HubSpot contacts. You can start a meeting in the moment or schedule one for later, but every one will be synced with HubSpot. With the meetings added to the contact timeline, it’s easy to add notes on your conversation so all the details are kept track of. Learn more about using the integration here.
Team Collaboration With Dossier
Frontline employees in marketing, sales, and customer service spend 10% of their time reconciling disconnected systems to ensure they’re answering buyer inquiries correctly. This is a significant cost that comes when different teams are operating in fragmented systems. Dossier helps teams collaborate on customer communication by:
- Organizing customer conversations in HubSpot
- Sending contacts, email history, and chats to HubSpot
- Enabling reps to start live chats with application users
- Helping teams collaborate on all incoming email and website chat
Use Dossier + HubSpot to help keep all customer communication in one place so that marketing, sales, and service can focus on what’s important: delighting the customer.
If you missed it, don’t forget to check out the list of free apps for lead generation. And come back next week to learn about free apps for productivity.
