Starting From Scratch
When CODE41, with the help of their 15,000 supporters, created one of the first crowdsourced mechanical watches in 2016, they knew they had a product that was going to make waves in their industry. But in terms of marketing and automation, they knew they needed help.
As far as a tech stack goes, in the very early days, “basically, we had nothing,” says Amir Sfez, Chief Operating Officer for CODE41. “We only had WooCommerce, and we managed everything on WooCommerce’s external email system. There was no CRM—so everything was very, very, amateur.” Amir knew that to grow and scale CODE41—and get their product in front of the right customers—they would need to invest in the right platform.
With that, they chose to go ahead with Marketing Hub Enterprise in June of 2017, while the company has added Sales Hub and Service Hub to their account since then.“Without a system like HubSpot, you can’t grow—meaning that if you want to spend a high marketing budget on lead generation, you need to have top-notch technology automation in place,” says Amir.
Using Automation To Improve The Entire CODE41 Customer Journey
Code41’s implementation was painless and they started to see results quickly. “We saw value from day one,” says Amir.
HubSpot has helped CODE41 optimise their entire customer journey—starting with email marketing. The company takes an educational, relationship-building approach to email. “There are very, very few automated emails targeted at producing sales,” says Amir. “Sales is like collateral damage; it’s all about education, it’s all about information, it’s all about giving interesting content to read.”
While relationship building is a big part of CODE41’s email marketing strategy, so is volume. The company sends a whopping 2.5 million emails per month through the Email Marketing tool in Marketing Hub—and they’ve been extremely impressed with HubSpot’s ability to manage that email volume and provide tools, like advanced list segmentation, to make their emails more effective. “We are like a content factory,” says Amir. “And HubSpot is great to push the content to your community. We can easily send hundreds of thousands of emails in just a few minutes. It’s a powerful tool with unmatched deliverability.” The ability to reliably and effectively send such a high volume of emails to their potential customers and to easily segment their community (which, to date, is close to half a million) for better personalisation and more targeted messaging has had a severe impact on conversions.
HubSpot has also helped CODE41 improve their customer journey after the sale. “When someone buys a product, it’s important to have a retention workflow—to sell them more, to cross-sell...to continue communicating with them and to produce more sales,” says Amir. The customer support team uses Sales Hub to automate reminders, which “minimises the customer support failures: not following up on the client request, not forgetting to check the payment status or things like that,” says Amir.
The CODE41 team has also recently implemented Service Hub, which “was a major improvement for us in customer support management,” says Amir. “Before it was tough to say, ‘Okay, how many returns did we have last month? How many people were not happy last month?’” says Amir. “Now, we have tickets for every category. Returns, complaints, and repairs. At the end of the month, ServiceHub generates a report of how many tickets for each.” Having access to this kind of data has enabled CODE41 to identify the areas of their business that need attention and improve their customer experience and retention in the process—which, for their company mission and values, is essential. “This is essential for us. It’s one of our main missions—to make the adventure with us as extraordinary as possible,” says Amir. “It’s crucial. Why? Because we base our business model on retention. We are very good at bringing in clients, but we also need to be good at keeping clients.”
Continuing To Grow Into The Future—In Partnership With HubSpot
CODE41 has been extremely happy with its growth over the past few years. But moving forward, they have plans to expand even farther (including shifting their ecommerce operations to a proprietary app)—and HubSpot will be along for the journey.
“HubSpot is a fantastic product. I mean, I cannot think about a better way to do lead nurturing, to do automation, or to do automation marketing,” says Amir. “Our plan for the future is to grow bigger, to have millions of people in our community, and have hundreds of thousands of customers. And we need HubSpot to be our partner for automation: marketing and customer support. We automate all of that in HubSpot.”
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