How Heap’s integration with HubSpot helps companies activate their customer jour...

Every company captures customer data. But it’s what you do with that data that’s critical. Heap is providing its customers with a way to leverage customer journey data in their marketing and sales programs through a new integration with HubSpot.

Taking advantage of first-party data

Heap is a digital insights platform - what CEO Ken Fine refers to as a digital vacuum cleaner. You connect it to your application or website, and it tracks what customers or visitors do - view pages, complete forms, access features, etc. Essentially, Heap provides a treasure trove of behavioral data that you can use to improve how you market, sell or support your customers.

There was already a one-way sync with HubSpot where users could provide Heap with a list of customers in their CRM that they wanted to track. But now, Heap has enabled a two-way synchronization that helps marketing and sales teams get a complete picture of customers or prospective customers and gives you the tools (in HubSpot) to activate on that data.

In terms of the new integration, Josh Roberts, Senior Product Manager at Heap, explains that initially, Heap was ingesting HubSpot data to provide that complete picture of the customer. With Heap sending data back to HubSpot, marketing and sales can leverage that data in various ways.

To do that, users create a segment in Heap based on demographic data, behavioral data, or some combination, and then send that segment to HubSpot, where it’s created as a list. The list is dynamic and updates every four hours to ensure it is always accurate and relevant. 

Leveraging Heap data in marketing and sales

By syncing the data captured via Heap with HubSpot, marketing and sales (and even support) can improve how, when, and why they interact with customers and prospects. Heap outlines a number of use cases for its platform, including funnel optimization, product-led growth (or product-led sales), product adoptions, and more. When Heap’s data is made available in tools like HubSpot, those use cases come to life.

Roberts says this integration helps marketers and sales refine their go-to-market motion based on signals coming from Heap’s data, such as: 

• Monitor how customers use an application and provide emails that encourage trying different features or functions or email guides to improve usage.
• Upsell or cross-sell to customers new features, add-ons, or application levels.
• Re-engage with customers who may have signed up for an application but aren’t using it.
• Re-engage with prospects who started the process or are looking to use an application but haven’t taken that next step.
• After reading a recent email blast about a new feature, understand how users interact with the product.
• Learn how many email touches it takes to convert a lead to a customer.

Giving marketing the self-service tools it needs

This new two-way integration with HubSpot is not the first for Heap. It has a similar integration with Salesforce and other marketing and sales technologies, such as Braze, AB Tasty, Intercom, Marketo, Iterable, Optimizely, and many others. 

Heap also offers Heap Connect, which sends Heap customer data to data warehouse platforms, such as Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, and S3. Connect is the most popular way for customers to access and analyze customer data as part of a more extensive understanding of their business, according to Roberts.

But for marketing, sales, product, and customer support, self-service tools that are easy to set up and work with are critical to ensuring they engage with customers correctly. This new HubSpot integration is easy to set up. Find it in the HubSpot Marketplace, sign in with your Heap account, and connect your segments in HubSpot. 

Marketing can set up workflows and campaigns around segments (lists) that automatically activate as the segments update. Add customers to sales sequences used by SDRs or BDRs to nurture prospective customers to take the next step. And if you use HubSpot for customer support, you can see how customers are using the application and may be getting caught before they need to reach out for help. 

My take

Understanding how customers interact with your application is critical to ensure they continue using it. It also helps you improve and evolve your application in ways you know your customers want and will use. Having this data in your marketing automation platform or other marketing tools is a no-brainer if you are focused on the customer experience. 

This is true for companies that follow a product-led growth go-to-market approach. But it also supports other GTM approaches, including demand generation and account-based marketing, because Heap doesn’t only work for applications but for other digital experiences. 

The better we understand the people who do business with us or are considering doing business with us, the better we can create experiences that drive conversion and improve retention and loyalty.