HubSpot Journeys vs. Workflows

HubSpot Journeys
But why do customer Journeys matter?
Best Practices for Designing  Impactful Journeys
HubSpot Workflows
Best practices for your Workflows 
Automating together
Which one should you use?
Journeys vs. Workflows Comparison Table

Everyone in the digital world has been sitting on the edge of their seats for the past year watching the AI world evolve, and your customers? They are more connected and in tune than ever before. They’re present and active across a wide variety of platforms, sifting through endless content and staying in touch with one another daily. This means the generic, one-size-fits-all communication and marketing strategies just don't cut it anymore. Customers crave personalisation, relevance, and perfect timing.

Meeting these heightened expectations demands more than just basic automation. It requires a smart, strategic approach to what you're doing. That’s where HubSpot’s Workflows and the exciting new Journeys feature come in. Both are absolute powerhouses, but knowing when and how to use them effectively is the secret to creating truly impactful customer experiences, Journeys, and streamlined operations.

Let's get into the best practices for leveraging both HubSpot Journeys and Workflows, individually and in tandem, to transform your customer approach.

HubSpot Journeys

HubSpot Journeys are one of HubSpot's newest features. This new customer Journey automation offers intuitive, visual tools to design, automate and optimise the entire, multi-stage customer path, personalising the Journey based on customer behaviour and preferences.

A customer journey map is a visual story of how customers interact with your business. From someone discovering it to all the way through to becoming a loyal customer and beyond.

But why do customer Journeys matter? 

Customer Journeys matter for these three reasons:  

• Align the entire team around the same customer narrative.
• Highlights what's working (points of force) and what's not working (points of friction).
• Bring customer-facing teams to make improvements.

When teams don't communicate well, your customers feel it. Your marketing team might be promising something that sales doesn't know about, or your support team might be unaware of what was sold.

Journey mapping prevents all of this.

Image source: HubSpot Blog – Customer Journey Orchestration

This image is a demo of a newly created customer Journey. This guides a new contact through qualification, engagement, nurturing and conversion into qualified leads, a visual representation of the customer path.

Depending on their behaviour in response to our actions, they can go one of two ways:

• High-intent: for customers showing some engagement
• Nurturing: needs more time and engagement cause they aren't engaging.

Best Practices for Designing Impactful Journeys

Start with the customer's perspective. Before you even get into HubSpot, put yourself in your customer's shoes. Map out their ideal experience. What are their questions, their needs and their desired outcomes at each stage (from awareness to consideration)? By designing from this perspective, you ensure your Journey is customer-centric, and you are putting their needs at the forefront of your decision-making.

Design for adaptability and personalisation. This is where the Journey shines. You can use conditional branching and dynamic CRM data to craft paths that adapt in real time based on the individual's behaviours, preferences and progress. Think, “If they opened this email, send them this follow-up. If they revisited that page, offer this resource instead.” This not only delivers hyper-relevant interactions but also provides the customer with exactly what they need when they need it.

Visualise the entire path. HubSpot Journeys essentially gives you a visual canvas. It allows you to segment the customer experience into stages, ensuring a logical flow between all of the touchpoints - emails, ads, website interactions, social media, and sales outreach. This lens makes complex experiences easier to design, manage, implement and share with your team.

Image source: HubSpot Blog – Automate smarter and more personalized customer journeys

Focus on key conversion points and metrics. You should have a purpose for each stage of your customer Journey. Clearly define your goal for each step (eg, this could be a conversion goal), then utilise the built-in Journey analytics to track performance closely. Look at engagement rates, drop-off points and connect insights to revenue attribution. Top tip:  Data-driven optimisation is key!

HubSpot provides 7 different Journey maps as a base for you to define your customer Journey. By mapping out your customer journey, every interaction becomes international and impactful rather than just you hoping for the best. Its also a great tool for identifying areas in your product, marketing or support that needs some fine tuning. 

Image source: HubSpot Free CustomerJourney Map Template

The seven Customer Journey Map Templates consist of: 

• Buyer’s Journey Template
• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• Future State Template
• A Day in the Customer’s Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

There are 9 steps for creating a Customer Journey Map:

1. Use customer journey map templates.
2. Set clear objectives for the map.        
3. Profile your personas and define their goals.
4. Highlight your target customer personas.
5. List out all touchpoints.
6. Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need.     
7. Take the customer journey yourself.
8.  Analyse your results.          
9. Update your map over time.

Implement effective Journey monitoring. As your Journeys grow in complexity, governance over them is vital. Use HubSpot’s permissions and approval tools to streamline collaboration. Establish clear ownership and review processes for all content and logic quite regularly; it's easier to maintain something than to fix a big problem and start over. This ensures brand consistency and reduces friction between teams, allowing you to scale efficiently while keeping wraps on your customers' Journey.

Image source: HubSpot Blog – Automate smarter and more personalized customer journeys

Iterate and optimise continuously. Journeys aren't like Workflows; they aren't a “set it and forget it” feature. The customer landscape is changing all the time. Regularly review performance, A/B test different elements and make adjustments based on your analytics and evolving customer behaviour, trends and preferences. Top tip:  Consistent optimisation maximises impact.

While this is focusing on the customer experience, and creating a good one, Journeys has limits inside HubSpot, the number of Journeys and stages, and their primary focus isn't on internal operational tasks. This is why using them with Workflows is a game-changer. 

HubSpot Workflows: The Go-To for Operational Excellence 

Think of HubSpot Workflows as the reliable, ever-ready engine for your HubSpot portal. These are the “workhorses” for automating specific, often routine and internal tasks. They focus solely on automating the boring, repetitive, and uncanny behind-the-scenes tasks, trying to make your life easier.

Workflows to automate your business processes. You can automatically enrol records with enrollment criteria, then take action on your records. They enable users to set up automated sequences of actions based on specific triggers, such as contact property changes, form submissions, or deal updates. 

Image source: HubSpot Workflows (Nic Clement) 

Some best practices for your Workflows:

Keep them focused and lean. You always want to keep your workflows simple; this is the golden rule. Design each one for a single, crystal-clear objective. Whether it's updating a contact property, sending a quick internal notification, or assigning a task, a focused workflow makes it easier to manage, troubleshoot and understand its impact. A top tip: avoid overcomplicating things with too many branches for basic tasks.

Leverage data hygiene and CRM health. Your CRM is the heart of your operations, and clean data is essential for creating powerful personalisation (especially for Journeys). Use Workflows to automatically clean up data, standardise property values, fill in missing information and enrich your data. They’re perfect for updating properties based on specific actions or criteria. You can create your own rules and paths to achieve your desired needs.

Automate internal processes. Workflows aren't just for customer-facing stuff; you can set them up to streamline your internal operations. Think automatic task assignment, creating service tickets, or notifying team members on crucial events (a potential lost deal), they boost efficiency and allow for timely and actionable follow-ups.

Image source: HubSpot Workflows (Nic Clement) 

Simple nurturing and follow-ups: For straightforward communication, Workflows still shine. Use them for the initial “welcome email” sequence or a simple post-purchase follow-up that doesn't require complex branching logic. They efficiently automate these foundational touchpoints.

Always test thoroughly: Before you let a workflow get to work on its own, test it. Use the “Test Workflow” feature with test contacts and diligently review the Workflow history. This step saves you from surprises and ensures everything performs exactly as intended.

While Workflows are incredibly powerful, remember that they can be quite tough to use when you’re trying to visualise and manage sprawling, multi-stage customer experiences. That's where Journeys come in.

HubSpot Journeys & Workflows: Best Practices for Automating Together

Image source: HubSpot Blog – Automate smarter and more personalized customer journeys

The true magic of HubSpot automation reveals itself when you strategically combine Journeys and Workflows. They don't compete; they complement each other perfectly.

You want to use Workflows for your fundamental business operations: lead scoring, lifecycle stage changes, internal notifications, data enrichment and syncing with other systems. Once a contact reaches a certain lifecycle stage or meets specific criteria (triggered by a Workflow), enrol them into a Journey to deliver a personalised, multi-channel experience. A Workflow could update a contact's lifecycle stage to “Marketing Qualified Lead” based on their lead scope and engagement. This lifecycle stage change then acts as an enrollment trigger for an “MQL Nurture Journey” that guides them with specific content. This means your leads get the right message at the perfect time, leading to faster conversions, higher efficiency, and a truly optimised customer experience across every touchpoint.

Triggering Journeys from Workflows allows you to enrol contacts into specific Journeys based on complex conditions that might be difficult to set up directly in a Journeys enrollment criteria. This provides unmatched precision in your outreach, ensuring every communication is highly relevant. If a contact downloads a specific content offer and has visited your pricing page multiple times (identified by a Workflow), that Workflow can then enrol them into a “Product Demo Journey” designed to convert them. The key benefit here is the ability to automate highly targeted, real-time engagement that directly responds to complex user behaviour, significantly increasing conversion rates and maximising your marketing and sales efforts.

While Journeys handle the nurturing, you might need a Workflow to perform more advanced actions in the middle of a Journey. In a custom onboarding Journey, after a customer completes a specific onboarding step (eg. setting up their profile), the Journey could trigger a Workflow. This Workflow could then:

• Create a task for the customer success team to prompt a personalised follow-up
• Update a property on the contact record to accurately reflect their progress and segment them for future communications
• Notify a sales rep that the customer is successfully onboarded

This powerful combination ensures that your customer nurturing is deeply integrated with your internal operations, automating critical internal processes and keeping your teams perfectly aligned with the customer's journey and needs.

Use a Journey to define the overarching customer experience and personalise the interaction. Then, within a Journey stage, trigger a Workflow to handle specific, detailed tasks that support that stage. This dynamic ensures your customer engagement is both strategically mapped out and flawlessly executed. For example, A Journey might move a contact into a “Product Interest” stage, which then automatically triggers a Workflow to notify a sales rep, update a contact property to “High intent”, and add them to a specific nurture list. This automation means no lead falls through the cracks, your teams are instantly aligned, and every customer receives timely, relevant attention. This leverages and utilises the strengths of both. Journeys for strategy and visibility, Workflows for reliable execution.

Use Workflow to trigger advanced Journeys. While Journeys largely adapt based on customer behaviour, a specific action automated by a Workflow can also be a trigger to enrol a contact into, or move them within a Journey. For instance, a Workflow that flags a contact as “VIP” after a certain purchase amount could automatically enrol them into your exclusive “VIP Customer Journey”. This allows for hyper-personalised paths based on complex internal logic or specific milestones, ensuring your customers always receive the most relevant and timely experiences.

Which one should you use?

The shift from sending generic, one-size-fits-all marketing strategies to truly personalised customer experiences isn't just a trend anymore; it's just how things are done. The great news is, HubSpot gives you everything you need to make this happen, but the real secret is knowing how to make these tools work for you. 

We've seen that Journeys are like your canvas for mapping out and running entire customer paths, adapting to what each person does from out the gate accuracy. And right alongside them, Workflows are your helpers behind the scenes, taking care of all those internal tasks, keeping your data clean, and making sure everything runs as it should. 

When you combine these two features, you create an incredibly smooth, automated system. This connected approach doesn't just make your teams stronger; It's about embracing this powerful synergy to not just meet, but consistently blow past, customer expectations and create a truly unforgettable brand. experiences.

TLDR:

Use Workflows if you need complexity, deep CRM integration and flexibility.

Use Journeys when you want to see and shape the customer experience visually.

Journeys vs. Workflows Comparison Table