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What You Should Know About HubSpot for Email Marketing
Over 52,000 companies across the globe rely on HubSpot for their inbound marketing. There’s a reason why it’s so popular.
HubSpot is a full-fledged marketing software platform that lets businesses manage all aspects of their inbound marketing campaigns. It brings your blogging, website analytics, social media management, and email marketing into one accessible and intuitive platform. With HubSpot, you can track the full journey of your customer, tuning in to what makes them convert (and what doesn’t), so you can continually optimize your marketing for better ROI.
HubSpot has a lot to offer businesses. Today we’re going to focus on one of our favorites: its powerfully personalized email marketing.
Set Up Your Email Marketing in HubSpot
Getting started with HubSpot is similar to most software platforms. You’ll add users, set up permissions, and personalize your account with your company logo, colors, and font. You’ll also get the tracking pixels you need to integrate your email marketing with website visits for analytics purposes.
Because email marketing is included with either of HubSpot’s paid offerings, you’ll need to schedule a demo before you can get started. This is where it can help to have a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner (like Your Marketing People) on your side, as they can speed you through the process and have you work directly with their account rep.
Free Email Templates You Can Customize
HubSpot’s email templates are one of their standout features. Here, you can create stunning, professional-looking email newsletter templates with spaces to embed video and add graphics, CTA banners, buttons, and more.
You can also create text-based emails that make it easy for your sales and marketing teams to perform individual outreach—without having to manually copy and paste emails.
Segment Your List
Email list segmentation is one of the best things you can do for your email marketing. Segmented emails get 50% more clicks, and, according to HubSpot’s research, simply segmenting your list by buyer personas can increase your click-through rates by 16%.
Segmentation allows you to ensure you are sending the most relevant emails to your customers—increasing their likelihood of opening your emails, clicking through on the included content, and staying subscribed to your list.
You’ll use HubSpot’s contact database to manage and organize your email subscribers. You can create different segment lists manually, or you can set up rules so HubSpot automatically segments your lists based on the actions your subscribers take.
We recommend adding a personalization token to each email campaign you create in HubSpot. Then, once your email is sent, you’ll be able to pull up any of your subscriber’s records to view when they read the email, what they clicked on, and how many times they opened it.
Optimize With A/B Split Testing
A/B testing allows you to discover what your email recipients enjoy—so you can give them more of what they want and boost your email performance. You can test different types of subject lines, content, send dates and times, and even the layout of your email. You can then take those findings and apply them to future email campaigns for higher open and click-through rates.
Turning on split testing in HubSpot is easy. During the email setup process, you just toggle the A/B test switch on to create your variations. You can choose the percentage of people you want to receive each email, determine how the winner will be chosen (open rate, click rate, or click-through rate), and the length of the test (up to 100 hours). Once the test is complete, HubSpot automatically sends the winning variation to the remainder of your list.
Nurture Leads With Drip Campaigns
Setting up a drip campaign in HubSpot is intuitive, thanks to their step-by-step process. You can work with one of their templates or you can drag and drop elements to create your own.
Then, you can define the rules for your campaign. Which segments will you send this email to, and what actions will they need to take for you to send them the next email in the series?
You can set goals for individual emails in a drip campaign, as well as overarching goals for the entire series. With the campaigns tool in HubSpot, you can even integrate your drip emails along with all the other related assets for a campaign, such as blog posts and landing pages. This lets you see at-a-glance what’s driving the most value—and what isn’t—so you can tweak it as needed.
Track Your Performance
Email marketing isn’t any fun unless you know how you’re doing. Fortunately, HubSpot provides detailed analytics for your entire email marketing channel: both at the top level and for each individual campaign.
In the Analyze tab, you can see your overall stats, as well as your top-performing emails, based on click-through rates, open rates, and click rates.
Click on an individual email, and you dive deeper on its performance. An HTML click map reveals which parts of your email were the most popular, giving you an idea of where to place important content in the future. You can also view open and click rate by email client, engagement over time, the amount of time people spend viewing your email, and your most engaged contacts.
HubSpot vs. Other Email Marketing Providers
There are several email marketing providers out there, and HubSpot is just one of them. However, based on years of using it with our clients, and for our own email marketing here at Your Marketing People, we feel it’s a great option.
HubSpot is a fully integrated marketing automation software, which means you always have the option to expand it to work with your CRM, social media, sales, and more. Klaviyo and Mailchimp, on the other hand, are more focused on email marketing alone. Klaviyo is also more focused on eCommerce, specifically, while HubSpot’s flexible platform makes it suitable for a wide range of business, both big and small, B2B or B2C.
Mailchimp is very easy to use, but that stems in part from its lack of features. There’s only so much customization you can do with their templates, and the email segmentation is pretty limited. Considering how critical that is to success, we’ve found most clients tend to outgrow Mailchimp once they’re ready to take their email marketing to the next level.
Why Choose HubSpot for Email Marketing?
We love HubSpot for its wealth of support documentation and educational resources. With countless blogs, tutorials, and more, you’ll have no trouble understanding the ins and outs of this platform.
Having said that, as a beginner it can be a lot to take in—and it takes time to learn all the little tricks you can do to optimize your marketing emails and personalize them down to the smallest detail.
That’s why many businesses choose to get on the fast track by partnering with a HubSpot email expert like Your Marketing People. Not only will you have our expertise on your side, but as an agency partner, we can get you exclusive access to discounts, special promotions, and a dedicated account rep.
We’re a HubSpot Silver Certified Agency Partner, and we were ranked as one of their Top Digital Agencies in the Los Angeles region for 2018. Learn more about our HubSpot marketing services.
