Let's face it: marketing is hard. It takes a lot of work and you have to be constantly on top of your game, which can be exhausting. Email marketing is no exception. In fact, some marketers might spend their whole day crafting, sending and following up with emails in the hopes of snagging a new client. This doesn't leave much time for the rest of their job, like writing social media posts or managing landing pages. Luckily, there are lots of tools out there that can help us streamline our work and save time across the board. You just have to find the right one for you.
I happen to really love my North Face jacket. Sure, there are other jackets out there that keep you warm and look good, but there are little things that make my North Face stand out. The way the cuffs fit just snug enough on my wrists; the way the sleeve doesn’t ride up; the perfect blend of weight and warmth. It’s the details that count. Finding the right email marketing tool is a lot like my feelings on buying a new jacket. Sometimes you don’t have the budget to spring for the one that gets all the details right. That’s okay because there are other jackets that provide the core functionality of keeping you warm. They might even get one or two of the other features right. But if you have the money, springing for the fancier jacket just feels right. And it’s bound to last you longer and accomplish its job better than the other options.
For me, HubSpot is the North Face of the email marketing world. It just makes your heart happy when you use it. Let’s dig into the five features in HubSpot’s email tool that will make you smile.
Simple Drag and Drop Editor
Similar to MailChimp, HubSpot uses a drag-and-drop email editor to help you design your emails and the elements within without having to code a custom template. You can start with a blank slate and add in elements like text boxes, logos, CTAs and contact links in just a few minutes. Plus, it automatically optimizes for desktop and mobile, so you can ensure an easy and aesthetic customer experience no matter the device. No HTML knowledge required.
Drag and drop editors are great, but they usually come with one drawback – it’s hard to make sure branding and design stay consistent across all emails. Hubspot lets you control design settings for your whole email in a separate tab, so you can set global elements like fonts and colors. This also prevents you from having to go through the tedious work of editing section by section, trying to make everything match.
Smooth A/B Testing
Another fun feature is the A/B testing you can apply to any email. This makes it easy to see which subject lines, images or CTA cards are working best for your brand. You can test things like different layouts, color schemes and wording to see exactly what catches people's attention. This helps you tweak your emails to maximize open and click rates.
HubSpot will randomly show your two tests to users and keep track of the analytics, so all you have to do is check in and evaluate the numbers. You can even apply A/B testing to automated emails to improve your nurture campaigns over time.
Easily Create Marketing Automations
If you’re looking for ways to save time, email marketing automation is the first place to go. Whether we like it or not, the robots are here to stay, so why not use them? There are endless possibilities for workflows and automation tools within HubSpot, but let’s examine a common scenario you might resonate with.
You have to manually follow up with every lead that comes through, and it sucks up a considerable portion of your day. Instead of combing through each email and trying to personalize responses or fill in email templates, you can set up a workflow that is triggered when a user fills out a form. This way, they’ll start automatically receiving new emails at predetermined dates and times to slowly educate them on your solution, keep your brand top of mind and nudge them down the funnel.
Automating can save you tons of time and streamline your workflows to make sure you're operating at maximum efficiency. When you offload those hours of manually sending emails, you create a whole new bucket of time to focus on lead generation elsewhere, such as through blogging or online contact forms.
It's important to note that these automation features are only available if you have the Professional subscription for the Marketing, Sales or Service Hubs.
Automatically Exclude Unengaged Contacts
Do you know how many times you email a prospect before you take them off your list? Do you ever take people off your email list? If the answer is no, then using HubSpot's exclusion feature could be a big help. Sometimes people would rather delete all of your emails instead of unsubscribe, but either way, they aren't engaging with your brand. This means they're pulling down your email open rates and possibly damaging your email sending domain. Not to mention it's just inefficient to spend time on uninterested contacts. That's why HubSpot helps you monitor who's interested and who's checked out.
When you use HubSpot, it can show you who in your contact record isn't opening emails or has been deemed "unengaged." Before you send out an email, you'll have the option to exclude unengaged contacts from the list so you can focus your efforts solely on potential customers. This can help you to stop chasing white rabbits and focus on the cakes that say "Eat Me."
Easy to Read Email Analytics
Without analytics, your digital marketing and email marketing campaigns are walking around in the dark. You know what happens when you walk around in the dark? You step on a lego.
If you haven’t ever stepped on a lego in the middle of the night, it’s like suddenly having a pointy rock shoved into the most painful spot on your foot while you’re half asleep. Nobody wants that. Email analytics are the flashlight that keep you on the path without any legos. They make sure you’re not damaging your domain and help you create more effective messages for your customers.
For individual emails, you can take an in-depth look at the activity associated with your message. You can see conversion rates and click-through rates, including which links people clicked on the most and who were your most engaged contacts. This is great information if you're not sure where people spend their time on your website or what your customers are most interested in. It also shows you who you're most promising clients are so you could potentially start catering some smart content directly to them and their interests.
You can also see the percentages of people who read, skimmed or glanced at your email after opening. If people are reading through your email but not clicking, that means they find your content engaging but your CTA doesn’t resonate. Finally, you can see a report of which email clients your users are using — like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail — which can sometimes affect deliverability and responsiveness. Some clients might be marking your emails as Spam or filtering your communications based on certain words in the subject line, so if you know which people are missing out, you can tailor those emails to try and push them through.
If you're more interested in the overall email campaign, you can look at the complete picture in HubSpot too. This is a compilation of all your individual email data that reflects the effectiveness of the campaign as a whole. It can help you make sure you aren't getting marked as spam across the board and gives you a good idea of how your emails are performing. You might even notice a simple fix that could significantly boost your open rates.
HubSpot Gets the Details Right
I've used a lot of different email tools in the past, including MailChimp, Sharpspring, Active Campaign and Constant Contact. But HubSpot is the one that provides the most frictionless experience. It's so nice to have an easy way to create emails that look good on every device so I don't have to worry about optimizing and scaling every time I send an email. Plus, the A/B testing and metrics are just simple enough to easily use without it being so simple I miss out on important data. In short, it has everything I need on a daily basis to launch and manage successful email marketing campaigns.
