Email marketing has a venerable history dating back to 1978 – and thus preceding the public Internet by a solid 15 years (the Internet became publicly available in April 1993). 45 years on, and nothing holds as much potential, or as many benefits, as a well-designed email campaign in the fast-evolving landscape of digital marketing. Email marketing can carry strategic and personalised content directly to your customers’ work inbox, create value for your business, and develop a web of connections that can grow into enduring relationships.
The HubSpot platform, a titan in inbound marketing, comes with an email marketing tool set that, when used with expertise and precision, is not only effective at reaching customers but also helps you resonate better with them. In this article, we will guide business owners through the intricacies of using HubSpot’s email marketing tools to foster stronger and more meaningful customer relationships.
Hubspot’s Email Marketing Capabilities
HubSpot goes several steps beyond earlier email marketing and scheduling programs, bringing together a range of tools that empower you to automate repetitive tasks, segment your CRM into highly targeted email lists, and create engaging emails that align with your value proposition and marketing messages. HubSpot equips you to deliver email content at the right time, to the right people, based on their behavioural cues, and by doing so transform your levels of customer engagement.
Sending Emails That Your Customers Actually Want To Read!
The reason that email marketing has a bad reputation in some circles is that the quality and relevance of a lot of marketing emails is woefully poor. HubSpot systematically addresses the main issues with email marketing to increase the open rate, engagement, and success of each of your email marketing campaigns.
1. Personalisation
Anonymous emails or emails addressed to ‘Dear Customer’ in the age of radical personalisation come across as impersonal as a telemarketing cold call. HubSpot’s data management and personalisation tools allow you to tailor each email to the recipient using various custom merge fields, capturing their attention with mentions of their name, their interests, their past purchases, or other interactions with your business. Customers are more likely to engage with an email when they feel that the message was crafted solely for them – it’s a touch point that speaks volumes.
2. Segmentation
Sending the same emails to your entire subscriber list is the same as casting a wide net and hoping for the best. It’s a relic from the noughties that is best forgotten. With HubSpot’s segmentation tools, you can divide your CRM into multiple segments defined by specific criteria such as demographics, behaviour, or engagement history, building an email strategy that reflects the priorities and needs of your buyer personas. Segmented email marketing campaigns yield higher open rates and are better at motivating customers to take your desired action, as the content is inherently more relevant to their individual needs.
3. Automation
Email marketing is best used as a lead nurturing tool, not a direct sales tool, guiding your prospects through the customer life cycle to the point where they are comfortable making a purchase on their own initiative – and then developing your relationship with them as customers. HubSpot’s automated workflow tools make it easier for you to sustain these relationships on a personal level by automating welcome emails, birthday/anniversary promotions, or even reminders for cart abandonment – all with a personal touch that requires minimal effort but delivers a powerful message.
4. A/B Testing
No email campaign is guaranteed success, and the only way to sift the gold from the dust is through A/B testing. By creating small variants of your email messages and measuring the ones that perform the best, you can optimise your content, email designs, delivery times, or subject lines – among other metrics – for the best engagement. With HubSpot, the A/B testing process is beautifully streamlined, and the insights gleaned can have a profound impact on the success of all your email campaigns.
Content Marketing And Email Marketing
The success of email marketing rests on the content that each email delivers. This content is the foundation that robust and enduring customer relationships are built upon. Beyond tedious sales pitches and promotions, value rich content is the currency of trust at all stages of the customer life cycle. HubSpot’s email content planning tools and editorial calendar make it possible to develop an email strategy that precisely aligns with your customers’ interests, ensuring that every email is an invitation to engage, and not an intrusion.
Ultimately, good email marketing is a dialogue, not a monologue. HubSpot recognises this, and includes a range of tools that facilitate easy two-way communication, including surveys, interactive campaigns, and polls, giving your customers a voice and helping them to feel heard. This vital feedback loop can be the lifeblood of your continuous improvement strategy, helping you refine your email marketing campaigns based on direct customer input, and improving the relevance and impact of your content.
Measuring The Success Of Your Email Campaigns
How do you know if your email campaigns are working or falling on deaf ears? Data. Data is the oracle that guides your hand through the email marketing process, and HubSpot will give you access to numerous analytics tools to track open rates, click through rates, conversion rates, unsubscribes, and other key metrics.
Understanding what these numbers signify is critical in assessing the effectiveness of your campaigns and making strategic adjustments. Raw data alone, however, is just the starting point. It’s what you do with this data, how you interpret it, learn from it, and adapt your strategy that is of true value. HubSpot email analytics tools give you a granular view of each campaign’s performance, helping you dive deeply into what the figures actually mean, and offering actionable insights to tweak your approach and refine your engagement levels.
Find Out More
To find out more about HubSpot’s powerful email marketing suite and how it can improve engagement with your customers, please get in touch with one of our expert marketing team by making an enquiry today!
