HubSpot is probably best known for its CRM and marketing automation tools, but it also has an extremely effective suite of email marketing and campaign management tools, that can transform the fortunes of any business that uses email marketing. If you are a HubSpot user and haven’t yet made full use of the platform’s email marketing tools, you’re in for a treat. In this article, we’ll look at how HubSpot’s email marketing features can be leveraged for better and more efficient campaign management.
Strategy 1: Personalisation and segmentation
Personalisation and segmentation are the two pillars of successful email marketing and can greatly impact the success and cost effectiveness of your campaigns. In short, personalisation refers to tailoring your email content to fit the specific interests and needs of individual recipients, while segmentation involves dividing your CRM into smaller demographic or target groups based on certain criteria. Generally, one goes with the other. You need a good segmentation strategy in order to personalise your email content.
How HubSpot helps: HubSpot CRM is built around the potential for effective, multilevel segmentation, and this feeds directly into the success of your email marketing campaigns. There is no end to the ways in which you can segment your CRM using HubSpot – one of the most effective ways is by organising it according to buyer persona/ideal customer profile, and buyer journey stage. Using just these two metrics, you can personalise your emails by using merge tags to insert a recipient’s name or other information stored in your CRM into the body of each email. Your contact database can also be segmented based on other user-determined factors such as location, interests, or age, allowing you to send targeted emails to extremely niche customer segments.
Strategy 2: A/B Testing
How do you arrive at the most successful approaches through email marketing? By testing the results of different approaches against others. A/B testing or split testing comprises sending two slightly different versions of an email to see which one performs better. The two versions will be virtually identical save for a specific element that you want to test, such as a call to action (CTA), subject line, or layout. The engagement levels of each version – which are often quite subtle – will help you determine which approach resonates best with your audience. Further testing will let you refine the tested feature until it is perfectly optimised for your target market.
How HubSpot helps: Traditional A/B testing involves complex spreadsheets and a lot of manual data entry, which is time-consuming and prone to error. HubSpot provides a built in A/B testing tool that makes it quick and easy to run email marketing experiments and track your results, allowing you to test a huge number of variables, analyse the data, and use the insights to improve future email marketing campaigns. It also makes it quicker and more viable to run a greater number of A/B tests, incorporating continual improvement into your email marketing strategy.
Strategy 3: Automated drip feed campaigns
A ‘drip feed campaign’ is a series of prewritten emails that are sent to subscribers either at predetermined intervals, or in response to an action by the subscriber – e.g. a subscriber opens a link on a previous email or make repeat visits to your prices page on your website. Drip feed campaigns are a time-saving way of nurturing leads, onboarding new customers, and re-engaging inactive subscribers. Using a scheduling or automation tool, these campaigns can be set up to go without any manual input from your marketing team, which keeps your campaigns on track and frees up time for other tasks.
How HubSpot helps: HubSpot includes an automated drip feed campaign tool through its workflows feature, allowing you to create complex sequences of emails and custom trigger actions based on a contact’s behaviour, and making your email marketing more personalised and effective.
Strategy 4: integrating email marketing with your other marketing channels
Gone are the days when businesses ‘just did’ email marketing or ‘just did’ PPC. The best results in digital marketing come from integrating email marketing with all your other digital approaches. By doing so, you have the potential to reach a wider audience and also create a more cohesive experience for your prospects and customers.
How HubSpot helps: HubSpot provides a full multi-channel marketing ecosystem with complete synergy between email marketing and other approaches. This is a huge advantage for businesses because it avoids the need to use multiple applications and eliminates the risk of duplicate communications – while also saving a great deal of time. With HubSpot, you can effortlessly integrate each email campaign with other channels, including your social media platforms, website, and blog, cultivating a more consistent brand message and reinforcing business recognition by reaching your audience through various touch points. This can increase engagement levels and conversions.
Next steps
HubSpot’s innovative suite of tools and features are designed to help SMEs make a real impact with their email marketing efforts. To start improving your results from email marketing and making full use of HubSpot’s email marketing tools, please get in touch with one of our HubSpot specialists today by clicking here.
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