In 2023, an estimated 347.3 billion emails were sent and received each day globally, a figure that keeps growing year-on-year. This is an astronomical volume of emails, setting very high stakes for businesses looking to stand out in an overcrowded inbox. (For context, there are ‘only’ approximately 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy!)
How do you maximise your open rates and click through rates in this context without your content getting completely lost?
The answer: HubSpot. HubSpot comes with a range of pioneering email automation features that can revolutionise the way your business approaches customer communication, marketing, and sales, helping you maximise your ROI. Let’s have a look at these features in some more detail:
1. Personalisation At Scale – Tailor Your Customer Experience
Time is short and emails are many, so you have to give your prospective customers a compelling reason to look at your email, let alone open it. This makes personalisation a key part of any email marketing strategy. HubSpot stands out by helping you to segment your email lists, so that you send the right message to the right customer at the right time. Other email marketing tools allow segmentation as well, but you often have to do this manually, e.g. by uploading a CSV contact list. HubSpot’s features take a lot of the time and guesswork out of list building, so that your email segments accurately align with your buyer profiles and target markets.
How To Do It:
- Use contact properties such as purchase history, location, and engagement data to start segmenting your CRM lists for email campaigns.
- Use HubSpot’s automated smart list tool to update your list in real time based on your contact’s profile changes and behaviours.
- Customise your email content through personalisation tokens, making your emails more relevant by dynamically inserting specific information into your emails relevant to each recipient. When used in a marketing email, the personalisation token automatically populates the content with the corresponding data from your HubSpot CRM records.
2. A/B Testing: Taking The Guesswork Out Of Email Optimisation
Often, minor tweaks in marketing emails can lead to significant results, which is why A/B testing plays such an important role in ROI optimisation. Unfortunately, manually testing email versions for tiny changes is cumbersome and time-consuming, limiting how practical A/B testing is for most campaigns. HubSpot’s email tools are a breath of fresh air, making this process straightforward and easy. At the click of a button, you can test anything from different subject lines to CTA button placements and see what works the best.
How To Do It:
- For the best results, change one element at a time to isolate which factors most affect your metrics.
- Test with a significant sample size to ensure the results are representative and reliable.
- Monitor the performance of each email against a baseline to understand what’s resonating best with your audience.
3. Behavioural Triggers: Catching Your Customers At The Right Moment
If you buy into the Many Worlds Theory of quantum mechanics, then there are an infinite number of universes in which different timelines unfold based on chance differences – Sliding Doors style. Think for a moment about what this means in terms of lost sales. How many huge customer contracts haven’t materialised simply because the customer didn’t see your marketing email? The fact that these relationships may be playing out in an alternative universe is cold comfort. More tangible support comes from HubSpot’s behavioural trigger tools, which allow you to send emails based on a customer’s behavioural triggers or actions, so you catch them at just the right time.
This is an important difference from traditional email marketing. The conventional, or passive model, simply sends emails out at a set time and hopes for the best. The trigger-based model, on the other hand, only sends the email when the customer does something to trigger it, such as when the customer abandons a shopping cart, when a product they have looked at becomes low in stock, when they register for an event, or submit a form. This is a great way of making sure more of your emails get seen and maximising your ROI.
How To Do It:
- Define the behaviour you want to trigger the email – e.g. page visits, click throughs from a previous email, and so on.
- Set up workflows to automate your follow-up emails based on the trigger conditions.
- Monitor the effectiveness of your trigger-based email campaigns and refine them as necessary.
What Next?
To find out more about email marketing and how to maximise your ROI through HubSpot’s automation features, please get in touch with one of our certified HubSpot specialists today by clicking here.
