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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
Elizabeth Winkelman (00:05)
Hey, it's Elizabeth from Web Canopy and today we're talking about something that I've worked in for a really long time and that's marketing emails, right? Love them or hate them, they're effective, right? And there's some tricks and tips and things to make your email campaigns even better. Today I'll share my screen and I'm gonna be using HubSpot but obviously...
You know, there's things that you can use if you're not using HubSpot. Some of these tips will still apply. And one of them, and you can refer to our other video or other podcast on cleaning data, everybody loves it and hates it. But if you do not have clean data, you're not going to have accurate lists. And the number one way to make a successful marketing email campaign is to know your audience and talk to them, right? So if you sell food, like pet food,
and you want to send a list, you know, an email to people who have dogs, but there's some cat owners on there, or you get your list mixed up because your data is not clean. This is a kind of a silly example. Obviously, the people that are cat people are not going to buy dog food. So your email campaign is, you know, not going to be successful. So one of the top things I always recommend doing is creating suppression lists. And in HubSpot, you can easily do this.
And I like using active lists for suppression lists. The first one that I like to create is for unsubscribed, bounced, and opted out of email. So on here, I just go in and grab and make sure they're ORs, right? Because when you're using filters, right, ANDs mean the records need to meet all of the criteria. The OR means it's at least one in order to get onto this list. So
We want to do unsubscribe from email is true or hard bounce reason is known because that's going to get any of the reasons or then another contact property if you're using HubSpot opted out of email. Let's find this one. You can do all of them or none of them is equal to yes. I'm just going to do one for the sake of an example. Save the list.
And what HubSpot is going to do in the background is calculate this list for you. And then as people meet the criteria or fall off, it will automatically update, right? So that's one list, this unsub, bounced, and opted out contacts. The other one to create is active customers. Because if you're sending a marketing email campaign and it's for, you know, a promo,
You don't want to necessarily advertise it to current customers, right? If it's like a SaaS platform, they already use everything. There's no point in trying to send them this information. So you can use them on the suppression list as well. So make sure you know your audience and that you use these lists on your marketing emails. I'm just going to select one again. This is in our test portal. But the other thing you want to do is tailor
the conversation to the audience, right? That's why segmentation exists. You wanna make sure that you're being relevant, again, in my pet food scenario. You don't wanna send an email that's completely about dogs to people who are cat owners, right? You know, most people would think it's awesome, but you're probably not going to have an effective campaign. So make sure that your content is tailored to the audience that you're talking to. Another great tip.
is to make sure you have a good balance of image to text ratio in your email. A lot of people actually have images turned off and so they might not actually see your beautiful images, especially if your email is completely image based. Another tip, subject line. Avoid those spam words like free, things like that in the subject line in the preview text.
You can find lists online on those common spam words. You'll want to make sure you have a correct or an accurate from name. And we actually have another video on connecting an email sending domain that is critical to make sure you have everything authenticated and your email sending domain is connected to whatever platform you're doing. But make sure the from name and the from address is accurate.
and that the from address is actually for that connected email sending domain to your portal. So here is where you would add any lists. So we're just going to add some just for the sake of adding them here. I've added a send to so a recipient list. And then I've added to the two lists that are don't send to or suppression lists, right? So these people
Even if they end up on this list, if they're on one of these two, they won't receive this email, which is exactly what we want. And then in HubSpot, you have the option to not send to unengaged contacts. This will also improve your open rates, deliverability, things like that, because it's not going to send to these people that aren't engaging with your content. There's different things you can do to do re-engagement campaigns and things like that. We'll get to that in a minute.
But make sure you add those suppression lists, have the correct send to list. I always recommend doing schedule for later, regardless of whatever platform you're working on. Even if you need to schedule now, definitely just schedule for later and make it 15 minutes. Do yourself a favor. Something happens, you got a little bit of wiggle room. The other thing I recommend is to send based on a context time zone if that option is available, because then you can pick one time.
right, and then send it and it will arrive in their inbox close to this time instead of in the Eastern time zone, for example, like mine would be right here. The other thing I recommend doing is sending a test email to yourself. I affectionately call this the idiot check, but send it to yourself, make sure the links work, make sure it's formatted correctly, all of that good stuff.
and then before you schedule it, obviously fix any of those errors. And when you send the test and you test things, make sure you click on everything, not just the content that changed. Because you know what? I feel like gremlins exist and sometimes links and things get broken. Just make sure down here everything is correct. Your social icons work, all of that good stuff, things like that inside of your email.
The other thing to keep in mind to keep campaigns, your emails, being successful is to look at your email health. In HubSpot, there's a handy health tool. This one doesn't have any data because again, this is the test portal. But I think it's got enough information here that you can figure out what would show if this was an active portal. The score would show here and then it would also give you percentages for different critical metrics.
You definitely want to keep an eye on the hard bounces, unsubscribing, spam reports for sure. Opens and click-throughs are usually easier to impact, right? This is all 100 % on the subject line. This is all based on the content, the relevancy of the content and what you put in that CTA or the button text, whatever you want people to click on to get them to click. But definitely pay attention to these metrics right here because...
There's no faster way to get blacklisted. I think that's the correct term to use. Then if your health score tanks, this goes through the roof. We don't want that to happen. In HubSpot too, on this email health tool, it'll have recommendations for you down here. And so let's say your open rate is low, for example, it will recommend different things for you to try to boost your open rate. It'll also give you high and low performing emails.
and that is also a great thing to have because then you can pay attention to what's working and then you know what don't do the things that aren't working right it may surprise you your audience may surprise you there's one thing i've learned over the years is that the audience surprises you right there's also an analyze tab in hubspot i know other email platforms have this as well pay attention to these things you may start to see trends in open rates and click rates based on when you sent them the time of day
the day of the week too. And that goes back to really knowing your audience, who you're sending to, and know their habits and trends.
My other recommendation is to make sure you don't have too many emails going out at one time, right? You want to pay attention to what you're scheduling, when you're scheduling it, and who's getting it. Because the one thing we want to avoid is inbox fatigue, especially at certain times of years, right? Like right now, for example, it's getting into the holiday season and everybody's going to get bombarded with emails. We're kind of used to it, right? But make sure you...
notice or keep tabs on what you're sending out one off and then what's going out via workflow. A lot of times these automated emails are set it and forget it, right? And so you may find that a contact might be overwhelmed with emails and all of a sudden your unsubscribes go up. Pay attention to those, keep track of them and then make sure your lists are segmented correctly and you don't have too many automations going on because you definitely don't want to fatigue these people.
based on what you're doing, right? We don't want that to happen. Nobody likes getting too many emails, that's for sure. And then lastly, you know, as an organization, figure out a, it's called a sunset policy. Basically, when do you get rid of records, right? It's kind of important. Nobody likes getting rid of records, but let's be honest, if an email has bounced because it's an unknown email,
or whatever the error code throws. I don't remember the exact terms. Chances are that person is no longer at that organization. You're not going to getting where anyway. So if that never produced anything, consider getting rid of that information. And then similarly, if you have a huge database full of unengaged contacts, that's when you would consider something like a re-engagement campaign if your email health is healthy enough to support something like that because
When you do something like a re-engagement campaign, like yes, you will definitely probably get more people interested and engaged with your marketing content and your emails, again, based on relevancy and the content that's relevant to them. But it will tank your email health, right? It's expected. It's a re-engagement campaign. So for those types of things, send small batches, see what's working, what's not working.
adjust accordingly to the email health, maybe you prioritize contacts that have interacted the most recently, and then deprioritize those ones that have been a couple years, right? There's also different tools that you could use to enrich records. I know HubSpot has one baked in, Breeze Intelligence, but you could use things like Apollo or Zoom Info or Eshoot. You could even look on LinkedIn sometimes to see if those contacts are there. I know that LinkedIn is a little more manual.
But take advantage of things like Never Bounce, stuff like that. I know there's other platforms out there. I'm just throwing out the big dogs to validate those emails and then send those re-engagement campaigns. But also, definitely build that unsubscribe, bounced, opted out list, whatever terminology you're using in your CRM or wherever you're using to keep track of those people. Definitely, definitely, definitely use that.
And those are actually the ones that you should consider getting rid of, right? Or you could, as long as they're not a customer or something like that. You definitely want to pay attention to those. I know I keep saying that, but it's actually really mission critical. Yeah, so that's it. Good luck. Questions, comments, we'd love to hear from you. And check out those other two videos on cleaning your data and connecting an email sending domain.