How to Create the Perfect Email Marketing Campaign in HubSpot

Austin Walker Austin Walker
August 24, 2017   |   5 min read time

Automated email marketing is worth the hassle, but don't get discouraged when your first email campaign isn't perfect at launch. I'll tell you why later. Don't worry, when putting together your first automated marketing  starting an email campaign, just know that it will not be perfect at launch. We'll tell you why later.

First off, building email campaigns is not easy. There are a couple things working against the marketer. One, email marketing is becoming more difficult. It makes sense right? More companies and people have caught on to automated email. So with the increase in emails, consumers are getting irritated and moving to other sources.

Two, and I'm certainly not saying that it doesn't work, averaged KPIs like open rates and conversion rates are coming back a little lower than a decade ago.  

Let's not look at what we have to work against. Let's see how we overcome this.

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Where to Start

If you're looking to start an email campaign writing emails, you're starting in the wrong spot.

Let's jump to the very end of where our email campaign starts, at our audience. No, we're not in HubSpot yet. Or whichever CRM you prefer.

In order to build a successful inbound marketing campaign, the emails need to be targeted to a very specific audience. One email will not work for everyone.

A specific audience is not built on demographics. Instead, it's built on research, understanding who the potential client is, what information they're looking for, and how you can help them. For a lot of companies, a lot of trouble comes from understanding how they can help their clients. So it's a great point to start at.

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Planning the emails

Before you even start writing out each email, there needs to be a strategy, a goal, and a way to measure the goal. In an age where anything conducted online can be measured, if you're not taking the time to utilize data that is created, the email campaign is just wasted time.

You should consider the sales cycle. Where are your potential clients in their purchasing process?Which is the best time to reach them while they're searching?

How long should your emails be? Well, it goes back to the target audience of the campaign. If you're targeting a CEO within a small business compared to C-level executives in Fortune 500 companies, the conversation is going to be different. How much can you change their world? Or, for a lot of situations, if you're speaking to a manager, how do you increase their bottom line (aka their end of year bonus)?

One other consideration would be how to design the structure of the email to make sure that the audience is being funneled into the proper place to make sure their questions are answered easily.

The amount of emails you'll actually need to have in your campaign depends on how long the sales cycle is, and what the goal of the campaign is. If your campaign is just to create awareness and keep within the top-of-mind of your audience, more emails spread over the campaign will be appropriate. However, if it's to actually target audience members that are in a position to start reaching out, less emails packed with really great information would be more appropriate.

Write Each One

Structure emails to be easily skimmable, so that your audience can look for important information to answer their questions.

Be sure that the branding across your website is the same as within your emails. This will make sure that any clickthroughs don't get confused when they're ready to come back to the website. This can help improve the bounce rate and decrease unsubscribes.

Keep the campaign goals in mind. Getting away from the brand of the campaign can lose your audience over time.

Here's Why the Campaign Will Not Be Perfect

No matter how much research is conducted, or even how much you may know about your potential clients and what they're habits are like within different part of the sales cycle, there will always be room for adjustments.

Monitor the click-through rates or even try A/B testing with everything from the headline down to the keywords and information being used within each email.

HubSpot development questions?  We can help!

Take the time to evaluate why your audience is bouncing, unsubscribing, or what can be done ot make sure that their questions are answered.

Reach out to potential audience members to ask what type of information might be more useful, and consider how you can implement the solution for that group.

An email campaign is a great way to automate awareness and grow the amount of leads in your funnel. Emails are free, so it has become something that consumers are easily turned off by. However, valuable emails that shows an audience how you can help them will always be successful. Most people are always looking for ways to help themselves.


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