How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign in HubSpot

Email marketing remains one of the most direct channels for connecting with an audience. It is not just about sending messages; it is about delivering value that converts leads into customers. As businesses continue to embrace digital transformation, building a strong email strategy helps your brand stand out.

In this guide, we cover the steps for creating an email campaign using HubSpot tools. The goal is to deliver a helpful and human experience that drives impactful results for your business.

Define Your Campaign Goals

Setting clear goals is the foundation of any successful email marketing campaign. Without a defined objective, it is difficult to measure success or determine the right content strategy. Think about why you are running this campaign. Do you want to provide resources? Are you looking to build trust? Or do you want the recipient to take a specific action? Identifying this goal determines the types of emails you send, the frequency, and the segment of contacts you target.

Use SMART Criteria

To ensure your goals are actionable, consider using the SMART framework. This approach helps refine your objectives into measurable targets.

1. Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve.
2. Measurable: Identify metrics to track progress.
3. Achievable: Set realistic targets based on past performance.
4. Relevant: Align the goal with broader business objectives.
5. Time-bound: Establish a deadline for the campaign.

Using a template to refine your SMART goal can streamline this process. It allows you to set your goals, calculate your metrics, and evaluate your success systematically.

Manage Your Contact Database

Contact management is a strategy that focuses on using software, such as HubSpot, to store and source contact information. This includes names, engagement history, and email preferences. A clean and organized database ensures your team can track relationships effectively.

Centralize Your Data

It is crucial to have a centralized database that stores all customer information. This allows employees across marketing, sales, and services to work out of a single system. Having a single source of truth saves time, supports effective communication, and provides a holistic profile of a contact’s connections with your business.

If you currently have contacts stored in spreadsheets, other CRMs, or sign-up sheets, import that data into HubSpot. Understanding where your contacts come from is also important. Make a list of all entry points, such as form submissions, manual entry by sales reps, or imports. This tracking ensures you have received opt-in consent from every contact receiving marketing communications.

Ensure Opt-In Consent

Before sending emails, verify that contacts have opted in. This ensures the best experience for subscribers and maintains high email deliverability. Email deliverability is defined as the measurement and understanding of how successful a sender is at getting marketing emails into inboxes.

Consent means collecting verifiable permission from an email recipient to send them email. Recipients must take an action, like selecting a checkbox or filling out a form. If you have lost track of opt-in status, run a permission pass campaign to have contacts confirm their subscription. This step is critical for maintaining a healthy sender reputation.

Audit and Clean Your Database

Email engagement significantly impacts deliverability. Higher rates of positive engagement increase the chance of emails reaching inboxes. Avoid blasting old contacts who are no longer engaged.

• Create and suppress a list of contacts who have never opened a marketing email.
• Delete contacts that hard bounced on past sends.
• Regularly remove stale contacts to keep your database healthy.

Segment Your Contacts

Segmentation is one of the most important steps in an effective email marketing strategy. You want to send the right information to the right people at the right time. This requires gathering information that helps you understand who the person is and where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Group by Shared Characteristics

When you group contacts into smaller buckets based on similar interests or goals, you can tailor your message to meet their needs. Think about ways to organize your contacts to reach your campaign goal. You may use data points like:

• Age
• Location
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Product purchases
• Subscription levels
• App use
• Event attendance

If existing properties in HubSpot do not cover all the data points you need, create custom properties to meet your unique business needs. This level of detail allows for highly relevant communication.

Refine Your Segmentation Strategy

Understanding segmentation is key to personalized marketing. Review lessons on understanding segmentation in HubSpot to deepen your knowledge. Customer segmentation helps you move beyond generic blasts to targeted conversations. Once you know who you want to target, you can focus on creating emails that engage this specific list.

Create Highly-Targeted Emails

Personalization goes beyond adding the recipient’s first name. It involves creating a conversation that engages recipients by sending relevant content and providing value.

Steps for Personalization

1. Collect Data: Ensure you are collecting data or that employees are entering data that allows for personalization. This might include a contact’s location, products associated with a deal, or ticket status.
2. Address Challenges: Create emails that address a key challenge your recipients face. Focus on solving problems rather than just promoting products.
3. Design Best Practices: Be concise, follow brand guidelines, and include eye-catching visual content. A well-designed email enhances readability and engagement.

Create an email in HubSpot using these principles. The platform provides tools to help you build visually appealing and functional messages. By focusing on relevance, you increase the likelihood of recipients taking action.

Select the Delay Between Sends

Setting a delay between email sends is important. It gives the recipient time to engage with the content before receiving the next email in the series. There is no single magic number of days to wait. It depends on your goals, your persona’s behaviors, and the content of the email.

Utilize Workflow Actions

HubSpot’s workflows tool offers various actions to set delays between email sends:

• Delay for a set amount of time: Select a delay period in days, hours, and/or minutes. This is useful for nurturing sequences.
• Delay until a day or time: Use this action to send an email on a specific day of the week and/or time of day. This ensures optimal open rates.
• Center on a specific date: Set actions to execute relative to a specific date. This is great for campaigns leading up to a scheduled event or following up after one.

These tools allow you to automate the timing of your communications, ensuring they feel natural and not overwhelming to the recipient.

Test Your Marketing Emails

Testing your marketing emails involves two main activities: sending a test version to yourself and conducting A/B tests.

Send a Test Version

As an email recipient, it is frustrating to receive emails with broken links, large images, or typos. Sending a test email allows you to double-check that everything works correctly. It ensures your business delivers a positive, professional experience to contacts. Check for:

• Broken links
• Image sizing and loading
• Typos and grammar errors
• Mobile responsiveness

Conduct A/B Tests

A/B testing empowers you to make data-driven changes to improve future sends. With an A/B test, you can test variations of the same email with a sample of your contacts. In HubSpot, once you have created your email (version A), you can create version B with a single variation.

Some aspects to consider varying:

• Image
• Offers
• CTAs (Calls to Action)
• Subject line

You can specify aspects of your A/B test, such as the percentage of contacts receiving each version, the duration of the test (max 100 hours), and what happens if results are inconclusive. This scientific approach helps refine your strategy over time.

Analyze Email Performance

Planning and executing email marketing campaigns take valuable time. Analyzing performance helps you understand why some emails succeed while others do not. Within the email tool in HubSpot, there are three primary ways to explore performance:

1. Analyze a Sent Email: View performance details for a specific email.
2. Analyze Overall Performance: Review details for an entire email marketing campaign.
3. Sources Data: Review how many visits, contacts, and customers resulted from your email efforts.

Track Key Metrics

Understanding metrics and KPIs is essential for continuous improvement. Check resources on viewing email data in HubSpot to get started. Focus on metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. These numbers tell the story of your campaign’s effectiveness.

By regularly analyzing performance, you can identify trends and adjust your strategy accordingly. What did you learn? What worked well? What didn’t? Sharing these learnings with your team fosters a culture of continuous improvement.

Final Thoughts

Creating an email marketing campaign in HubSpot is a structured process. It involves setting goals, managing contacts, segmenting audiences, personalizing content, timing sends, testing, and analyzing results. Each step builds on the previous one to create a cohesive strategy.

As you implement these steps, remember that email marketing is an ongoing effort. It requires attention to detail and a willingness to adapt based on data. The tools provided by HubSpot make this process more manageable, but the strategy comes from you. Focus on providing value to your audience, and the results will follow.

Consider how your current email practices align with these best practices. Are there areas where you can improve segmentation or personalization? Small adjustments can lead to significant improvements in engagement and conversions. By taking a thoughtful approach to email marketing, you build stronger relationships with your audience and drive sustainable growth for your business.