Email Marketing Explained: Tips & Free Tools

If you're a growing business unsure of where to start with email marketing, HubSpot totally has you covered with our free conversion driven email marketing tools. You can get access to HubSpot's free CRM and all of the tools shown in this video by clicking the link in the description below. The key to a successful email marketing campaign all starts with your CRM. It is the single source of truth for your sales and marketing team and gives you access to all of your customer data in real time, such as who's opted in and who's opted out, meaning who can email and who can you not email? So let's pretend we're a B2B consulting firm that helps businesses go viral with creative and innovative marketing strategies. The goal of our email marketing campaign is to get people to subscribe to our podcast. To get started, scroll over to the left hand sidebar, click on Marketing and select Email. From here we'll select Create Email and select Regular Email. From here we can craft professional emails that look beautiful across any device type. You can get started with one of our goal based email templates, or you can select from one of dozens of templates in our marketplace. To get started, I'm going to select this template. It will bring us to our Drag and Drop editor where you can add, edit and even update content based on your personal needs. To get started, it's as simple as selecting one of the elements and double clicking and updating the content. If I'd like to change an image, it's as simple as clicking the image, clicking Replace, and selecting from one of my uploaded images. And there it is. Now it's really important to give your email a great name so that it helps it stand out among all your other emails so you can reference it. So we'll call this email podcast subscription 612 24. That way I know the date. And now since the whole goal of this email is to get people to subscribe, I'm going to go ahead and grab a button to drag it and drop it right here and I'm going to go ahead and edit the button to say subscribe. Today. I can go ahead and link the URL, select that it's going to go to URL. I can even change the size of the button and the font if I want. Now you can see we've got a great email name, we've got our header, a great image, we've got our buttons that are all linked to our URLs ready to go and we've got great content all directing people to listen and subscribe to our podcast. Pro Tip Marketing emails should have one goal. There might be multiple buttons in the email, but they should all lead to one specific landing page with one goal. Email newsletters, however, could have multiple CTAs for multiple options. So as you can see, our email's looking good. I've got multiple buttons that are all leading to the same URL to get people to sign up for our podcast. Next, it's time to look at the settings of our email and start personalizing the email for our audience. You can see and change who the email comes from. The email address click if you want to use this as a reply to email address. Next, it's time to come up with a great subject line that will grab the attention of our audience. Here we can use HubSpot AI by simply selecting Generate and HubSpot AI is going to scan the content of our email and come up with a great subject line for our audience. I'm going to go ahead and insert. Now it's time to personalize the email and we can use this with any of our contact properties. So I'm going to say subscribe to let's Go Viral Podcast today and then I'm going to insert the person's first name. There it is. And now our subject line will read subscribe to let's Go Viral Podcast Today and insert the recipient's first name. Next we need to create some preview text for the email. Again, I can use HubSpot AI by simply selecting Generate and it will scan the contents of my email and create the preview text. I'm going to go ahead and insert that. Make sure that I've got my right internal email name, my language subscription type, office location. Now I can select and add this to a marketing campaign. I can select from existing campaigns or I can create a new campaign with the click of a button. Simply type in the campaign name, give it a color, make sure the campaign has an owner, a start date, and an end date. Next, I can list my campaign goal, give it our audience and any notes, and click Create. Next, it's time to look at our sending and scheduling options. Here I can select to send this to certain recipients or certain lists. If I want to create a new list, I simply click Create New List which will bring me into our CRM. To create a brand new list, I'll give this list a name. There are two main types of lists you can create. Active lists allow contacts to flow in and out of the list based on certain actions that they take or whereas A static list means a customer is added and they are there for life. Let me show you how it works. I'm going to create a static list and go ahead and click Next. Next I'll start by adding a filter. I'll select any contact who has last been contacted within the last year. Now I'm creating a list of customers who was contacted less than 365 days ago. Here I can start to see a preview of the list on the right hand side. And then I'll go ahead and click Save List. Now I can see that that list is starting to populate. If I go back to my email now, I can refresh. I'll go ahead and select my summer 2024 podcast subscription list and I can choose if I want to send it now or schedule for later. I can select a date and a time. I can send it based on contacts time zones instead. And now we're ready to review and schedule. Here you'll see any warnings that might pop up to give you best practices and tips to make sure your email is ready and optimized to go out. Next, we can create a simple automation. This will allow us to email contacts that either didn't open the email or didn't click on a link. We'll go ahead and click Create Workflow and this will start to create a simple workflow that when a contact clicks on an email, they will be opted out of the list. Here you can see that when a contest clicks on a link in our podcast, they'll be added to a list and that will be the end of our workflow. You can also use lists to email people that didn't engage with your first email. Let me show you how easy it is to get started. Scroll over to the left and select CRM and lists. Scroll up top and select Create List. Give your list a name, give it a description, and we're going to select an active list. This way, when somebody does engage with the email, they'll be taken off the list. We'll go ahead and select Next. Here we'll start to add filters to create our list. We'll scroll down to Marketing Emails. We'll select the marketing email we want to use. And now we have a few different options to select from. We can select somebody that clicked the link in the email, somebody that marked the email as spam, or somebody that even opened the email. We can even scroll down and find people that unsubscribe from the email. We'll go ahead and select the email was sent to a contact, but they didn't click a link and we'll click save list. Now HubSpot will create a list of people that got the email but did not click a link. That way we can re engage with them at another time. And that's how easy it is to re segment your email lists. You can also use emails to nurture leads once they filled out a form or a pop up embedded onto your website. Let me show you how it works. To get started, select Marketing and Forms. Here we can select one of our existing forms that we've built or or we can create a new form. We'll go ahead and select Embedded form and click Next. I'll go ahead and select the newsletter signup form and select Start. Here we can customize this form. For example, I always like the first and last name to be on the same line so that looks good. And all we're doing is collecting their email, their first and their last name. If I want to change any of these properties, I certainly can. And I can even change any contact, company or ticket properties. Next I select Options. Here we can choose what happens after they submit the form. We can send a thank you message, direct them to a HubSpot page, a scheduling page, or conditionally redirect them to a scheduling page. For now we're going to send them a thank you message. Next we'll select Style and Preview. Here we can select from pre built form templates. Then we're ready to start some automations. Here I can automate what happens after the form is submitted. We're going to select to send an email. After they submit the form I'll go ahead and create this workflow. And now anytime somebody fills out that form, they're automatically going to be sent an email. I'm going to click here to edit the email. Here I'll go ahead and select my email newsletter sign up. Welcome. A preview will load in the left hand side to see what that email looks like. And finally I can update that form so when I put it on my website, anybody that fills out that form now will will automatically get a welcome email. Now that our email campaign has gone out, it's time to analyze the results. The good news? HubSpot's totally got you covered with our email reports. To get started, scroll onto your marketing emails page and select the email that you'd like to see the results for. First you'll see the tab that says Performance and another one that says Recipients. We're gonna start with Performance. As you scroll down you'll see reports and data from for things like Open Rate. Open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email out of the people who were delivered your email. You'll also see Click Rate. Click Rate is the percentage of people who clicked on a link in the email out of the people that were delivered your email. You can also see Reply rate which is the percentage of people who replied to the email out of the people that were delivered your email. As you scroll down you'll start to see delivery rates. This is the amount of successful deliveries, emails that were bounced, emails that were unsubscribed, or any emails that were put into a spam folder. As you scroll down you'll also see the HTML click map. This is a visual representation of all the clicks on all of the links in your email. As I scroll down here you can see here's the button that we made that says subscribe today and as I hover over I can see where it ranks out of the other clicks in the email and how many clicks were actually made on that link. Here we can see that this link down here actually performed the best with a 35.7% click rate. The click map will not include any clicks for people that were sent smart content or if you sent a text based version of this email. On the right hand side you can see the top clicked links with the number of clicks. You can also see the top engaged contacts from the emails that you sent and finally the time spent viewing email and the engagement of that email over time. A best practice in sending emails is to be aware of your email health. Now the good News is that HubSpot has a tool that does all the work for you to get started with your email marketing health. Select Marketing Emails and then click Health. Here you'll be brought to a dashboard that shows your email marketing health. Use email health data to keep track of your email sending reputation. You you can see if you're on track, you need to improve or if you need to take any actions at all. As you scroll through your email marketing health, you'll see their overall score on the left, the amount of opens, click throughs, hard bounces and unsubscribes and your score over time. It's important to monitor your score over time to see what actions you're taking and how they impact your ability to reach your subscribers. As you scroll down you'll see any recommendations that HubSpot has for you to increase your email sending health and and you'll also see some of your highest and lowest performing emails and if you're just getting started and you want to build your best reputation and email health score, we've got a Getting Started guide built for you. There are tons of other features to explore with email marketing, but let me show you one of my favorites, the Shared Inbox. A shared Inbox is a great way to optimize your email marketing to make sure that anytime somebody replies, they're going to hear from one of your team members in quick time time. This is a place where you can connect multiple team members emails to one inbox. You can get access to things like emails, chat, messenger all in one place. Some of those emails can even be turned into tickets to allow customer service to service those customers or you can respond as needed with your team. According to G2, HubSpot is the leading choice among small mid market and enterprise businesses. You can start with our free tools and as your business grows, HubSpot scale scales with you. So if you're ready to get started sending professional, simple and powerful email marketing campaigns, click the link in the description below to get started. I'm Mark from HubSpot. Thanks for watching.