HubSpot Email Explained: Marketing, One to One, and Transactional Emails

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Yeah, it is.

We're going to activate the powers. Welcome back everybody to Hub Heroes, the show where we Help HubSpot users just like you stop guessing and start building with confidence today. I'm super excited because we're going to be talking about email. I know that may not sound exciting, but there's some things that I've learned along the way, some things that Max and Chad threw into the Slack channel when I brought this up. And honestly, think email, but then also think today we're going full nerd in the best way probably possible on this. Because here's the thing, like, we've, we've seen people come from MailChimp. We've seen people come from ActiveCampaign. We've seen people try to build the same system in the system they once were. And, you know, one day it's you're sending clean newsletter. The next day you're dealing with deliverability and subscription chaos and transactional confusion. And it's just like a lot. And some people aren't even getting a fifth or a tenth of what they could be getting out of HubSpot. And so this, this episode, I think I'm, I'm going to classify it, Chad and Max, as a little bit of a did you know style breakdown to HubSpot email, some of the features that people might not know, might not be using, or people are just flat out ignoring or misunderstand per se. And so we're just going to kind of dig into this. So hopefully we can help people make decisions, or better decisions when it comes to HubSpot email, what they should and could do, uh, with all of the tools at their fingertips, which again, I believe there's probably going to be several people that are listening this and go, wait, what? You can do that? So let me, let me start this off, and whoever wants to go first can go first, but when you hear the words Oh, I'm scared what Max is gonna say, but when you hear the words HubSpot email, like, what's the number one thing that you think people might get wrong, uh, right out the gate when, when we're talking about HubSpot email?

Ah, I mean, yeah, I mean, get— yeah, I mean, I, I know what my answer I think used to be.

What was, what was that?

This is not just your newsletter tool. You know what I mean? But like, I feel like newsletters are like back, right? At the same time. But then I also think it's like those are not the same newsletters that I was ever talking about, you know what I mean? Like, I think there is, you know, the newsletters that I would see people send out, which was all they were ever doing with the tool, was like the newsletters that were like, oh, well, we were going to be at this trade show and oh, we hired our new—

we hired a new accountant.

Say hi, Jake. Of like, just like the stupidest, uh, you know, ABC Corporation acquires XYZ. It's like no one, no one cares, um, at all, right? Um, you know, and here's, uh, there's too long and too dense and obviously no one's gonna read them. Um, but now I think, you know, people are doing the whole newsletter thing, but the, but the thing is, it's like, I think you can get away with doing a newsletter if it's like content, like if it, if the newsletter is the content, not like the newsletter is like literally just news from your company, right? Um, so I think those are like very different things and I wouldn't want to kind of confuse them. But, um, yeah, I mean, today, like, I don't know how many people are still like just buying HubSpot just to send a freaking email newsletter, but, you know, back in the day, that's, that's unfortunately all I ever saw, which is—

yeah. Chad, what, what's your thought on like what people HubSpot email kind of get wrong?

Yeah, yeah, I, I think not all emails are created equal in HubSpot. Funny enough, an email for a marketing email is not the same as a one email, which is considered a sales email, which is not the same as a transactional email. And there is a distinction between the different things and their use cases, but technically under the hood, they're all quote unquote emails in the email object. And funny enough, did you know, did you know that we have email-based workflows now, which is kind of cool? For one-to-one emails.

I'm pretty sure. Yeah, but be careful because I don't want people to get confused. It's not like you can fire a workflow or do like— it's not sequences reimagined. It's like once a one-to-one email is in the system, then you can like trigger some things to happen based on that one-to-one email being sent. Because the title of that update is confusing as all get out, product team, because, because immediately everybody's like dancing in the street and they're like popping bottles and then they're like, Oh yeah. Oh wait, that's not what I thought it was. But, but still, it's—

it doesn't give you the ability to send one-to-one emails. It does give you the ability to trigger on them though, which can be really advantageous depending on what you're trying to do.

Super powerful. I'm, I'm not trying to neuter or the other word that I don't want to say on the show. Yeah, I'm not trying to downplay the, the, the power of the, the, the update. I'm just saying, don't get confused where like all of a sudden you run from the show and you go in like, I'm going to send one-to-one emails via workflow. No, no. But you can trigger some cool stuff after the fact. Mm-hmm.

Can I, can I ask something? You know what really like grinds my gears so much is how expensive transactional email is. Oh, comparatively. Is that— but, but also like, like I, I hate it because what, it's like $600 a month.

Or something. Let me— let me—

$600 a month, really?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I could be wrong. I could be spreading some HubSpot misinformation here, but I'm almost 100% sure it's $600.

Let me see, let me see.

Look, what— like, what I was like, what is that?

Yeah, yeah, so, so, well, the first Google search that I did, um, HubSpot transactional email add-on pricing overview, Transactional email add-on, $600 a month. Marketing Hub Pro.

Was that from their site?

Of course I'm on HubSpot, bro. Yes, yeah, I'm on the— I'm on blog.hubspot.com/marketing/hubspot-transactional-email. I should have breathed before I tried to read this— dash pricing.

Um, but it's the entire file extension and all the UUID and the query parameters. Can we get the query?

No, there's George.

There's no query parameters.

Hey George, go ahead and read me off the UUID, the Cookie, please.

I'm gonna need that cookie.

Let me take a big breath. But here's the thing, here's the thing. For that minimum amount of $600 a month, uh, it's unlimited transactional sends. It's also dedicated IP, which, okay, and it's SMTP/API integration. Um, there is also an additional dedicated IPs you have to contact sales for that anyway. Yep. So why does that— why does the cost grind your gears though, Max?

Because, well, right now it's like a selfish thing, um, you know, just because Max wants to send transactional emails. And being in the event— being in the event space, we have plenty of people that want to use HubSpot to send like transactional emails for like registrations and stuff like that. And like, we're eventually— we're building our own email infrastructure to be able to do all that stuff, but like You know, it just sucks to like go and be like, yeah, you know, you can send emails to people through HubSpot, but if they've unsubscribed from you, they're not going to get those emails. And then it's like, yeah, well, they're like, well, what can we do to combat? I'm like, you get transactional email. And I'm like, it's more expensive than our product, but like, you know what I mean? It's just like, it's really awkward. And like, I just remember how awkward it was, like in the sales process too. Like, you know, you had a couple of people that weren't even going to really send that many transactional emails and they're looking at $600 a month. But, you know, I think it's more just me complaining. Like, I'm not sure, like, what is the average— like, what's, what's the average monthly cost of a transactional email?

So, well, and here's my question while you're doing that, Max. Like, should, should an event email be transactional? Like, I think there's going to be listeners who are listening to this and they're going to be like, well, what should be transactional and what shouldn't be transactional? Because if I know anything about Humans. It's that if they could send and know that it never could not go, like they might send every email as a transactional email.

Like, yeah.

Let's see, isn't there some sort of rules though when you actually purchase it that they outline what you can and can't use transactional email?

There might be. There might be.

Oh yeah, there absolutely is.

Yeah.

Yeah. There's, there's certain rules for it. I mean, the easiest way you can think of, like for transactional emails, like when when something can qualify as transactional is like when you're sending something that's like a payment receipt or an account update or like legal, uh, legal notices or something like that, right? So it's like you change your terms of service and you have to notify people in your database. That's a transactional email. Uh, it can't be anything that has like marketing in it, right? Because you're like— what people may not know is, but what transactional emails basically allow you to do in HubSpot in a very, very basic sense is email people even if they've unsubscribed from your mailing list. Right. And the reason behind that is like, well, even if someone's unsubscribed from your marketing, if they were to buy something, they need billing. Like, you've got to be able to get paid, you know what I mean? Like, exactly. And so like HubSpot will let you do that, right? You know, and what'll happen is when you have transactional email and you go and like select a type of email that you're sending or setting up for an automation, there is an option to select it as transactional instead of one of your subscription types, right? And that will go to people regardless if they've unsubscribed from you or not, right? Um, you know, so that's a transactional email. And there's a couple of different ways to do it. Uh, well, there's 3 methods, right? There's like sending as a traditional email, like one-to-one. So that's good for like legal notices, right? Where it's like, oh, we're sending out an update to our privacy policy, right? You'd basically just set up a one-to-one, like a, uh, what they call them, regular emails now, right, where you're just sending it to a list and you would just choose transactional as the email, uh, subscription.

I love those privacy, uh, updates.

Yeah, yep, yep. Then there's, um, the automated ones where you send them through a workflow, which is like the same thing. Um, there's single send API, that's the second one, right? So like sending them through a, through a workflow is like almost the same as sending to a list, right? There's no different, you're just Choosing the type. So there's single send API. Single send API is pretty sweet. Um, what'll happen there is, um, you set the email up and you could put custom tokens in it, right? And basically what happens is you have some other outside system triggers a request to HubSpot to be able to send that email, right? Um, and the cool thing about having those custom tokens in there, that comes along with whatever, you know, payload you're hitting the API with to say, hey, here are some values for this custom token in the email, right? And that, uh, will send the email but also update those tokens with those, uh, custom things you want to see.

External values. They're values you don't have to have inside of HubSpot, which is super advantageous depending on what you're trying to do.

And that often goes hand in hand with, uh, information that would only be in a transactional email, right? Uh, such as like a sensitive account number or payment information, like whatever it may be, right? Um, oftentimes you'll see people like send over information from like a receipt that in like an HTML format or something like that and send it that way when it's stuff you don't want to store in your HubSpot database. That's a really good method to do that. And then the other one is SMTP API, right? Where basically the emails are sent from another system, but they're kind of like logged into HubSpot so you can see it. I can't remember the exact like use case for that. Like if you're already sending it through some other infrastructure, but you just want to see it as if it was sent inside of HubSpot.

It's almost like hitting the BCC address.

Yeah, it's kind of like you have a little bit more flexibility. Yeah, it's like compliance copy, but inside of HubSpot instead of out into like some other system, right?

You know what I love more than privacy updates is compliance processes. I love those.

Oh yes. Online stuff is really cool. Wait, but there's, there's one big thing to also like mention to people that I think this is like a lesser known thing is that single send API stuff. Has been relegated to just transactional emails for a very, very long time. But there is now just a regular marketing email single send API. So like you can, I'm pretty sure you can do single send API on regular marketing emails without transactional email, right? Don't you just have to have enterprise, Chad? Yeah. So, so that's okay.

So Chad, I have two questions for you, but before I do that, I did scroll down a little bit further on the blog that I said I was on to like find out that, well, $600 a month, which is, you know, that might be like under somebody's couch cushion for somebody listening. But it says making the right choice. Choose transactional email add-on if you send automated emails triggered by customer transactions. You need guaranteed deliverability of critical business communications. You want to protect your marketing IP reputation. You send high volumes of order confirmations, account alerts, or system notifications. You require API integration for external system triggers, or you need unlimited sending without the marketing contact impact. Consider alternative solutions if you only need occasional transactional emails. You don't currently use Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise. You prefer specialized transactional email services with pay-per-send models. Or you want minimized platform complexity and cost.

Now I'm pretty sure that's called SendGrid.

Yeah, pretty much.

Also, also dedicated IP is a separate SKU, right? I do believe I'm almost 100% sure. Yeah. And, and so kind of mixed into that, like this idea of like you completely owning like your domain reputation and everything. When HubSpot sends marketing emails for folks who are listening, they're all sent through the same like shared email sending like IPs, right? And that's a good thing because is like what that means you can do, uh, company that hasn't emailed anybody from your domain anymore, it means that you can take advantage of HubSpot's, uh, exquisite email sending and deliverability and, uh, IP addresses that they have without you having to do any stupid warm-up periods or any of this other shit, right? Um, so like there's a big, big benefit to that. Some people who like to be really, really hard, like, you know, they're, they're hardos about their domain reputation and they want to be able to have complete control on it and they want to go, oh, something gets screwed up for HubSpot, I don't want that to screw our stuff up. You can get dedicated IPs from HubSpot. It's going to cost more money, obviously, right? But then like you're not sending your stuff out of the main, you know, uh, shared sending swim lanes that everyone else is doing, or however that works, right? Um, but just keep in mind like there's a warm-up period. You gotta like do the work to get those domains functioning just like anything else. But HubSpot is a pretty sweet automated process to like get it done. And from What I understand is pretty painless, right? Um, but you know, don't, don't hate on shared sending email domains, guys. It's not that serious.

No, I don't think it's that big a deal. So, Chad, I have, I have two questions because, um, I'm, I'm new at this, like, trying to, you know, herd the squirrels. Um, one, yeah, I didn't know you were a prophet. I guess that's a statement more than a questioner, uh, so I'll just go with it. You literally said in Slack, you said I know you got some cool insights about single send API @MaxCohen, and he literally just went there already. Like, he went there. Now, my question is, I started with the question of what are people getting wrong right out the gate with email chat? Did you even answer that question yet?

Yeah, yeah, it was the email.

Oh yeah, that's right. That's right.

Right. So there's— they're not all creditable. And then I said the dreaded word Oh, well, we didn't hear any of that transactional email.

Yeah.

Okay. I had to bleep it or we'd get going again.

Yeah, we'd get going on the topic again if I said it, but it was something email that happens one at a time and you have to ensure that they have deliverability. Shh, Max, you're not listening. Okay. Yeah. And then that's how we got off on that tangent.

Squirrel. Squirrel. Okay, squirrel track. Well, then let's, let's, let's move on and carry on. So, by the way, Actually, let me answer this real quick. Yeah, because I want to just give people maybe a different mindset or an idea to think about when they start to send emails. So many people, when I watch what they do with emails, it's one way, it's, it's broadcast. And the one thing that I would ask people to do is whether you're creating any type of email, whether it's a marketing email, sales email, transactional email, If it's something that we'll talk about in a little bit, which is literally like a maybe an email that's powered by HubDB. Oh, I'm teasing it. I'm teasing it. But can you make it a— can you make it a relationship? Can you make it a two-sided conversation? Can you think about giving people the opportunity to reply? Can you actually make it a value? Because by the way, the tangent that Max went on, beginning with newsletters, is, is it— if it's, if it's a value, it's gonna be okay. But nobody wants to learn about Jake. And I don't know if that's Jake from State Farm or Jake my neighbor, but nobody wants to know more about Jake.

Okay, Jake from—

I mean, come on. All right, so, so guys, what's— what is a feature, email feature, um, that you love that's maybe different than what we've talked about? That you think maybe most typical HubSpot users might not even know exists?

Oh, well, custom email tokens and workflows.

Okay, so, so wax poetic on that.

So this is— so one thing that like really sucks here is that like it's one of these like lesser known features that is just like hidden away in Marketing Hub Enterprise, right? Which is really annoying to me. Um, but, uh, custom email tokens borrows from the idea of those custom tokens from the single send API, right? Where basically, um, when you're sending emails through workflows, okay, instead of having to, um, marketing emails through work— yeah, marketing, sorry, marketing emails through workflows. But I guess this is just— this could just as easily work with transactional ones. It's like really any, any email sent via a workflow, right? What you can do is instead of putting in a personalization token, right, in that email, um, what you can do is you can type in brackets custom dot and then the name of any like variable that you want, right? And then when you go and set up that email to be sent, right, it'll detect that there is, um, custom variables in there. Actually, I don't know if it— I don't think it auto-detects. It just— it gives you the option if you have Enterprise to add custom tokens, right, where basically you put the name of the variable and then where the data comes from, or if it's some kind of like static value, right? And so what's cool about this is it gives you a lot more of a flexible way to get like, I don't know, people normally call them like merge tokens or email mail merge.

Does that support fallback values like with the vertical bar or does it not?

I don't think it does. I'm not 100% sure. I don't think it does, right? Um, it might and I might forget how it does it.

Right.

Um, but yeah, you could put these custom tokens in and then like use your workflows to basically pick where that data is coming from and injecting it, right? And this is particularly helpful because like I think a lot of people get kind of like screwed up in terms of like how personalization tokens work in email when you're talking about tokens that are not just contact properties, right? This is where people really kind of like break their brains around like how to send an email that has data from a different record that's not a contact in a workflow, right? Yeah. So the basics, folks listening at home, right, if you don't have access to this awesome, uh, custom tokens tool, right, when you're building an email, all right, and you see, oh, I can put something else besides contact properties into this email, right? One, you can only do that when you have the email set up as an automated one. You cannot do it as a single send or as a— sorry, a single send to a list, right? Or a regular, regular email to a list. You could only have contact properties in there, right? Because when the email is being sent, it only knows who the contact is. It doesn't know any other objects that may be involved in this. So like, you'll notice that you don't even have the option to add properties from other objects when you do a regular email. You might be able to do it with company, right? Because it doesn't use primary company or something, right? So, and you can only have one primary company when you're a contact, right? So it has a way to figure that out, right? But everything else you can't. So let's say you wanted to send an email that had like, uh, custom object, uh, based stuff on it, and you have a custom object called I don't know, ponies. All right, what you'd have to do is you'd build that email as an automated email. All right, you would have all of your custom properties in there from contacts and custom properties from your ponies object. Okay, that email has to be sent from a workflow that is centered around your ponies object. The reason being is that when a workflow enrolls, it enrolls a specific object. So when it sends the email, it knows which one of your Pony records to use to fill those properties in. It's going to know the contact as well because an email always has a recipient, right? And so this is where like a lot of people also don't understand when you're sending an email in a workflow that's based on an object other than a contact, it's sending it to contacts directly associated to that object going through the workflow. Yeah, the ponies, right? And so like a lot of people like don't understand the nuance of that because I don't think it's like very well explained.

Well, especially since workflows have started to become a little bit more like— while under the hood they are primary object-based. It's not as obvious as it once used to be because it was very rigid at how you used to create. Yeah. Now that abstraction layer over it where it's like, hey, you know, you just gotta figure it out that it, it is a primary object-based workflow.

Yep.

Yeah, it doesn't scream in your face, this workflow is centered around this object. Yeah, yeah. I— that's the one thing I hate the new way that you do work. We're not gonna get into it, but like, it's because of that. I, I do not like the workflow, but I like— it was so much easier for my mental model and for teaching people and everything. Yeah, that like you build a workflow around a certain object, not like— I feel like all they wanted to do there was like make it, make it seem like, uh, you know, it was more flexible when like really it's just— no, we're just making it more confusing, amorphous. We're getting into it, right?

Tune in next week as Max talks about 12 reasons he hates the new workflow setup.

Oh my God. So yeah, what's going to be my 13th reason?

So here's the thing. So if I recap what you said, right, because I've now gone over to knowledge.hubspot.com as, as one would do, use custom tokens in automated emails, use custom tokens in automated marketing emails. When sending emails through workflows, you can create custom tokens based on data such as enrolled record data, associated record data, or information received from external sources via integrator actions. So just know that you can do those pieces, ladies and gentlemen. Also, by the way, Max, you brought up ponies. Am I the only one that immediately went to like Genuine Pony, like the song, and was like— anyway, okay, I digress, I digress. Oh, um, I almost danced just for you listening. I almost did a little bit of like, uh, you know, a little Anyway, let's move on. Let's move on. Chad, what?

I was thinking of baby horses. Well, that's—

I figured you were talking about— well, ponies aren't baby horses. Those are called colts and foals. But anyway, I digress. Ponies are ponies.

What? What's it? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What's a pony if it's not a baby horse?

Pony is like a small horse, but it's not— it's like a miniature horse. But a baby is a colt or a foal. Of a horse. Anyway, uh, you can Google that later.

Uh, by the way, yes, yes, I thought the foal was just when it came out and like couldn't walk that well.

You can Google it. By the way, yes, ladies and gentlemen, uh, a little unknown fact is, uh, your boy George B. Thomas used to be a certified, uh, riding instructor, Western and English, and worked at a ranch where we did, uh, we did horseback rides over 4,200 acres Uh, so there are pictures of me wearing a cowboy hat, but that's not why— here, why we're here. Chad, what is a HubSpot email feature that you love that most people probably don't know exists?

Uh, yeah, well, I'll give an example of how a business that I work for kind of had to use emails. And I guess, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's like a—

what do you mean by had to use emails?

Well, we use it a little bit of a non-conventional way. So first of all, let me just kind of like circle back here, and you guys can just sanity check me if either things have changed or I've always been wrong, but, um, you can send emails as like an owner property. However, when people reply to those emails as an owner property, unless it's hooked up to an inbox, they don't get them, right?

Uh, no, I think you can. I think, I think that's one of the reasons why you use an owner property and owner email as a token. And then I think they do get them. But you have the ability to also set a different reply email in there if you wanted to, right?

I just remember always being in there and seeing that if the email that you are having them reply to isn't hooked up to an inbox as a warning, then they're not going to get it. And it seemed like they made it look like unless it was connected to a HubSpot inbox. But I could have been wrong there.

Well, I think you'd still get the email, but it wouldn't log the reply.

It wouldn't log the reply.

And that might be what it was happening.

Yeah, yeah. That I think is what it was. And so that— yes, that's exactly it. It doesn't log the reply. And this is why we did this. And so outline this. So this was like it wasn't transactional, but it was a little bit of a situation where we would need to send a timely notification to a customer from whomever was doing interactions with them. And this was like a physical one-to-one onsite inspection of their house. Like, this is when I worked at Roofing Business Partner. And so it's like, okay, we're doing an inspection of your house and we want to send an email as the inspector of the roof. And so we would actually use just a single automated sequence email with all the personalization tokens. So it would send as a one-on-one email and then get logged in HubSpot, and then the sequence would be done and they wouldn't need anything else. And it would be like, hey, thank you so much for having us out. Like, here's your proposal, a link to it. Here's, you know, some variables about your projected cost. Click on the link. You can sign it here. Like all that kind of stuff. And so I think there is in some certain scenarios the ability to use automated sequence enrollment for non-spammy things to get around some of the quirks of the marketing email tool and some of that auto-logging stuff with replies. Right. And that's what we did. So using just a single email, long automated email sequence, and that was it to get basically a good send out with pertinent information to the customer to make sure they never got dropped once all the properties in HubSpot were known, which was connected from an external— externally integrated system.

Very nice. Very nice. So I have— I have two. I'll talk about one first because I think the second one might tend to send us into a spiral of other conversations around a thing called subscription types in HubSpot. But anyway, the first thing that I want to mention that I think that more people could be doing. And again, I think this might be enterprise feature, but it's programmable emails. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I've been using HubSpot since 2012, and it wasn't until this year, the year of our Lord and Savior, 2020— I'm just kidding, 2026— where I actually got asked by a client to create a programmable email. And what that meant was I was able to create a programmable email module that looked at a HubDB table, and we were able to pull certain information out of that HubDB table, and it was based on a property. And whatever this property was set, that was like one of the indicators in HubDB table. And so now we'll be able to send that, and the header image is different, the testimonial is different, the main text The text is different. The CTA button is different. And it's all different based on the information that's looking at for this property code in the line of the HubDB table. And it's like this, like, I think smart content, but on like steroids. And like, it was one of the most fascinating journeys to go through. One, creating the module. Thanks, Claude Code and AI assistance. And then setting up the HubDB table and then previewing it and seeing just it magically change based on this stuff. So programmable emails, if you, if you have not used that or thought about using that for a very like granular way, and we're about to do this in another way, by the way, where the property is literally going to be state. And so then it basically is a geographical send based on the state that they're in and what the email will actually send. So like once you think about one way to do this, you might think about multiple ways to do this, but like programmable emails based off of HubDB. The second one I'll bring up because I'm super curious if you guys will have thoughts around just HubSpot subscription types in general. Yeah. Yeah, Max.

Yeah, real quick, George, is programmable email still in beta?

It might still be in beta.

Yeah, it was in beta when I was—

it might be. That's crazy. But it's— but it's— I would call it like It's a forever video, but it's really— you know how some betas suck?

And yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I get that. It's good. It was working back then, my guy. I don't know why it's like they still call it beta. It's—

I don't know, um, because it's good and it, and it works really well. So, but yes, um, yeah, I do believe it. When I go to the knowledge base for information around it, it still does say beta. Version. Here's the other thing that I have not done since 2026, or I might have started this in 2025, but the end of 2025 is I don't know if people understand that they can actually create custom visibility rules for subscription types. And what I mean by that is usually people will create subscription types where it's like the newsletter, the podcast, the, you know, the blog, the marketing, the one-to-one, the customer service or success or whatever you want to call it. But one thing that people usually get wrong with that is they like give a description that feels totally internal instead of external and never teases anybody to want to stay subscribed. It's the worst. Like that, that the email preference center, when you go look at it, it should look like you're trying to entice them to stay subscribed, not something that says how Bob sends his sales emails. Like that's just not— anyway, this is different though because this is custom visibility rules. Where you can say things like, if somebody is in, let's say, a segment, and because they're in this segment, we want to go ahead and create this subscription type that is XYZ. And so now they only see the— I'll give you a real-world example. I help a company and they, uh, they have franchisees, and people will sign up to these different, like, franchisees. And before, there was just like a kind of like a local, but it was like for all locals, for like everybody everywhere. And now there's actually visibility rules that's like Boulder, Colorado, and two cities next to Boulder, Colorado. And you might have only see those two but not see all the things, and therefore be able to subscribe to something that's very— and by the way, this is the magic word If you have a business where you need a granular level of specificity in which people can see or not see the things that they're subscribed to, then custom visibility rules in HubSpot might be super dope for you.

I think the, the other is because business units have now, uh, rebranded as brands.

Yeah, brands.

Yeah, right. And is that still the mechanism that controls like having multiple You can, you can have—

that's another thing too. Like, if you're an organization— great, uh, by the way, I don't think that's in the list of things that I shared or things that we want to talk about. But if you do have an organization where you basically have like potentially 2 or 3 different kinds of brands and you are like, man, I wish I could get them to subscribe to these different things based on brands— it used to be called business units, but you can get brands, uh, which then would give you like these is defined different segments basically, and I don't mean lists, but like maybe pillars, uh, inside your HubSpot portal where one of those things is like different logos, different colors, different themes. But a very important piece of this conversation is different email preference center. And so you could have different subscription types per the brand that you're trying to get them to. So a real-world example of this is like GeorgeBThomas.com, SidekickStrategy.com, BeyondYourDefault.com, Well, good God, like there's a bunch of different ways that you'd want people to subscribe to those things.

And with brands, AKA, like, all roads may lead to George, but each one of those, if they, if they want to unsubscribe from Psychic Strategies, you don't want them to also unsubscribe from George B. Thomas.

I mean, you should get Dad Jokes of the Day no matter what. If you'd like— no, I don't, I don't even have that.

But those are transactions.

Yeah, I send those as transactional emails. On a dedicated IP because you're gonna get my dad jokes. No, I'm just kidding.

I don't— and you get mailed a hard copy. Exactly.

Who snail mail it to you every day from a llama that pulls it on down?

So, so, okay guys, I can't believe we like a ton of time, but is there one thing that you wanted to say in this episode that you haven't had the chance to say yet about email in general or an email tool as we kind of head out for today's episode?

I'd really double down on like the whole, like, if you're a new, like, HubSpot admin, I think one of the most valuable things that you could— like valuable skills immediately you can go get is figuring out how to send emails that have data from other objects on them. Like go, go, like, go build an email, use a different object to have some properties in there, learn how to like send it from a workflow, get like familiar with like like, you know, thinking about, all right, if there's more than one contact associated to this object, how do we target it with an association label? Like, all this kind of stuff, go figure it out on your own. It's like one of the best ways to kind of like understand how like systems and objects and email and contacts all like interact with each other inside HubSpot.

So go figure that one out. Chad, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, I think, um, you know, uh, don't undervalue like sequences either because they're super helpful for your team. And I think a lot of people think about, well, sequences are my hack to get around being able to send one-on-one emails in an automated way. But I mean, we had a specific use case for what we were doing at that time because it was really relevant. We wanted to make sure it was timely. But I would say like sequences are based on templates which also have similar variable construction. And you can even put like if you're really fancy, hyperlinks inside of URLs as long as that or sorry, variables. So custom properties inside of URLs as long as they're on the query parameter side. Unfortunately, it doesn't work inside the path side of the URL because some of the text stripping they have. But like, don't, don't undervalue sequences as a really useful tool for your team. Understand how to build them and the difference between the automated sequences and manual or more traditional HubSpot sequences as well, because it all does tie back to email, but also other things. If you're B2B LinkedIn, if you're, you know, tasking to remind you to do different things on a cadence in structured outreach. And you can report on the sequence itself to understand its, its effectiveness.

So here's an honest question, because by the way, I got got a while back ago because sequences for me were always sequences. And then all of a sudden sequences became sequences or dynamic sequences. Does it, does it make sense for us to just do an episode on like, uh, templates, maybe snippets, templates, and sequences, or even just an episode on sequences in general, like in the future? I'm, I'm asking you guys, but I'm also asking just the listeners if we should do an episode on sequences. Give us a heck yes somewhere on socials or tag us or email us if you have our email, whatever. I'm super curious, but for today The one thing that I'll kind of round this out with is HubSpot is always changing and there are so many things that you probably don't know that maybe you know now, or there's still things that we haven't even had a chance to talk about. For instance, if you're not enterprise or even if you're enterprise, you might not know that there's a send frequency setting that you can set so that you're not sending too many emails in a day. My suggestion would be to go over to the product updates in your HubSpot portal and just filter it by email and look at all the things that are possible or being created in real time and really become a student of email, of communication, of, you know, whether it be one-to-one or it be marketing emails, transactional emails. But how, how are you leveraging it to have conversations two-sided and how are you using it to add value? Value. That's what I would want you to do. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes Podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power-up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag #HubHeroesPodcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces. Remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's he—