HubSpot Email Marketing Strategy + Best Practices 101

Yeah, that's right. No representation of the employer on this podcast. I'm just saying. I am super excited. Listen, first of all, we got to address the issue in the room, the issue for our tissue. And that is we have no Liz today. Liz is out, like gallivanting. See, I'm going to use all the old words that I can right up at the get go here. She's out gallivanting across the countryside doing Liz things. So it's just.

Yeah, Nomad Liz stuff.

No, no Nomad Liz, though. It's going to be, it's, it's going to be an interesting episode though, because we are, we are choosing to pick a precursor conversation to our next conversation, which is the fact that it may be time, it just may be time to start buying lists. Well, we'll get into that later. We'll get into that later. Today.

We're going to fight you, George. Straight.

Like.

I, I will. We will square up.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, let's list.

I'm telling you, at the beginning was very important.

Yeah, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about March list. Yeah, yeah, for sure. The disclaimer. We have our own thoughts, but today we're gonna talk about an honest HubSpot. We're. We're gonna talk about an honest HubSpot email marketing conversation. See, this is what happens when Liz isn't around. It's just like cats all over the place. But, but here's the thing. Get ready, hub heroes universe, because we're about to dive into one of the most lasting and powerful marketing and sales tools in your company's arsenal, email marketing. It's interesting to me how many people would believe that statement or live in the camp that email's dead. We'll talk about as we kind of move forward. But here's the deal. How long has email been around? Does anybody on this panel of humans who have been using HubSpot know when email actually was invented and the first email was sent?

I want to say it was in the 70s or 80s, but it could have even been in the 60s. I know that email as a concept has been around the official organization.com nomenclature, but I remember it was usually used just in academia at first. Right.

So my thing is, how in the world is it still around? The rotary phone is dead. The mini disc player is dead. Like there are things have the. The. I mean, they're just gone, but email is still around. And honestly, if done right, maybe isn't even gone out of style at this point. Right. Incredibly powerful lead Nurturing education, communication. Like, what is your take on why email just doesn't go away?

Correspondence and the need there for it will never die. We're always going to need to communicate. And until a better tool comes along that's more widely adopted than email, their email is always going to be there. Now how it's used and the effectiveness of the different ways people want to use it, that's a different conversation. But I mean, mail has been around almost as long as people have and we still have, you know, rain, sleet or hail. They'll be there, right?

Yeah, I think, I think also too, they'll be there. It's. It's also kind of been like an advertising medium that like, I think as a society we've like tolerated to an extent. Right. You know, like phone, the phone has kind of died. Right. Everyone hates cold calling because no one likes talking to strangers. But at the same time these days, no one likes picking up phone numbers that they don't recognize. Right. So like, you know, kind of, you could say like before there was email marketing, there was probably. I don't know if telemarketers came before email marketing or what. I'm sure they did in some way, shape or form. Right. But that's easily mutable. Right? You can choose to not pick up the phone. You can choose to go on the do not call list. You can choose. And people, I think, are probably more likely to take those routes because a phone call is so much more invasive and so much more personal than like an email that like, even if you are that person that I mean. Well, there's some people that love to be an inbox zero. And then there's other people like my wife who when I look down at the mail app on her phone, it just says like 999 plus, dot, dot, dot. You know what I mean? And like people can kind of easily ignore that. But I think also there's just so much, there's so much of an industry around it too. Just like there are like any other advertising mediums that kind of exist for that. But you know, also it's just in today's like digital age, it's a tool that we kind of continue to use to like passively communicate things that aren't as urgent but still are important, but we don't need to deal with now, but they can kind of just be dealt. Dealt with later. And it's faster than regular mail. So yeah, it's still there.

It's interesting to like dream about if it ever will go away. And by the way, Max, you just made email sound real sexy. It's passive things that you really don't, you know, no action. Which by the way, if that's the kind of emails you're sending and maybe you should just slack everybody or something instead. I just, I just don't even know. But, but here's the thing. Email can be really dope. It can be like the nirvana place for your marketing but it can also sometimes you look at what people are sending and man, do I have a story later of the wild wild west. Man. It is just craziness. Like people were in the middle of the street gunsling just like straight up from the hip and you open your inbox, wow, you're like not, you're, you're out like they got you and you're like what is going on here? So that's that lad. Ladies and gentlemen, we're digging into this story of email but with the hint or tone of HubSpot email marketing, what that means as far as HubSpot, what it means for your strategy. And so let's just go ahead and get into this and the first question that we have here is what changed about how people should be looking at their email marketing? So if we think right the beginning of even HubSpot, let's just go that far back. 2010, 2011, 2012, the early days, what has changed that right now if you were to talk to somebody about their email email marketing strategy you'd be like.

Hey this, I'm really interested in hearing your guys thoughts on this because I want to make, I want to, I want to pop up another quick disclaimer on this discussion. I do not consider myself at all educated when it comes to email marketing in any way, shape or form. I have done approximately close to zero research nor do I consider myself any sort of expert on the subject. I go off of what made sense for me, right. And how I experience and interact with email marketing. I think there's probably going to be a lot of like email marketers listening to this that are going to think I have some pretty dog shit takes on it. But you know what I probably do, a lot of it just is going to come from the heart. So I forgot what the original question was. But Devin and George, I consider you guys experts on this subject so I'd love to hear your answers question first and then Maybe I'll throw 2 cents in there after.

Well I think your point of view is exactly what's needed on this particular episode because marketers ruin everything and it's hard for us to see what we're ruining it as we're ruining often until it's too late. So I'd love to hear the. You know, it really grinds my gears.

But yeah, go ahead.

The.

The biggest difference to me with email marketing is now email marketing should be done with a mindset of opt in and warmth. If it's not a warm contact, if it's not someone who's been engaged with your brand or been engaged with you before, cold emailing is rude.

Yeah, dude.

And it's like I remember my first email marketing campaign, quote unquote that I ever did was, was when I was 17 years old and I learned how much college costs back then. This is in the mid-90s. You were able to go to the bookstore because that's where most books were sold back then. And then you were able to buy a book with nothing but rich people's email addresses. And this was like a 300 page book with just the 1%. It was like a 1% Rolodex. And so I sent every email address in that book a sob story about how I needed help paying for college. And a shocking number of them, well, a shocking number of them went through almost a 100% deliverability rate, which was scary enough.

Take that zoom info. Oh my goodness.

But some of these people shops fired.

Some of these people actually responded. Now no one gave me money, of course, but the fact that it was so easy to get in contact with the wealthiest people via email back then, where now it's virtually impossible. I work at HubSpot and there are some hubspotters that I can't send an email to knowing that they'll get it unless I go through their executive assistant first. That's how email is now. So if you're thinking you're going to send this magic bullet email or that you have this lightning in a bottle lead nurturing email, chances are your strategy is old enough to vote at this time. You need to move ahead and think about better ways Email now for marketing at least awareness type stuff where it's cold, man, you don't want that to be the center of your strategy.

Yeah, I don't want people though to hear that and not think that it shouldn't be part of the strategy. Maybe not center, but. But still definitely huge part. Not the center. Like there's, there's something else there.

But.

But here's the thing, what I think about when I hear you, Devin, it's literally this thing of like back in the 80s, you were. You were excited to be like, yeah, I'm Green Jeans 7:54 on Yahoo.com. like, just hit me up, man. Like, because it was new and it was fresh, and now you're like, yo, only. Only the right people.

Right?

To the point where a lot of us humans have created, like, an email that we use for all the stuff that we sign up that we really don't care about, and an email that people can get to if we, like, they're close to us, right? So we have to remember that us as humans have created these strategies to cut the marketers and the sales team's off at the pass before they even think that they've got something that might be valid or not valid just because it went through. Neverbounce. Right? But it's. But it's my. It's my, like, shade, my protector, my shield email, if you will, that you actually got that I don't even open. It's the one, by the way, Max, that probably has 9,999 emails in it. And I don't care if it's in promotions or spam or junk or whatever. Who cares? Like, I got my 20% off coupon now. Just. I don't care. Yeah, but here's the thing. What I want to say also is that there comes a time where you have to look at for your business. How do most people communicate? And this can take you down a whole bunch of different roads. I have a ton of people who love to communicate via email. I have a ton of people, actually, who want to call me. And I'm like, bro, what? What are you doing?

But.

And I'm talking clients, like, they just. They want to call. And whether it's a zoom call or a phone call or they want that voice even for what could potentially be an email. And so there's this. Think about the phone and the. The conversation. We talked about the phone. Right now there's this curve that's happening kind of with email. We used to go by the longest cord ever so that we could attach it to the phone, wrap around the hallway, and go to our bedroom and have a phone call. Because being on the phone was that cool, right? So think about, like, the correlations happening. But what I will say is most of these strategies that humans are coming up with is because of bad email. Yeah. Bad actors, bad strategies. And so, Max, I'm gonna go back to your original. Like, I'm gonna get myself out of trouble before we even start this episode. I don't know anything about email? No, bro, but you know, about being human.

Yeah. Right.

And so the things that we need to talk about is, as a marketer, how do you lean into your human side? In 2012, HubSpot was preaching, don't call me customer, call me human. I never lost that. I never left that. Like, I run business and teach in the human way. So, Max, when you think about, like, what's the, like, crappiest, nastiest, like, email thing that ever happened to you versus maybe something that was like, oh, man, that was like gold. Like, is there a story that your brain goes to? Because I know I have. I have one where I was like, oh, oh, oh. And I didn't know how to act. But where does your brain go?

Yeah, I don't know if it's like one necessary story just because it's more of like a billion micro experiences, like, over time. You know what I think? I think, like, people don't. Well, first of all, I think marketers make a ton of assumptions about their email marketing, right? And maybe that's because maybe it's just a numbers game, right? Like, I can get it. Like, there's some things about it that have just never made sense to me. And we'll get into those. But like, when it talks about, like, the experience of email marketing is like, I'm always constantly thinking about what is going to go through someone's brain when they get this email. And I think a lot of marketers go, they're going to want to buy this thing. It's like, no, that's not. People are smarter than that. People know when you're trying to sell them stuff, especially when they get an email from a brand name. What we all do these days is when we see an email show up in our inbox or flash up on our phone or like, whatever, right? And we see name of a company immediately. We're conditioned to go, oh, they're just trying to sell me something. I don't care. Right? That doesn't need to be seen right now. It doesn't need to be. Unless it's like, hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper. Very, very, very relevant. And I'm expecting it, right? That's different. And so it's just. It's tough because we've. We've kind of been so conditioned to just, like, ignore that stuff, yet people keep doing it. So there's a piece of me I just like, well, I mean, there must be something that's working about that if they keep doing it, otherwise they're just kind of being lazy I don't know. But, like, the worst experiences are the ones where it's like, dude, I give. I give this company my email once and then I'm just getting emails from them every single freaking day. And when I try to subscribe, it doesn't work.

And.

And they just keep coming no matter what. Like, and I have to go and put them in a spam folder or filter them out to get them to stop or, like, what? Those are the real bad experiences. And like, what I think people just don't understand is, like, if you have someone who's a recipient that's paying attention to how many times you're just destroying their inbox with irrelevant shit every single day, you are turning that person into an enemy. You are not turning them into someone who might be interested in the next thing you happen to send them. You're turning that person into someone who really despises your constant presence in their inbox. Right? And I don't think, like, a lot of people are thinking about that. I think people are looking at open rates and going, oh, you're doing a good job. Right? When it's just like, I don't know if that's a failure of leadership to understand the purpose of email marketing and what it should be doing and stuff like that. I don't know, there's just so much about it that's like so unbelievably cringe that it's like, it's really hard for me to understand how I actually feel about it. I know it has to be useful for some reason because so many people are still doing it. Right. But there's still so much about it that I just see that's just so wrong that, like, I don't know, I'm floating in. Yeah, I'm floating in this very weird space of how I feel about it.

Yeah, it's interesting because, a, there's a couple of things I want to unpack with what you said. One, you mentioned open rates, which, by the way, that's one thing since we're talking about things, things that have changed. You can't trust open rates anymore. Between Bimmy and what Apple did with, there's like, things are just getting opened even though they're not opened by the actual human. So that's not even a metric to pay attention to. Like, I literally, months ago started teaching the folks that I help listen, it's. It's more about the click, it's more about the reply. It's really less about the opens. And if you're listening to this and you're like, wait, what? Just do a quick research study on what Apple changed with email, what Bimmy means, all the things that are happening around that. The other thing too, Max, that I want to unpack with what you were talking about is it's, it's kind of just a human principle, right? We can do seven things that are good, seven things that are good as soon as we do one bad. You know what people focus on the bad thing. And the fact that like marketers, we need to understand it's not the 57th email where they're going to go oh, oh yeah, I, I guess I do think they're cool and I love them. That's not, that's not happening. I like by that time it's too late. And so we have this depreciating return, right? Like you have to be cool out the gate and you got to be like just calm and it really has to be human and it has to be valuable. It has to be and you use the words hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper relevant. That's when we start to win. One of the things that we are always talking about is how do you make it customized, personalized and feel even though it's a marketing email that it is a one to one email at the end of the day. So that, that gets me into where I want to actually dive into like ways that we have seen brands getting email marketing wrong. And I'm, I'm going to start with this one Max, because I want to dive a layer deeper than where you went because you were like, yeah, they just, they, they email me and they email me and they, you know, I just signed up for your thing, I didn't want to get it. 57 times the amount of newsletters that come into my inbox that I never signed up for that I have zero clues you are that I have to go over to mailchimp or some other system that let your dirty butt in so that you could spam the crap out of me when I never even gave you the right is mind blowing. Mind blowing. I mean I spend a good portion and I'm saying like maybe 15 to 30 minutes a day just keeping my inbox clean of people who never got permission to be there in the first place. And so if you think that that kind of crap is going to work, by the way, I'm not even mad at you because I realize that you may not just know better. And what I mean by that is I literally had a client that I was talking to two days ago Max and we were talking about, they were doing email, it was for an event and then they did this workflow and they wanted the last thing for the person to be added to their blog subscribe list. And I said wait, you haven't given them the opportun to subscribe to your blog? Like no. And we had a very human conversation and they were like, oh, oh yeah, I guess, I guess that is a fundamental important part of them, you know, like letting me know the frequency and giving me the permission to actually put them in this list. That to me feels very like whatever. And to them is like, you just done chapped my butt when they get that email.

Yeah, I'm thinking like when I, when I started thinking about like newsletters and people still doing it, I think, I think something that I've seen and maybe it's because I just wasn't paying attention to attention to it, but I used to be a really, really big newsletter hater and I think it was just because of the newsletters I saw. I kind of assumed those were newsletters as a whole. And you know, I think a big portion of that is correct is like I would see marketers doing and like almost all their job was like literally just this is they would send their company's newsletter out to everybody on their list and the thing would be like a gigantic 12 page long, you know, email of just worthless stuff, right? Like oh, this is Jim and he's our new accountant. And here's, here's these events we're going to and here's some other stuff and here's links to these other websites and here's like, you know, here's a deal on a product we're having and people thought that was marketing, right? And it's just like listen, you're trying to send people all this content and you're spending an asinine amount of time creating these giant, what look like hyper complex infographic emails that are taking you hours and hours and hours to create. And people are going to only look at them for maybe 10 seconds before they move on to the next email in their inbox. And you're sitting here getting butthurt because when you preview this newsletter on what it's going to look like on Outlook 2006, one of the margins isn't working correctly. And I was sitting here like what are you doing with your life that this is like where you're spending your time and putting your mental calories. So I got into this like really kind of piss poor attitude I think about newsletters I'm, I. There are some newsletters that I think are still viable if the newsletter itself is the content, right? So like there are some things out there that are products and the product is the newsletter. It's. It's something you, you pay to subscribe to or like you specifically sign up for. And it is marketed as a newsletter and it is content rich. It is aggregating stuff you're actually interested in. And people are signing up for the newsletter, not just getting it because they got an ebook and it's about the. But it's an actual product. I think those are cool. I remember getting into an argument with Doug on the last podcast, right? I think when I, when I told people, like, listen, delivering your content via email is like not the way you want to do it. You want to use it as a vehicle to get them onto your website, right? Which I still think is like valid today. Like the email inbox is the most distracting environment there is. So you want to get them onto your website and get them away from that to actually consume content. But Doug brought up a really good point about how you say, I love getting newsletters, but like, these are newsletters. He's actually. Well, I would think, I'm not trying to speak for Doug, but I would imagine someone who wanted to get a newsletter expected to get that newsletter, signed up specifically to receive that newsletter. It's not just some random one with a bunch of random crop in it, which is like 90% of the ones that I see. See. So like newsletters have kind of come around on, right? But like, here's the thing. If you're a marketer and all you're doing is building a hodgepodge company newsletter and sending it out and thinking that's email marketing, boy, have you missed the boat.

Well, and I think too, what's funny is again, I'm old school, so I remember and it still kind of happens. But my wife really gets the mail at this point or one of my kids because they're old enough to go out to the end of the driveway and back. You know, they're like really grown ass adults, but they're still in the house. Never. Never. Nevertheless, digress. Not why we' that's another episode. It's probably not called Hub Heroes. It's called something totally awesome. But at the end of the day, I can remember going out and, and what it was is it's, it's in your mailbox, it's a sales flyer. And what some people are trying to do is they're Trying to duplicate a sales flyer in a digital presence that is not a newsletter, that's a sales flyer. And if it's going to be a sales flyer then let it be a sales flyer. But know that it's probably not going to generate any sales sales. Like my sales flyer makes it up the driveway and into the trash.

It doesn't even get into the house.

Makes it, it doesn't even make it into the house. And so you have to think newsletter. Yes, if it is truly a newsletter. Y and when I say newsletter I, I mean something relevant. And honestly one of the things that I'd like to talk about when it comes to HubSpot email and HubSpot email marketing is the ability to actually sit down, strategize and figure out what are the areas of interest that somebody might have around our business. How can I give them a multi checkbox where they can select the 2, 3 out of the possible 10 areas of interest and how can I use HubSpot's smart content based on the list that they've put in? Because they selected an area of interest and now deliver only the three or four pieces of a ten part email newsletter. Because it's the three things or four, four things that they care about. It's contextual to each individual human that is actually in your database. It starts to feel like it was made for them, not just made for the masses.

And I think the test that you got to run it through, whenever you're about to say I built this email and it's going to get sent out either right now or under some sort of automated context or like whatever, you got to ask yourself if this is a real, if this was a real human interaction, would it make sense? You remember that TikTok I made a while ago about email, email emails, if marketing emails, if they were real human interactions, right? You got to remember that's the sending someone an email is the equivalent of walking up to them and tapping them on their shoulder. You're, you're going, you're, you're going at them when they don't expect it and you're delivering a message to them, right. So you got to say if you were doing this in real life, what would their reaction be? Because it's probably going to be pretty similar at least maybe in like a little bit more of like a toned down extreme, right. But like the same sort of like stuff is going to happen in their head, right. So when you say be able to gather information about what's relevant to them, the physics of why that's important is because if you're going to come out of nowhere and deliver a message to somebody, you better make sure that it's at least relevant to them, right? If they're not expecting to hear from you and you're popping up out of nowhere, at a bare minimum, you should be taking special care to ensure that when they get that message out of nowhere that it's at least relevant. Because if you don't do that, one, you're bugging someone and two, you're giving them stuff that they don't need. If that happened in real life, they're going to hate you, they're going to knock, they're going to, they're going to think you're weird. So yeah, I think like that's the first little kind of sniff test you got to give it, right? But I think also there's some more like, sort of like nuanced like trust building that you can do with email, right? Especially in this age that we live in where people kind of expect email marketing to happen in a certain way, right? Today we all expect our emails that we give out to be used and abused. So the standard experience that we are expecting is that I give my email and you're like, oh shit, I'm going to get, I'm going to get nuked with like, buy this, buy that, do this, do that, right? And I think with your email strategy, if you can do like a pattern interrupt and maybe in the way that you communicate with people, you show that you're not trying to abuse them or catch them in these little tricks. I think what that can do is that can get folks to go, oh, they just wanted to make sure I had that content I requested and not try to do anything else. They just want to make sure that like I knew where to find XYZ and not anything else, right? They sent me that extra email actually asking, what do you actually want to hear from us? Are we sending too many emails? Right. You know, things like that, that there's like little micro things you can do there to just interact with people on a more human level that is not just, you know, putting them behind the email. You know, marketing buy this, buy that, just chain gun that they're used to, right?

But yeah, I love this because I think it starts to dip into when you talk about tapping people on the shoulder and email in a more human way and paying attention to the micros and strategy it goes into like, what are some inspired examples that we've seen of people getting it right And I have a. I have a great story because there's. There's something that is the bane of my existence on a daily basis, whether it's for this podcast here, the Hub Heroes podcast, or whether it's for the podcast that I do for marketing profs, which is the marketing smarts podcast. And that is when people pitch guests or the fact that they want to be a guest. And those are some of the most crappiest of crap emails. Right? And. But that's not what we're talking about. We already talked about crappy emails. This is something that inspired me. And I'm going to try to paint a really good picture because about four days ago, I was going through my inbox and I saw this subject line and it had an envelope emoji with a heart on the envelope. And I started to read the subject line and it said a note from a fan and then a bracket plus a marketing smarts. I got that far and I actually stopped reading. I should have kept reading, but I stopped reading because when I clicked into it, then I looked at the subject line again. The subject line says, plus a marketing smarts guest idea, exclamation mark. And. But I was already in there, right? So they had me. But then I'll tell you how they really got me is because I clicked in there, I saw a freaking five star podcast review. And I was like, wait a second, what's going on here?

Here?

And so Danielle says, hi, George, huge fan of the marketing smarts here. In fact, to show you my thanks for the five star content, I just left you a review to match. And there's emoji that points down and there's a screenshot of the actual podcast review. She goes, really enjoyed your episode with Ashley Foss. Her playground example was a breath of fresh air. Now, Max, you had to listen to the podcast to know there was actually an example of a playground in it. And the fact that she even used the person's name that was on the podcast that said that. And so now all of a sudden you write, this goes for like, oh, well, this is very contextual. This is very specific. This, this is actually making me feel good.

Yeah.

And then we get to the part that I didn't care about actually at this point, couldn't resist reaching out because I'm working with, with Amerita. And it's from. Anyway, I'll just go from this way. It's a pitch to have Amerita on the podcast. And you know what I did? I immediately hit reply and I Said, yeah, I'm interested. I'm interested in this topic. Because they gave me three topics to choose from, by the way. I'm interested in this topic. Here's the link where you can schedule the podcast interview. Why did I do that? Because it wasn't a flaming hot piece of dog crap email where they just immediately went for my jugular. They. I didn't have any idea of who it was, the podcast, the guests, the topics, any of it. And so this is a perfect example of like, how you can do something that others are doing, but actually shine above the rest and, and get the action that you want to take place out of it.

I. Okay, so that's a great. I need to, like, I need to bring this up now. So I have a bad example.

So, so this is.

That's. I think that's a, you know, for anyone who are these, like, you know, because that, that, that example you kind of just gave is less of like an email marketer, but more of like a sales person, like, you know, doing the proper research, putting something actually personal in there, right? And like delivering like a good. That's like a cold outreach you kind of got. You definitely got a cold outreach there, right? I think that was great. Some examples of some bad ones that I got recently. I'm going to not say the name of the person or the company, but literally got a totally cold email out of nowhere. And the subject line was video one for Max.

And it, and oh my God.

And it said, what going on? Said, hey, Max, dropping this video to entice curiosity. That's like the first line of this email. And then it's just like a vidyard or a loom or something of this guy going through this first deck of this slide or slide of this deck, right? And I don't even know what this company does. No clue. And then at the bottom of his email, it says, imagine, build, evolve, and that's it. And like, it was just the weirdest, weirdest, like, cold send that I've ever gotten. And then the next one was video two for Max. Hey, Max. Leaving you this message to excite interest. And then it was just him just lightly saying the words of the second part of the slide of this deck. Like, I, I don't know what some people are doing. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's really brutal, right? But it clearly bought my email somewhere. And then they're just deploying this garbage strategy and I spam reported the crap out of them, right? On every single email. They sent. And it's like, dude, this is hurting your company, doing this right? Going out, buying lists of contacts, sending them garbage that people just don't even understand what you're doing. No context. I never expected to hear from you. You're immediately just trying to sell me something, and I don't even know what it is. All you're doing is damaging your domain. You're torching your domain by, by, by doing this. And it's just crazy how people just don't think there's a better way, or they're so lazy they don't want to find the other way, and they're just doing what they've seen, done, and accepted as the, The. The. The easy standard. And it's like, this isn't getting you sales. This is damaging your brand. You know, it's.

Yeah, it's.

The cold email stuff is always so weird to me because there's a lot of people who die on that hill, and I just can't. Can't get behind it. It's so weird.

It's so cringe. We're gonna get Devon in here in a second because I know he's got a, like a good, A good example, right, Of. Of something that maybe kind of enticed or delighted him that wasn't video one and two. But I wish, I wish, I wish marketers could just realize there's. There's one of two outcomes when you do what Max is talking about. Outcome number one, if you're lucky, is something like, you know, that's what, that's what you're getting crickets right now. Outcome number two, if you're not so lucky, it's. It's literally you're getting the big old, like, you know, and that's when you get the spam. You get put to spam, you get blocked. It's all these negative things about, you know, and, And I. I'm glad you brought up Send Health and your domain, because we're going to talk about that in a little bit. But, Devin, you got to jump in here and you got to talk to us. You've got an example, something that inspired you, something that people are getting right when it comes to the inbox.

Absolutely. Shout out to the team at the Hustle. They do amazing work. It's an excellent newsletter, highly recommend. But there was a time when I wasn't reading it, and so I had signed up for it, excited about it, made it through the first issue. Few issues didn't open up anymore, and so at that point, they're sending what's called graymail. Now, if you're a good marketer, what you do is you try to reach unengaged contacts less and spend more energy on contacts that are engaged, or else you start sending out gray mail, which lowers your email deliverability, which is literally a whole class that I've taught. So what the Hustle did is they send out what's called a breakup email. It's an email you send to your unengaged contacts saying, hey, do you still want to hear from us? Great. If so, we're going to keep sending you stuff. If not, just click here. Unsubscribe. Big call to action. Go ahead and click on it. Unsubscribe, we'll stop talking to you. And so I'm a fan of that tactic as it is. But they took it to the next step. Calling in the email subject line was Save our intern. And the whole email was about how the intern was upset that they've been putting in all this hard work on these newsletters and no one's reading them. And there was a mock slack back and forth. And so at this point, you're really feeling for this intern. But it was hilarious. The whole thing was tongue in cheek. It was so well written and so engaging. Starting with the save our intern. What's going on with the intern? So they pulled me in with the subject line. They got me to read the entire message, which was absolutely hilarious, and then ended it with the do you want to make the intern happy or do you want to unsubscribe your choice? And I stayed engaged because they have genuinely good content, but because that breakup email made me laugh so hard, I was like, well, let me give these guys a second chance. And to this day, I do not miss any Hustle emails. I love them because they're great, but I never would have known that if they hadn't sent me the breakup list email. They hadn't sent the breakup email and kept sending these things to me. Eventually would have gone from my main inbox to the promotions inbox, which we always only glance at. And then eventually it would have made its way into spam, because graymail gets you into spam. It's just the way it works. But that was something that truly, truly impressed me because it's hard to, even if you have an opt in audience, to keep them engaged in your email. And so if they're not engaged, not only are they not converting, they're not making you money, but the postmasters are seeing that you're sending out Content that no one cares about. And they're going to eventually push you down the priority list, possibly just push you right on out the door.

Can we. Wait, wait, wait. George, did you have something you want to add there?

No, go ahead.

Can we talk about the Gmail promotions tab for a second?

Oh, yeah, sure.

I've read, I'm going to say studies in big ass quotation marks. I've, I've, I've, I've read stuff that the promotions tab actually increases engagement. Is that bullshit or is that true?

I have no idea. But I can see why it would be true.

So. Because, because here's the thing that, like, a lot of people like the conversation that always kind of made me. And like, again, the research that I've done, people said it actually increased open rates. Right. And increased engagement. Right. Because it's, it's putting promotions in a place that it calls it out and it makes it a little bit easier to engage with versus just like a massive list of emails that you have to deal with. It's more overwhelming. Right. What's funny is that like people are always asking me how do I avoid the Gmail, the promotions Gmail tab. And I think the thing that they forget is like, not all people turn that on. First of all, I shut it off. I don't like that view of it shipping.

Yep.

And then people think it's a spam folder.

Folder.

It's not. It's not the spam folder. It's your inbox. It's just a sorted version of your inbox. It's not the spam folder. And then the funny thing is, is like, there's people out there think like the product you buy will help you beat it. And like the thing is, is like all that promotions tab needs to do, and I don't know if this is how it works, but like, it has to be as simple as like, is there an unsubscribe link in the email? Probably filter it under promotions. Right. And people are thinking like, they need to come up with these insane ways of like getting around it when they forget not everybody even has it. And also not everybody's using Gmail even though everyone is kind of using email, but in, I guess, relatively. But like, what have been your kind of thoughts and experiences around that? Because like, I've just found it be just another thing that email marketers obsess over or people that maybe aren't super like educated on it, like obsess over when, you know, like, they're not even like caring about the actual substance of the content they're sending out. I don't know if you have, if you have thoughts on it.

So. So I have thoughts. 1. I, I too hear that same question a lot.

Yeah.

And I've never really kind of dove into if it's a positive or negative. I immediately when you said that, I was like, I did the thing. Which usually when I do the things it means I want to find somebody that I can interview you who is like an absolute expert on what that actually means or doesn't mean for your email marketing. But I will say as just like a human who likes to keep it simple, the idea of there being eight or 10 things, again, the number doesn't matter. I'm just telling a story here. Eight or ten things that I now go look at a promotions tab to see if it's relevant or not. It's at least not in my. What is no longer possibly an inbox. Zero like that sometimes that, that area is just a hot mess. So maybe you do have a little bit more of a chance when I actually gallivant over there and start to look at what, what are those 8 to 10 or 12 numbers that I need to go clear out because my ADHD is taken over and I, I just don't want them to be there on the left sidebar anymore. So it's interesting.

It is.

It's interesting.

Also, if someone goes in there, their intent is to go, okay, now I'm looking at this kind of stuff, right? And they're no longer distracted by the stuff they actually care about, right. Which is like personal emails they're getting. But the other thing that's like so weird to me about the argument there. Oh, hold on, Wait, sorry. Do you think Google is trying to make things more difficult for marketers when that's literally the one way they make all of their money is catering to marketers. You think they're trying to make it harder for you. Like the logic just doesn't really make sense to me when people are like so hyper focused on it. I don't know, it's just like all their money off of invading your privacy and like getting it like, like making a ton of money off of advertising. And you think for some reason they're gonna take on this crusade to make it more difficult for email marketing? I don't know. I don't know.

I mean, it just seems weird. I don't know, like, like the other side of my brain to that. And obviously this email conversation is going to have to be two episodes because Holy crap. People can't even believe we're at like almost time to close this down. But Max, here's the thing. Google's job, its real job, especially when it comes to Gmail, is to make sure that everybody wants to continue to use the platform.

Yeah.

And if I just let marketers come in all willy nilly like the wild, wild west, I'm going to be an Outlook user in like a, a week. In like a week, I'm gonna be out of there. And so while I hear what you're saying, and it definitely is like video one for George, this is conversation to entice me into the future. Conversations that we might have. I, I have to believe that Google, Gmail, those tools are like, no, our, our objective number one is to save you from the marketers because I'll add another layer on this. Max, not everybody is a marketer like, like you. Not everybody's a marketer like Devin. Not everybody's a marketer like me. Meaning not everybody comes to the table with positive intents. People are trying to game this crap out of the system and they're just not good humans. And so they do not good human things. And we got to remember Gmail, Google, the powers that be, they see that kind of stuff where we don't even maybe think about that kind.

I just think it is also possible for them to make some, something that looks like a quality of life improvement to say, oh, we'll get all this like promotional stuff out of your inbox. But we're also kind of calling it out to like give you some hints to go look at it and engage with it a little bit more to keep our marketing friends a little happier, right? I don't know, I just, it's, it's, to me it's just sketchy.

But anyway, yeah, conspiracy theory, Max.

Gotta love it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I got a bunch. The next episode, we've gotta just have the hardcore conversation around paid lists. I think that's got to be the thing.

Well, so I think there's a couple of things, right? I think there's the, the fact that we need to have a conversation about why you might want to start buying lists. I definitely think, I definitely think that we need. Devin is just like losing this stuff right now, ladies and gentlemen. I'm good. You can't see it. Eventually when we give you a video version of this podcast in a place not to be named, where you can actually go watch the shenanigans, it's going to be a lot, a lot funnier. It's going to be a lot funnier. Although we know you're having fun anyway, but we have to talk about why. Maybe it is time to buy lists. But more than that, we need to talk about how the heck. Yeah, how. How the heck has HubSpot evolved over the years? What are some ninja features and tricks that HubSpot people often overlook pertaining to email? What are the non negotiable best practices? Like if, if any of those three things entice you, then you're going to want to listen into next week's episode of the Hub Heroes. But we're going to close it out like Liz closes out Max. Devin, what's the one thing. What's the one thing that people need to know exiting out of this episode?

You shouldn't buy lists. I don't like. I know this. No, don't. Don't buy lists. Yeah, there's don't like. Just don't do it. Please don't like. I got an email the other day from a guy, he sent it to my HubSpot email sending me, telling me that he could sell me lists that have Nothing but engaged HubSpot users. And I'm like, I bet I can find that information faster than you can. But you know what? You go ahead, guy, because you bought a list that had my name on it and thought it would be a good idea to sell me what I already have. One and two, it's like the only way you possibly get that information is unethically or, or it's fake so that it's either way, like, I hate is a strong word. So I'll say I dislike you significantly and I will not be adding you to my Christmas list.

Yeah, I will say that I know that guy. That guy's in my inbox too. Max, what's the one thing that people need to remember?

I'm gonna double down on what Devin just said. Do not buy paid liquor lists of emails under any circumstance whatsoever. The other thing that I'll just say, kind of said it earlier, but again, before you click send, ask yourself if I were to walk up to somebody on the street, tap them on the shoulder and give them this based on who I'm sending it to, would that be weird? Would it be a bit cringe? Maybe think twice about hitting son.

Yeah, I'm gonna close this out with email isn't dead bad, Email is dead. And Max, I'm gonna even kind of double down on your philosophy because this is something that I've used for years. I'll sit and look at an email before I hit send and I ask myself, would I want to get this?

Yeah, yeah.

Would I read this? Is this like, is this of value or am I just trying to shill for big gbt?

And the important thing to do there is don't lie to yourself. Yeah, yeah.

Be honest with yourself and like, ah, you know what, let me cut some of this back. Let me go in a little bit of a different direction. Don't be afraid, Devin. I'm going to preach your language. Don't be afraid to blow that email up and go back at it at a second chance. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, we are out of time. Episode two of this is going to be absolutely amazing. We'll see you next week. I'm having a hard time kicking you out of the room like Liz usually does because I'm just not that type of guy. But yo, see you later.