Scalable Email Nurture Campaigns: Driving Strategy into Execution
In this 2024‑11‑19 webinar, HubSpot partner solution consultant Laura Conway walks the audience through the end‑to‑end creation of a scalable, industry‑agnostic email nurture workflow that can run on “set‑and‑forget” mode. She starts by framing the business need—aligning email nurture with sales and marketing goals, defining target audiences, KPIs, and available resources. She then debunks the myth that marketers lack enough content, showing how to repurpose newsletters, blog posts, webinars, case studies, and other timeless assets. The core of the session is a detailed walkthrough of a HubSpot workflow diagram: three repeatable cadences of 3‑email blocks, double‑delay timing, engagement‑based branching (open vs. no‑open), subject‑line variations (not classic A/B tests), and enrollment without predefined triggers. Laura explains how to set enrollment (manual or list‑based), unenrollment criteria, and hand‑off to sales via tasks, internal emails, or automated sequences. Throughout she addresses practical concerns raised by the live audience—optimal send days/times, handling low‑engagement flags, image‑heavy vs. plain‑text emails, tracking limitations (open‑rate reliability, image blocking), and how to avoid overlap with one‑off promotional sends. The webinar closes with next‑step resources (deck request, LinkedIn, excellent.com) and a reminder that the session will be recorded and posted.
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My name is Laura Conway. I work at a HubSpot partner called Excellent. We, you know, work with clients every day, migrating for them from different platforms or elevating the, the, you know, their HubSpot portal that they're using currently. I have a background in marketing and doing all kinds of B2B marketing channels and all that stuff. So now in this role as a solution consultant with Excellent, I get to build portals of my dreams for our clients and I build this scalable email nurture campaign and workflow for a lot of my clients. And I figured that it's, it's pretty cool and there's a little bit of secret sauce. I figured it would be a good idea to share it with with you guys. So I will jump right in. So here's, you know, just to set the stage a little bit, the opportunity, whether you're in marketing or you sit next to marketing, you know that email marketing works. You know, getting your brand and your message and your content in front of your audience, whether it's prospects or customers or cold leads, however you want to segment them, it works. It increases your lifetime value. Personalization is really key when it comes to optimizing your marketing as well. And when you're using HubSpot workflows it will also increase your close one rate as well. So there are definitely challenges that come with doing this. Well though we run out of time, we are short on personnel and if you sit on the marketing team, you know this very well and true, you never have enough money and on the marketing team. So the solution is to build an industry agnostic logic based email workflow that distributes content and messaging, gets your brand in front of your prospects, leads and customers to keep yourself top of mind but also reduce the burden on your marketing resources. So the idea is that this is always on set it and forget it to a point. And I'm going to teach you how to do that. We're going to go through each of the steps and talk about some of the nitty gritty, but also kind of bigger pieces there as well. So first we're going to get into strategy alignment. And I do want to say too, this whole presentation is just about how to get you started. You can always add additional layers of complexity to this down the road or iterate and segment in different ways and use all those different tools. But we're really leaning into the crawl stage of this crawl walk run kind of ideas. So here's your pre launch strategy checklist. So of course the first question is does this project align with my sales and marketing goals? If no, you don't need to do this. If yes, you're going to continue on to these additional steps. So you definitely want to consider things like who is my target audience? What does success look like? What are some of the KPIs that I really care about when it comes to email marketing, especially with a nurture kind of campaign, what does the customer journey look like? How are people going to get into this nurture campaign and then what's going to happen to them after they're done and they fall out of the workflow? And what resources do I have available to execute this project? Honing in on that last thing there. What kind of resources do I have? What kind of content do I have to put into this email nurture campaign? When you think of email nurture campaign, it definitely means a lot of different emails and a lot of different kinds of content. So what I hear a lot is I don't have enough content. I can't fill in 6, 9, 12 emails. There's no way I don't have that many emails. I'm here to tell you you're wrong. Just ripping the band aid off. You've got plenty of content, especially when you lean into the art of repurposing and recycling content. This is definitely a misconception that you don't have enough. I'm sure that you've got plenty, at least to get started. You can always add more later as well. So here's an example. So if you send out monthly quarterly newsletters that look a little bit like the one that's on the left of this example, there is a lot of content that you send out to your prospects or your customers, whoever it is. Just in this example alone, I immediately see 10 different pieces of content. There's a couple of articles, there are some blog posts, there are some events that you'll probably get recorded and then you can send out, there's lots of different options. Just in this example alone that also poses the question, what kind of content should I share? The key is to make sure that it's timeless content. In order to stay in this relatively evergreen nurture workflow, you want to be able to share timeless content. And that includes case studies, sales insights, you know, different customer testimonials. I'm sure you have some on your website or on your review page. You can just grab and drop into a marketing email. You can share blog posts. You can share them more than once, and you can even share slightly older blog posts. Just they still have value, so get them back in front of your audience on demand. Webinar recordings is a really good example. Of course you'll share your ebooks, white papers, guides, whatever you use to your thought leadership content. Product sheets are good when it comes to overviews or the ways that people are using your products as opposed to specifications. And industry news is actually something great to share too. Maybe you work in a really highly regulated industry and Congress passed a bill that either really helps your industry or causes some challenges and you figured out a workaround that's something great that you can share at least for several months that you know your way around it. Things that are really timely don't belong in this particular nurture workflow. So company announcements, it's great if you have a new board member. Something great for social maybe a one off email doesn't belong in this nurture workflow. Similar with product updates. Updates kind of come and go. They happen frequently. Don't belong in this nurture workflow. Any kind of event promotion too, because the last thing you'd want to do is say hey, we have this event coming up in July. It's November that is passed. You don't want to have to worry about going in and swapping that out every time. That belongs in its own kind of promotional campaign. Similar with employee spotlights. Really great to update on your website regularly. Really great to share on social, not great to share in an evergreen campaign. Anything that's self perpetuating or timely that has an expiration date on it doesn't belong in this particular kind of nurture workflow. If you don't have design support, that's okay too. The key is to keep it really simple. The idea is that there's one piece of content and one CTA per email that helps you break it up. So just like how we showed 10 different examples in that newsletter how you can break those different pieces of up pieces up. You really want to keep it simple. Don't add a bunch of CTAs, don't include additional content. You don't need a sales, you know, talk to sales button in there. Just keep it really top level and educational that almost anybody can read this email. And here's the recipe for success. You just need a header. You can see leverage nurturing workflows. That's the recording we're on now, a brief description of what the person would be clicking on and then a very simple cta. So this is an example of a webinar recording that we would send out internally to our network after this event. So just keep it super simple. Leverage the templates that are in HubSpot or the templates that you've already built. Now we're going to get into the actual campaign, I mean the actual workflow and what kinds of steps you need to actually build in HubSpot. Once you have all of your emails in place, what you want to do here, this is a lucidchart. You probably, a lot of you probably use this, but this is a good representation of what the workflow will look like in HubSpot. The idea is that there's a couple of repeatable cadences in. It sends a few emails, there's some logic to see if they engaged, there's another few emails, there's a couple variations, and then you'll see at the very end is the life cycle or the customer journey piece. And we will get into each of these three pieces over the next couple slides. So like I said, all you're doing is building a couple of repeatable cadences that are have some logic built in to, you know, figure out engagement. So, so the idea here is that it sends emails 1, 2 and 3. It will stop and take a look to see if anybody opened any of those emails. It will check for engagement and if they did not open any of them, they will get sent the same emails but with a different subject line. If they did open the emails, it will continue on to email 4, 5 and 6. What I tell clients all the time is that you don't need to create totally new emails. You don't need more content. You just need the exact same content but with a different subject line. You can even utilize Breeze to build you variations of your subject line. And this is not AB testing. This is literally you send out version one. If it didn't work, you send out a version two to try to drum up that interest and get them to engage with your emails. And then when it comes to the delay in between the different emails, I really like to use this double delay in order to maintain total control over when exactly your emails are getting sent out. So you are going to want to delay several days in between. You can mix it up 2 days, 10 days, 5 days, however many days in between you want to do it. It's a good idea to kind of mix it up in between and then adding a time delay will really help with again maintaining control over your send times. The last thing you want to do is send it out at 10pm or 4am that would just get a little awkward if you're Sending out emails in the middle of the night. The other part is that if there is the delay under the certain amount of time, which is that two days part. But if you say two days, two hours and two minutes, it's easy to lose track of where you are in the day. So the days are 24 hours. So if you, you know, if you know that that first one will get sent out at 10:00am, you know, two hours, two days and two minutes will be two days later at 12:02. But it's hard to calculate those different things. So I like this double delay in order to set that exact thing, especially because you can use the contacts time zone and then it really becomes relevant for the people that you're sending it to. And then when it comes to your and or logic, you want to create your branches based on the desired outcome. So you want to of course set your different groups for did open versus didn't open based on these settings that are, that you see right there. I really like to use open rate because then it just identifies any interest. It's, you know, they see who it's from, which is probably your brand, they'll see your subject line and then they'll see some of the content and your brand colors and all of those other squishy marketing pieces. They'll get exposed to that every time. You don't necessarily need to or I wouldn't use click rate in this first variation. You know, this crawl version of this workflow because it's hiring 10, you know, that's something that can be utilized in other kinds of workflows. This one's purely just a nurture workflow to get your brand in front of your audience repeatedly. So that's all there is. You just repeat it a couple of times. How I usually build these is nine emails over three different cadences. So you can see emails, you know, version one, email version two, it repeats. And then what I also have too is even if they don't open emails 1, 2, 3 or 1v2, you know, et cetera, they'll just get the fourth email eventually. But that's why I use did they open any of those emails as opposed to all of them? Because then it kind of helps with they don't need to open every single email in order to continue down the path. So that's what those kind of things look like. And then if we're going to get into the nitty gritty of the actual settings of the workflows and there's a couple different things to consider, I'M sure one of those things that you're thinking about is who should go into this. What kind of enrollment triggers should I start with? So I actually just say don't add any enrollment triggers. That's normally what I use in these. So that way it can be totally open ended and almost anybody can get dropped into them with intention. So you can use the add to workflow function in other workflows. So once they've downloaded content, you know, they get sent the PDF email, maybe a couple of other operational things happen. You know, you set the lead status, you do those different things. Maybe some other relevant content gets sent out a couple of days after they've downloaded that thought leadership that they filled out their form for. The last step of that workflow can be to drop you into their nurture workflow. Maybe you have a follow up workflow after you've met somebody at a trade show that sends out some, you know, maybe the recording of the talk you did at the there or the case study that you were giving away at your booth and then the final stage me to drop them into this nurture workflow. You can also enroll people individually. So if SDRs are getting sent new leads, but maybe they need a little bit more warming up, those people can drop them into this workflow as well. They'll go through the steps and then they can come out the other end a little bit more warmed up. So you can do this based on different properties or you can actually send, you know, cohorts of people based on lists into this workflow. Cold lists, you know, our cold leads, you know, closed loss prospects or you know, customers, whatever you want to do can, can get dropped in here. That's why we want to keep the content really top level marketing and educational related without having harsh sales CTAs in in this. And then how do people come out? So you can also unenroll people based on certain things. This is a little bit depending on your business as well. But if you want to unenroll people based on their lifecycle stage or maybe their sales engagement, if sales doesn't want marketing content going out side by side with their outbounding, you can pull them out based on that or you can leave them in there. So they get content for marketing and content from sales relevant along their journey. So it's totally up to you. But there are ways to utilize goals when it comes to unenrolling people. And then what happens at the very end? So you, you know, they go through these email workflows. But similar to Your other workflows. If you don't add anything at the end, people just complete the workflow. So you want to really think about what happens next. I think this is really key, but this is also very dependent on your specific company's needs. The rest of the health score at
scale when using automation.
Yeah, that's a good question too. So specific to this workflow, I think it's important to, again, stay really close to it and monitor those different things that I just mentioned. But also the fact that you're not dumping hundreds of thousands of leads into this every day. You're using it intentionally to nurture cohorts of contacts. So whether that's an ABM list or, you know, a list of, you know, 200 people that haven't been reached out to in six months, or, you know, you know, it could kind of flow in onesie twosie. As people convert on LinkedIn, whatever it is, you just want to be a little bit more intentional about it. So the idea is that you're not sent, you're not dropping your entire database into this. And. Yeah, and then the other thing to consider too, is your delay in between. So if you're sending out too frequently and you're reaching out to people too much or your stuff seems spammy, people will start to unsubscribe at a high rate or Mark's spam at a high rate. So it's just about being really intentional about the content that you're sharing in this, different steps and delays that you're utilizing.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I thought it was so smart. Your enrollment criteria is no enrollment criteria. Right. Like, let's. Let's not fully automate this. Let's. Let's choose the people we think will benefit from this flow we have built and.
Exactly.
Really smart.
Yeah.
Okay. Wow. Lots of votes coming in. Resorting here. Um, Emma asks. I used to build huge workflows, but I got the idea that short workflows had the same impact because if they don't read email number three, they won't read email number six. What's your experience with this?
Yeah, so people take pto, people go on maternity leave. They, you know, they take breaks. They, they. Their server, you know, firewall. Things change. I think sending out regular emails, as long as they're relatively relevant is a good. Is a good idea. So that's also why I think if they haven't read emails 1, 2, and 3, maybe it's just their sub. The subject line that's not really grabbing their Attention. That's why I suggest to use the exact same email so it reduces the burden on you. You don't have to create net new emails every time. But completely changing the subject line. Try personalization, try a contact token, try an emoji. You know, there's so many different things that you can test to drum up your interest that they'll either open and then scan. Maybe they'll click, or they'll open and unsubscribe. And that's okay too, as long as that's not happening at a really high rate. It's okay for people to unsubscribe from your marketing emails or to unqualify themselves in that way. So I know what you mean by that, and that's the question. I get a lot from my clients too, and I'm like, give this a try. And they're usually happy with the results.
Yeah, yeah, that hearing you talk about the different variations on. On email subject lines reminds me. I was at a conference recently where they were like, look, I found this blog post that's like, add an emoji to your subject line, you'll stand out. And then look, here's a screenshot of my inbox. Literally everybody added a pumpkin emoji because it's almost Halloween, right? And. And one of the questions that came up a few times in the chat that I wanted to ask you, someone asked, like, I once saw that the best times to send are Tuesday Thursdays. Is that still true? And other people in the chat were like, well, if everybody's sending Tuesday Thursdays, then those are actually the worst days. So if you see a best practice like that, do the opposite. Send Monday, Wednesday, Friday. How do you think about all the ever changing email best practices and tactics that are all over the Internet? How do you know what's worth using and what is not?
Yeah, that's such a good question. And then like, just to kind of add to that noise, are all the people that are like, email marketing is dead, forms are dead. Like, all these things that people think they have this magic bullet. And the truth is that, like, variation I think will win out. I think people are. I think people are humans because I was also in the same camp where I was this is several years ago. But I was thinking if we send it out at the same time of the same day of the week every week, people will start to expect our. Our email. Like, oh, It's Tuesday at 10 now my company or this company is sending me an email, or then you send it out at 10, 5 and they're like, where's my email? But people don't care that much. That's what I think. The truth is, I don't think that. I think that variation in mixing it up is really key. And I think that unless you have a metric that blows something else, something else totally out of the water and you're like, oh my God, we have like an 85% open rate on Tuesdays at 2:00'. Clock. I think just mixing it up is a really good idea. That's why I use the day delay as opposed to wait till a specific day, you know, or wait till a specific date or whatever the different pieces of that are. I saw somebody else ask this question about like setting the times between like 9 and 4pm Monday through Friday. We didn't include that detail, but I definitely use that as well. However, if you don't set the time of day, it will send out at exactly the same time of day, 24 hours later. So whenever they go into that workflow, they will get sent the email on the same day. So adding the parameters of like 9 to 4, Monday through Friday is a really good idea and I definitely recommend doing that, but I don't think that that's enough to put those parameters on your send times. So I just think that mixing it up is a really good idea. And if you see patterns emerge, that's great. But those are some. Yeah, definitely something.
Yeah, it's really interesting. I hadn't thought about it when you were talking in your presentation, but if, if people just get enrolled, whenever they get enrolled, right. You manually enroll them and, and the delays are two days, then this cohort of people might get the Monday, Wednesday version and this cohort might get the Tuesday Thursday version. Right. And so that variety is built in, which is really interesting.
Yeah.
Pinar asks, how do you make sure that nurturing emails and one off promotional emails do not get overlapped and sent at similar times?
Yeah. Okay, so maybe you're not going to like my answer, but I think that's okay. I really think it's okay. And I think it's okay because it should be relevant content to your audience. So I think that they wouldn't mind it. And especially if it's two different pieces of content, they're two different value, you know, pieces of value that you're trying to add into your audience's life. So I think that as long as you take that approach and it's not sending the exact same email with the exact same content and the exact same subject line, I Don't personally see a problem with that.
Cool.
Yeah.
Our next three questions are all about open rate reliability and Apple changes. I think we covered that. I think it's okay. One, one is sort of interesting in that it says, are you changing your cadences now that open rates are becoming more unreliable? So maybe all these questions were asked before you answered it, but just maybe bears repeating too.
Yeah, no, yeah. What I basically said was that if, you know, we Trust. We trust HubSpot's functionality and product updates to kind of go along with those kind of things. So, you know, bot opens are also something to think about too, but the fact that they can filter that out and you know that those kind of things are like, in. Taken into consideration when your open rate is provided to you. Um, I think that it's just something that you have to consider, but I don't think it should make you not create this nurture workflow. I don't think it should be a hard stop. I think it's something that you keep an eye on, you stay close to. And again, I think the other part of the answer was checking in with your stakeholders too. So if, you know, after a couple of weeks of this, your SDRs are saying, I'm reaching out to these people and they say that they've never heard of us, that they never got those emails, then you can change your strategy and focus more on clicks, maybe instead of opens in that case.
Yeah. Makes sense. This one is in a similar theme. Hector asks if the recipient's company use Outlook and images is disabled by default. Will HubSpot still be able to track if they read the email? I know there's some kind of pixel inserted for tracking.
Yeah. So I think it has to do with how long the email is open. So. So if it's over eight seconds, it's considered red instead of, instead of like skimmed. You know, there's those different pieces that are involved and I don't think that downloading images has to do with open rate, as far as I've understood it.
Okay, so you, you already said you. It doesn't give you really any heartburn if, if promotional emails and these nurture emails are hitting at the same time. So maybe that answers this question from Dominga. How would you enroll them back in the nurture workflow? For example, if we're sending a webinar invitation and want to prevent contacts from receiving both the nurture email and the webinar email, is there a way to pause or remove them from the nurture workflow temporarily and Then add them back in after the webinar.
Yeah, that's a really good question. And I've been asked that before too, by clients. They wanted to like offshoot something and bring them back in. So there's not a way to enroll somebody into a workflow at a specific step, just like it is with. With sequences. How you can drop somebody in, you know, step three instead of step one. It's not possible within. Within workflows. So exactly like what you said, Kyle. I would. I would just leave them in there and send them out or make the decision to pull them out altogether since you can't really like take them out and insert it. So the one thing you could do is you could. I don't even think you could really necessarily add like a bigger delay between steps. You could do something like that. That way anybody who's in a delay step will not wait four days, they'll wait 10 days. If you wanted everybody to like skip it. But then you would have to go back in and readjust your delays back. So if that's one way to kind of think about pausing it in that way is just increasing and then redecreasing your delays in between steps.
Got it.
Yeah.
Very common question that was in the chat is also in the Q and A. How do we get a copy of your deck?
Yeah, you can definitely reach out to us. Just go to excellent.com and fill out the form. I can drop the website if you want to in the chat. Let me see about getting the right page for that. But we can, we can definitely send it to you. But the recording will be shared by. By as well.
I would guess a lot of people are wanting to like stop and study some of your workflow diagrams. And definitely once the recording comes out, you can pause it and stare as long as you want.
Yeah.
But I'm sure Laura and the team would love to hear from you also, if you want to reach out, go
ahead by the deck. That's just fine.
Let's see. How can. This is interesting. How can we reduce the amount of leads that HubSpot sets as low engagement? I fear some of my emails might be landing in junk and that's why they don't get any type of interaction.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm actually not sure about that because I think that if it's their landing and junk, it has a lot more to do with the audience members email servers that are filtering them out. Sometimes they have filters in place that if they're from certain IP addresses or certain mass mail vendors like HubSpot, then it'll get dropped in there right away. There's not much you can do about it on the HubSpot side, except for maintaining your sender reputation. So making sure that you're not sending to people who have opted out, of course it won't actually get sent, but even just trying to send it to them, making sure that those people don't, don't get sent emails is important.
Got it. So Jeremy, who is admin hug faithful, I hear every week this is not really a question so much as it's feedback. But he says can you explain to other presenters the benefit of leaving a healthy amount of time for Q and a? Because 30 plus minutes is fantastic. This is how we learn. Good, well done praise from a regular.
Cool.
We're getting lots of good questions here. I'm going to reshuffle again because the uploads are coming in and it's not updating in real time. So it's going to take me a second to. So this is. Kelly asks, how do you make sure that contacts don't get stuck in a repeat loop?
Yeah, you don't build a repeat loop. Yeah, that's really after you have your send 1, 2, 3. And then if they drop over to that version 2, 3, 4, they don't get back up into it, they just get dropped over to email 4. So watch it back. Look at the deck again and see about, about that. Yeah, I see. Kind of said the workflows don't actually do that. I mean, don't let you do that. And that's totally true. If you put them back up there, that says it'll create an influential loop. You can't do that.
So yeah, absolutely has some protections there. But I, I think it, I think it's a good question. Just because when, when you're building your go to action in the workflow, you're not actually circling back to the, the branch or above the branch. You're just going from branch A to the first step of branch B.
That's exactly right. Yes. Yep.
Why do you resend as cadences instead of AB testing?
Because AB testing only tests which, which email. Sorry. The subject line is performing better and sure, you can build that in. That's great. However, the person will still only get sent the email one time with what? You know, with version A or version B of the subject line. The idea of sending a different email, like a completely separate email send with a different subject line is to try. If the first one didn't work, hopefully the second one will, rather than testing which one's going to work. So that's totally like we were talking about. This is the crawl stage. That's a really great walk stages to build in the AB testing into each of the emails or into a few of the emails. So it's really something great to consider. But there's definitely a specific reason why I'm doing a version 2 instead of AB testing in this type of nurture workflow.
That's so interesting. That's a really powerful insight that these are actually, even though superficially similar, you can AB test subject lines. But we're actually, we have different goals. It's not about improving the overall quality of the email and the likelihood it'll get opened by a particular group, it's about reaching this particular individual in a way that resonates with them.
Yeah, that's exactly right. Well said.
That's really cool. Yeah. Sort of a technical question here from Anthony. What is an expected open rate?
That's a really good question. So I really lean on the email health tab. If you just like go into your email tool and click on the health tab, they'll give you some top level analytics at the top and then you can compare versus benchmarks. So you can compare to HubSpot's overall benchmarks which I'm assuming takes it like all different kinds of businesses into account for or you can toggle it to your industry so you can look at the industry benchmarks. So you know all the different industries are going to have slight variations between that. But for overall, I think like most of those benchmarks sit around 25% give or take a few industries are going to have slight variations between that. But for overall, I think like most of those benchmarks sit around 25% give or take a few points. But every so often we work with B2C clients that have like 85% open rates and that's because they're expecting an email from the company that they're buying from. So whether it's a follow up survey or like a, you know, booking confirmation or promotional kind of thing, you know, 25% off your next H VAC system, whatever it is. Like those ones have really high open rates because you're corresponding with customers that you regularly correspond with. So somebody really cold that you're using for a nurture workflow will probably, it'll probably be a lower open rate.
That's really interesting. Yeah. I will tell you as a consumer, I Open and click 100% of my Amazon, your package is shipped Emails. Right. Like, because I want to know when it's going to arrive. Their open rate and click rate on those, I bet is just incredible. So this is a question about your actual personal business practices. So feel free to let us know if we're crossing a boundary. Okay. Julie Julia asks, I just visited excellent.com and couldn't find any forms there. How do you leads and how do you nurture them?
Yeah, we, we're actually a pretty new company. We've been around for about a year and a half and a lot of our businesses, you know, generated pretty organically. So we don't have like a lot of, you know, gated content strategy on our website. But we do have a Contact Us page that, that's a good Contact Us one there. My marketing team would probably yell at me for not adding the tracking parameters on there too. So if you want to put a note in there too that says that you came from this webinar and what you're looking for, especially if it's the deck or if you wanted to talk to me about, about this a little bit more, feel free to add that in there. But it's a really good question. Yeah, everybody has, you know, their different business strategies and where we are as a company right now, we have a lot of other ways to do it outside of gated content.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Okay. JS says such great, such a great to the point session with useful insights. Dominguez says. Thank you. Well, these are not questions, but they are wonderful. Here's another sort of technical question from Amanda. We've had a hard time with getting URLs and links in HubSpot emails to show as a simplified link without all the tracking characters for HubSpot tracking, it makes text emails look very messy and spammy. Any suggestions?
That's a really good question. So I would argue that you want those because you want to be able to track your results. And I, as far as I know, I don't think there's a way to simplify them because HubSpot puts that in there. So I'm not sure that would take a little bit more research on my part to see if there's a way to trim it out. But if, if what you're thinking about is when you actually like drop the link in as opposed to linking in text or using a button, I would definitely link in text or use a button as opposed to typing out a link as well. But when you click on links, there will naturally be the tracking code that comes along in the, in the URL Box, whatever that called. I'm blanking that word. Yeah.
Okay. Heather's asking a very specific question. I assume this is referring to one of your slides. She says in the send to sales stage, is that manual or an automation with sales hub if you have it?
Yeah, that's a really, really good question. So it, that's, that's one of those things that definitely depends on your business and the way that you, the way that you want to do that. I've built it out several different ways with our clients. Sometimes they just want everything automated and if they have an enterprise sales thing, you know, we can just drop them right into a sequence and have them not only be sent to sales, but also start outbounding from sales for them. So that's like the totally automated way to do it. I've also done things where I've just created a task for sales because as related to that contact as well and said, you know, go follow up with this person. The other way that we've done it is to send an internal email that says, you know, hey, sales enablement person, you know, this lead has finished this nurture workflow. This is the date of their last marketing email open. And it had to do with, you know, XYZ or they've, you know, normally what the internal email says is they've finished their nurture workflow and opened emails along the way. They're probably ready to be reached out to again. Please have a look and address them accordingly. So there's a couple different ways to do it. You can do the fully automated way and just drop them into a sequence and get, get them going. Or you can do a task or send the internal email to just like alert them that they're ready to do to ready to be, you know, the next step is ready. But that's also why I add them to a list. So just in case they get missed or they get ignored or whatever happens in between, they're on that list. So then you can then, you know, sort that list even further and say, you know, they were added in the last two weeks. Maybe this is the list of people that the SDRs are going to start reaching out to.
I love that and I that that to me sounds like it fits with what you were saying earlier about we're just learning to crawl here. Right. Like if you start with a task or an internal email and see how that handoff goes and once you're sure that like you're sending the right people to sales and they are following up and having good Success maybe then you move to fully automating it with a sequence. But like starting slow, starting small, keeping it manual.
Exactly. Just get it started. Yes.
Brianne, I owe you apology. Thanks so much for putting this question in a second time. I marked it as answered earlier and then forgot to actually ask it. What do you recommend for an amount of time between email sends in order to not blow up people's inboxes?
Yeah, that's a really good question too. And my what I tend to lean on is be variable again. So the example we showed was two days. That's probably too short unless you are just doing like kind of a split. So but I really like to mix it up. I like to say you know, two days, two days and then 10 days like give them a break. Just kind of mixing it up is a good idea. I've definitely worked with clients that are a little bit more sensitive about how frequently their, their emails get sent out. So there was a two week or I think it was a 10 day delay in between. Now having a really big delay in between. There's risk of you know, them not remembering your brand in between or not remembering like what really what you stand for, what you're trying to share with them. So you don't want 30 days in between for example be way too much. But every single day is also way too frequently. So I mix it up between 4 and 10 days typically is how we, how we build them.
Cool. This question popped in while we were talking about the sales thing earlier. Christine asked what would the sequence typically do? Any suggestions?
Yeah, so it could. This is when it gets turned over to sales and now you're really reaching out for the sales kind of cta whether it's book a meeting, book a demo, you know, 15 minutes of your time to discuss your needs, whatever it is. But that's when it becomes like a much more personal approach when it that you know, it's coming from a sales rep, it's rather than the marketing team. It also is, you know, a plain text email that comes from your Outlook or Gmail account through HubSpot as opposed to one of the pretty marketing emails with images and buttons and inside things and all of that stuff. So the look and feel is really different, who it comes from is different and the call to action is very different as well. But it may also in the messaging is different too. So rather than it being very top level educational, industry agnostic, this is much more where you get into you know, the value prop kind of language where you know people at Companies like yours express this kind of challenge and my company can help you overcome this challenge by buying our product or service or whatever it is. So that's what how it. That's like the biggest difference between the two. And when it comes to like the actual emails and the messaging inside, nice.
This sort of relates. Koda asks, do you notice a major difference in open rates between emails that are image heavy and feel more marketing versus plain text emails that seem like they're actually coming from a team member? I don't think code is asking specifically about the difference between the email marketing tool and the sequences tool. I think just like actual formatting of these marketing emails.
Yeah, that's a really good question. So we have somebody who very, very recently set it up like that. So they. This was a much smaller, it was still a nurture sequence, nurture workflow, but it was a much more trimmed down version of it. They sent like three marketing looking emails and then the last one was exactly what you described as plain text email that got sent through the email marketing tool, you know, via workflow and looks like it came from a certain person. Now they just spun this up. So I'm not even sure if they've launched it yet. So I can't tell you the real world analytics for that. But it's definitely something worth testing. So if you want to really simplify and test that, that's, that's totally fine. The only thing to consider is that you at least the way that I'm positioning this, this is supposed to be coming from marketing. So rather than being a plain text email that looks like it's coming from a person, this is top level educational marketing content with the goal of brand awareness and getting your brand and your, you know, several different pieces of valuable content in front of your audience.
Okay. And we have made it through to the bottom. I see one question left. I don't know if any others will sneak in here at the end, but Walter says I turned off click tracking because I am in the process of improving my email health. Is there a temporary workaround to track clicks while my health improves?
I don't, I don't know that. I don't know that. I don't know that answer.
It's a very interesting question.
I guess you would just have to look at other KPIs as opposed like outside of clicks. So yeah, there's actually an answer in the chat.
Amazing.
Let's all learn. What does it say? There are other ways of tracking. A slightly more technical way is to send them to A redirect link. So your domain.com email link. If you can track traffic to those pages, you can get a good idea. So something like a redirect. That's a really good. Really good way to do that. Yeah. Track where they land as opposed to the click that they actually take. There you go. Brilliant.
Okay, well, thank you. That was a lot of questions. And you. You took them like a champ. Thanks, everyone, for being here and asking so many questions. Yeah, this has been a really enjoyable session. Laura, just one last time, do you want to let folks know next steps, how to get in contact or wherever you want to go from here?
Yeah. So these guys will send out the recording as well as the blog post by us as well. But you can find me on LinkedIn if you just type in Laura Conway. I'll probably come up. Can't imagine there's too many. Oh, great. Feel free to reach out. Go to excellent.com and click contact Us. And you'll. You'll get to us that way as well. But I see a lot of really nice notes in here too, so thank you.
That's a great group. You all are wonderful. Thanks for being here with us week after week. Laura, thanks so much for joining us. It's a delightful session. I'll let you all get back to your Tuesday now, but thanks so much for joining us and I'll try not to yell at you anymore. Jeremy, I hope to see you back next week. Have a. Have a great Tuesday.
Not next week, the following week.
Yeah. This is so important. I am so confident some number of people, particularly outside the United States, are going to show up next Tuesday and wonder where we are. And probably they're going to just click on, join on whatever the top event is, which will be the week after. We are not here next week. It's. It's. It's Thanksgiving week in the States. Deanna and I are actually taking a Tuesday off, so that is odd. Sounds like Jeremy's gonna be hanging out here if anyone wants to come see him. He's gonna be sad. But anyway, yeah, thanks. You mentioned in the chat earlier, mentioned all that out. We will not be here next week. So we will be back on Weekly Cadence week after. So everybody enjoy your next couple weeks. See you. See you two weeks from today and have a great day, everybody. Bye.
