Emails are a critical communication channel for businesses of all sizes and industries. According to Statista, there were 347.3 billion emails sent per day in 2023—and that number is projected to grow to 392.5 billion by 2026. With a population of eight billion, that’s about 43 emails per person on the planet every day.
Well-timed email sends can be critical for nurturing leads along your sales cycle. A quick email helps keep your business top-of-mind. Emails targeted to your prospect’s interests can generate more interest in your brand and convert them into customers. Timely support replies can improve customer satisfaction. The use cases for email are endless.
However, with so many emails getting sent every day, standing out in a prospect's (or a customer’s) crowded inbox is a major challenge. To maximize the results of your email efforts, you’ll want a customer relationship management (CRM) tool with a comprehensive solution for managing email communications. This is where the HubSpot email tool comes into play.
What Is the HubSpot Email Tool?
HubSpot’s email tool is a comprehensive suite of email management and analysis resources that lets you create emails in HubSpot and send them to contacts in your HubSpot database or save them for automation so they can be used in workflows.
Who Can Use the Email Tool in HubSpot?
Any HubSpot account can access the basic drag-and-drop email creator tool and use it. However, some HubSpot email features might be locked behind specific subscription types. For example, A/B testing is only available to Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise subscribers.
Additionally, email send limits are tied to your HubSpot Subscription tier.
- Free Tools. 2,000 email sends per month.
- Marketing Hub Starter. 5x your marketing contact limit per month. With a contact limit of 1,000, that would be 5,000 emails per month.
- Marketing Hub Professional. 10x your marketing contact limit per month. With a contact limit of 2,000, that would be 20,000 emails per month.
- Marketing Hub Enterprise. 20x your marketing contact limit per month. With a contact limit of 10,000, that would be 200,000 emails per month.
In addition to having a HubSpot subscription, you need to have the right permissions in your HubSpot account to access the email creation, editing, and reporting tools. If you cannot access your HubSpot email tool, reach out to your account administrator and ask for email creation and reporting privileges.
Where Is the HubSpot Email Tool?
You can find the email tool under the “Marketing” dropdown in your top HubSpot navigation in your HubSpot portal. Here’s a picture highlighting the options to click:
How to Create Emails in HubSpot
Creating emails in HubSpot is fairly simple. However, there are two email creation tools that you can use: a “drag-and-drop” email editor and a “classic” email editor.
Creating a Drag-and-Drop Email
The drag-and-drop tool is the modern standard, allowing you to create a custom email with different content fields for text, CTAs, and more using a simple interface. Here’s how the process works:
- Go to the email tool in HubSpot
- Click on the “Create email” button
- Optional Step for Marketing Hub Enterprise Users with Business Units Add-On: Click the business unit dropdown menu and select a business unit to associate the email you’re about to make with a specific business unit
- Choose an email type:
- Regular: a single-use email that you can send to contacts
- Automated: an email that is saved for use in automation such as workflows
- Blog/RSS: an email that sends out to your blog or RSS feed subscribers whenever you publish new content to your blog or RSS feed
- On the drag and drop tab, choose a template
- Begin editing
Here’s a quick tutorial video showing the process:
Editing a Drag-and-Drop Email
Once you’ve opened your new drag-and-drop email, it’s time to start creating!
- To add a new element to the email, click and drag it from the left menu’s “Content” tab and place it where you want it in the email
- To rearrange elements in the email, hover over an element and then click and drag the blue edge on the element to move it around
- To change a section’s layout, click the area just to the side of that section and a “Layout settings” menu will appear in the left menu that allows you to change the column layout, width, spacing, and background color
- To quickly add a column to a section, click on one of the “+” icons next to the section—clicking on the icon on the left adds an empty column to the left, and clicking the one on the right adds one to the right
- To remove a column, click on the “-“ icon that appears next to multi-column sections
- To change column spacing, click and drag the handle separating the columns to the left or right
- To edit an element, click on it
- Images, buttons, and dividers can be customized in the left pane
- Text elements can be edited in-line using the rich text toolbar
Saving Drag and Drop Sections for Reuse in Other Emails
If you have a Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise subscription, you can save an email content section to reuse in other emails. To save a section for future use:
- Mouse over the section you want to save
- Click on the floppy disk icon
- Give the section a name in the dialog box that appears
- Click “Save” to finish
Creating an Email in the Classic Editor
To create an email in the classic editor:
- Go to the emails tool and click on “Create email”
- Optional Step: If you’re on a Marketing Hub Pro or Enterprise account, choose a business unit to associate with the email
- Choose whether you want to make a regular, automated, or blog/RSS email.
- Select a template from the “Custom” template menu
- Give your email a name
- Start editing
With the classic editor, you won’t have as much freedom to change the layout of your emails. The sections that are in the template are what you have to work with. So, you will need to choose a template that matches what you have in mind.
Here’s a quick video showcasing how to create a new email in the classic editor:
Sending and Scheduling a Classic Email
The classic email editor has a “Send or schedule” tab for choosing who to enroll in the email and who to opt out of the email.
For who to send the email to, you can choose recipients or lists of recipients from the dropdown menu. To find a specific recipient or list, you can search by typing the name in the search bar. Check all that apply
Similarly, you can use the “Don’t send to” dropdown menu to select contacts or lists of contacts to exclude from receiving the email. For example, if you have an exclusion list, you would select it here so your email doesn’t go to those contacts.
On the right side of the page, you’ll get to choose when to send the email. The “Send now” option sends the email to all of the enrolled contacts as soon as you hit the “Review and send” button in the top right.
Meanwhile, the “Schedule for later” lets you pick a date and time to send the email in the future—and you can choose to send based on each contact’s registered time zone (assuming you know their time zone). When you’ve finished choosing the date/time to send the email, hit the “Review and schedule” button in the top right.
Here’s a quick video showing the scheduling tab and how to use it:
You might notice that, in that demo, the email couldn’t be published because of missing information. That’s because HubSpot won’t send an email that is missing critical information like subject lines, email sender names, or sending email addresses.
Before You Send: Checking Your Email’s Settings
Aside from creating the content of the email, you’ll want to go to the “Settings” tab to edit things like:
- The “from” name for the email
- The “from” address for the email
- The email’s subject line
- Email preview text
- Internal email name
- Language settings
- Subscription type (useful for limiting the audience of an email targeting specific recipients)
- The campaign the email is associated with
If you try to publish or schedule an email that is missing information, you’ll get a “required fields and warnings” callout when you hit the “review and publish/schedule” button in the upper right of the screen:
This will give you a quick heads-up showing what information is missing from your email so you can correct it. If there are required fields still missing from the email, the “Schedule/Publish” button will be grayed out and unclickable until you add the missing information.
Determining If You Should Send Contacts a Marketing Email
I think we can all agree that getting spam sucks. Unsolicited and unwanted emails can clog up your inbox and are just annoying to sift through while you’re looking for those communications you actually wanted to see.
So, what do you do? Odds are that, if you’re like me, you flag the unsolicited crap that hits your inbox as spam and get on with your day.
This is just ONE of the reasons why you need to consider whether you should send your marketing contacts an email before you do it.
Getting a large number of emails reported as spam, trying to send emails to addresses that trigger hard bounces, and other email health issues can result in your email sending domain getting blacklisted—meaning all of your emails automatically hitting spam folders—or even risking your account getting suspended by HubSpot.
Another reason to be sparing with your emails is that you don’t want to run over your monthly email sending limits.
Here are a few helpful guidelines to determine whether you should send an email to a marketing contact:
- Has the Contact Opted into Receiving Email Communications? The first filter should be whether the contact you’re sending an email to has consented to receive communications from your organization. If they haven’t volunteered their email and given their permission, you shouldn’t be sending them frequent marketing emails. An occasional cold email might be a decent way to prospect, but you shouldn’t be repeatedly messaging people who have never shown an interest in your brand. If you do send a cold email, you may want to create a special workflow for it that moves any contacts who don’t convert into a non-marketing contact status so that you don’t accidentally keep sending emails to contacts who never opted in.
- Is What You’re Sending Relevant to the Recipient? Is what you’re planning to send somehow relevant to the contact’s interests? Not every marketing contact in your database needs to get every email you send. When picking a list of contacts to send an email to or creating a workflow to assign automated emails, consider what’s in it for the recipient. Why would they want to receive this email? Does it have some kind of benefit to them, align with their interests, or provide useful (or necessary) information? If it doesn’t meet any of these criteria, it might be necessary to go back to the drawing board with your email before you send it.
- Have You Validated the Contact’s Email Address Recently? How long has it been since you last successfully delivered an email to the contact? If it’s been more than a year, they may have changed their email address—which can lead to hard bounces. So, before sending an email to a contact, check to see if you’ve validated that contact’s email address recently. If not, you might want to find a third-party email address validation service or tool and use them to check the emails you plan on sending your emails to. Additionally, if you bought a list of emails for a cold outreach effort (and you really shouldn’t be relying on bought lists), you definitely want to get those addresses validated before sending them an email. If you find invalid emails, scrub them from your list.
- Did You Check Your Opt Out List? Do you have contacts who have unsubscribed from email communications or otherwise indicated that they no longer wish to receive communications from your company? Then you should have them set as non-marketing contacts and avoid sending them emails. You can also create a specific list in HubSpot for contacts who have opted out of communications and use that to exclude them from email lists. Alternatively, you could create an opt-out list specific to a particular email or workflow to restrict that email from going to the wrong contacts.
- How Many Emails Have You Sent Them Recently? You don’t want to inundate contacts with too many emails in too short a period of time. After a while, they’ll get tired of constant emails clogging their inbox and just unsubscribe (or worse, mark your emails as spam). So, consider your email posting schedule and try to pace them out so your contacts aren’t getting five emails on the same day. Workflows can be a great tool for controlling the pace of email sends as they let you choose when to start a series of emails, how much time to put between each email in the workflow, and when to automatically stop sending emails to a contact enrolled in the workflow (such as when a contact fills out a form in an email or a landing page promoted by the email, you can stop sending them emails promoting that gated resource).
Once you’ve completed all of these checks, you should have a good idea of whether you should send your contacts an email.
Automated Emails vs Regular Emails in HubSpot: Which Should You Make?
So, when setting up an email in the HubSpot emails tool, which should you make: an automated email or a regular email? The answer is: “It depends.”
Are you planning to use the email more than once or as part of a larger campaign, such as a lead nurturing campaign? Are you making an email that will be sent automatically in response to an action by a contact, such as filling out a form on a landing page? If so, you will want to create the email as an automated email so it can be put in a workflow or used in other automation.
Are you creating a one-off email, such as a customized newsletter or a pre-event announcement email? If so, you might want to make the email as a regular email.
Setting Up an A/B Test in the HubSpot Email Tool
If you have a Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise subscription, you can create A/B tests for your emails. An A/B test is creating two versions of something to test out how differences between the two versions impact performance.
Before you create an A/B test in the HubSpot email tool, it’s important to choose what you want to test. Ideally, an A/B test should be restricted to one or two primary differences so you can accurately isolate the reason for a difference in performance. If you send two completely different emails in an A/B test, then you might have a hard time isolating the reasons why each email performed the way it did.
Some things that are commonly experimented with in an A/B test include:
- Email subject lines (to compare open rates)
- CTA/hyperlink placement (to see what kind of placements generate the most clicks)
- Messaging (to see what garners the most engagement and read time)
To create an A/B test for an email, start by creating the email. Once you’ve created the base email:
- Click on the “Create A/B test” option in the upper right of the email editor
- Choose a name for each version of the email (such as “Test Email Version A” and “Test Email Version B”)
- Click on “Create Test”
- Select the version you want to edit from the dropdown menu (located where the “Create A/B test” option used to be)
- Start editing your alternate version of the email
Here’s a quick video to show you how to create the A/B test:
How to Create Email Templates from Marketing Emails
So, you’ve created a great email that, with just a little tweaking for new images and CTAs, could be a great base for future emails. While you could just clone the email, why not turn it into a template for future emails?
If you have a Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise subscription and design tools access in your HubSpot portal, you can save a drag-and-drop marketing email as a template for future emails. To do this:
- Hover over the email you want to save as a template in the HubSpot email tool
- Click on the “Actions” dropdown button
- Click on “Save email as template”
You can also save an email as a template in the email editor by click on the “Actions” button in the upper right of the editor and clicking on “Save email as template” from the dropdown.
How to Make a Global Email Footer
Want to make a custom global email footer to use for all of your outgoing emails? If you have a Marketing Hub or CMS Hub subscription at the Professional or Enterprise tier, you can!
To do so, you’ll need to leave the email tool and go to your design tools—here’s the basics of the process:
- Click on the “Marketing” dropdown in your main HubSpot menu navigation
- Hover over “Files and Templates”
- Click on “Design Tools”
- Locate your email template in the finder tool and click its name
- In the inspector tool, click the “+ Add” option and drag a rich text module into the footer of the email template
- Select the rich text module you just added
- In the right menu, scroll down to the “Default content” section and click on it to open the text editor
- In the editor, add the required CAN-SPAM information for the footer—this can be copy/pasted from the default Office Location Information Module
- Customize the content of the footer while preserving the CAN-SPAM required information and the unsubscribe link
- Need to add an unsubscribe link? Insert a hyperlink and choose to link to an email subscription link and choose the unsubscribe option under “subscription type”
- Click the “More” button
- Click on “Convert to Global Module”
- Click “Create”
- Remove the old Office Location Information module from the email template
Here’s a quick video showing how to create a new global module for your footer:
Congratulations, you now have a new footer module that you can use in your drag-and-drop emails moving forward!
About the HubSpot Email Health Tool
Okay, you’ve created and sent hundreds of emails, how can you be sure that your email health is in good condition? One way is to use HubSpot’s built-in tools to review your email health metrics and make adjustments as needed.
You can find the Marketing email health dashboard by clicking on the “Health” tab of your HubSpot email tool page. Note that, if you have not sent at least 400 emails in the last 30 days, the tool won’t have enough data to populate. For example, here’s a look at the tool in the Bluleadz sandbox which, naturally, doesn’t send real emails:
The overall health score is found in the upper left of the email health view and rates your email health on a score from 1 to 10, with 1 being very poor and 10 being very good. The health score is an aggregate of your opens, click-throughs, bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports to give you a rough idea of how healthy your email efforts are.
The “score over time” graph gives you an idea of how healthy your email marketing have been over the last year, providing a line graph showing your email health score during each month of the year. This can help you correlate your health score to specific initiatives launched during the year.
For example, say you check your email health report in June and see that, in March, your overall email health score sharply dropped. You could review the email campaigns you launched then to see if there were any that had especially poor performance—low opens and click-through rates or high bounces, spam reports, and unsubscribes.
The report also specifically calls out emails that performed particularly well or poorly in the “High and low performing emails” section. Here, you can take a look at your emails to see what worked well and what did especially poorly to investigate the cause and refine your future email efforts.
Measuring Your HubSpot Marketing Email Results
Now that you know a bit about your email health, it’s important to learn how to measure the results of your email campaigns. The email health tool helps you find particularly impactful emails, but what do the metrics mean and how can you do a deep dive into any of your emails or email campaigns?
Email Marketing Metrics to Know for Measuring Email Performance in HubSpot
First, let’s define the terms you need to know:
- Clicks. The number of unique clicks generated for a given email, campaign, or time period.
- Click Rate. The rate of clicks from the emails sent for an email, campaign, or time period expressed as a percentage of the number of emails sent. For example, if you sent 100 emails and five of them generated clicks, that would be a five percent click rate.
- Click-Through Rate. The rate of clicks generated expressed as a percentage of the emails opened. For example, if you had 20 email opens and generated five clicks, that would be a 25% click-through rate.
- Deliveries. The number of successful email deliveries made for an email, campaign, or period of time.
- Delivery Rate. The rate of successful deliveries expressed as a percentage of the emails sent. If you send 100 emails and 99 are successfully delivered, that would be a 99 percent delivery rate.
- Hard Bounces. This is the term for when an email couldn’t be delivered due to an invalid email address, the email being no longer in use, or the email being marked as spam.
- Hard Bounce Rate. The rate of emails sent that hard bounced, expressed as a percentage of the emails sent. If you send 1,000 emails and just two of them hard bounce, then your hard bounce rate would be 0.2 percent.
- Opens. The number of unique email opens generated for a given email, campaign, or period of time.
- Open Rate. The rate of email opens for an email, campaign, or time period expressed as a percentage of the number of emails sent. For example, if you sent 100 emails, and 20 of them were opened, that would be a 20 percent open rate.
- Reply Rate. The rate of replies to your emails expressed as a percentage of replies to emails sent. So, if you sent 100 emails and got one reply, that would be a one percent reply rate.
- Sends. The number of attempted email deliveries for a given email, campaign, or time period.
- Spam Report. This is when an email recipient reports your email as spam—indicating that it was an unwanted or nuisance communication and that they do not want to receive further communications from your organization.
- Spam Report Rate. The rate of spam reports expressed as a percentage of the total number of emails sent. If you send 1,000 emails and get one spam report, then your spam report rate would be 0.1 percent.
- Unsubscribes. The number of people who chose to unsubscribe from your email using the unsubscribe link in the email. CAN-SPAM rules require that you “tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future marketing email from you.”
- Unsubscribe Rate. The rate of unsubscribes expressed as a percentage of the emails sent. If you send 100 emails and one person unsubscribes, then you would have a one percent unsubscribe rate.
How to Analyze Marketing Emails, Campaigns, and Overall Email Performance in HubSpot
Now that you know the important terminology, how can you assess the performance of your emails and email campaigns in HubSpot?
How to Check the Performance of an Email in HubSpot
- Go to the email tool in HubSpot
- Search for the email you want to analyze and click on the name
- Click on “See details” to open a slide in panel with more details about the email
- Click on the “Performance” tab to see general performance data for the email
- Click on the “Recipients” tab to see data about the email’s recipients—who received it, opened it, clicked in the email, bounced, unsubscribed, reported the email as spam, or didn’t receive the email
In the “Performance” tab, you can see not only general performance data, but also revenue attribution information for leads who eventually went on to close a deal with your organization. The HTML click map shows you where in the email people clicked on it—letting you see what kinds of links, CTAs, or images are the best at generating clicks in your emails.
The “Time spent viewing email” report gives you a general indication of whether people read, skimmed, or glanced at your emails based on how long they had the email open to look at it. A higher percentage of “read” emails vs “glanced at” or “skimmed” indicates a highly-engaged audience that carefully reads your content.
How to Check the Performance of Emails in a Campaign in HubSpot
Want to check the performance of a whole set of emails in a campaign in HubSpot? To do this, you’ll first need to make sure that the emails are all associated with a campaign in HubSpot. When creating an email, you can associate that email with a campaign in the “Settings” tab—the “Campaign” dropdown menu will appear near the bottom of the settings tab:
Click on the dropdown and select a campaign, or create a new campaign to track for the email.
Once your emails are associated with relevant campaigns, you can check the overall performance of emails in that campaign by:
- Clicking on the “Marketing” dropdown in the main HubSpot nav menu
- Clicking on “Campaigns”
- Clicking on the campaign you want to check email performance for
- Opening the “Emails” section
Here, you can look at the unique clicks, opens, and send data for emails in the campaign. You can do a more in-depth comparison of emails in the campaign by clicking on the “Compare emails” button. This allows you to directly compare different emails in the series to see which ones have the highest open rates, click-through rates, revenue attribution, and more.
How to Check Overall Email Marketing Performance in HubSpot
There are a few places to check your email marketing performance in HubSpot. For a quick overview of performance, you can go to the “Analyze” tab of your HubSpot email tool. This page will give you a quick overview of your overall email recipient engagement, delivery stats, and email performance.
You can also create a custom reporting dashboard in your HubSpot to curate specific email-related reports and information—including saved reports from your HubSpot email analyze tab. To save a report from the analyze tab to use in your custom email report dashboard:
- Click on the “Save report” option in the upper right of each report
- Give the report a custom name and description
- Choose whether to add the report to an existing dashboard, create a new dashboard with the report, or to not add the report to any dashboard
- Click “Next”
- Choose who can access and edit the report (private, everyone, or specific users and teams)
Here’s a quick video showing the basic process:
Common Causes of Issues with Email Sends in HubSpot
Having trouble sending emails in HubSpot? There are a few potential issues that might be keeping your email from going out or getting received by your intended audience. Some common reasons for emails not being sent or failing to deliver include (but may not be limited to):
- Incorrect Recipient Email Information. One common reason for an email not being successfully delivered is that the recipient email address is incorrect.
- Recipient Flagged a Prior Email as Spam. If a recipient marks your emails as spam, HubSpot may stop you from sending more emails to them to prevent further spam reports and preserve your email health.
- Recipient Unsubscribed. The recipient unsubscribed from your email communications and has not opted back in.
- Invalid Sending Address. If there’s an error in your email sending address that makes it invalid (or appear to be invalid), HubSpot will not send the email.
- Previous Hard Bounces. If emails to a given address have experienced hard bounces in the past, HubSpot may avoid sending further emails to that recipient.
- Recipient Has Requested to Not Receive ANY Emails from HubSpot. If the recipient has reported a HubSpot-generated email as spam or specifically requested not to receive HubSpot emails, HubSpot may block emails to them until you can provide proof that the contact is legitimate and wants to receive emails.
- Blocked Domain. If the owner(s) of a domain request to not receive emails from a HubSpot account, the email will not be sent.
- Subscription Not Confirmed. If a recipient hasn’t confirmed consent to receive marketing emails, HubSpot may not send emails until consent is confirmed.
- Email Not Sent. If you haven’t sent the email or if there is an unknown error blocking the email from being sent, you may get this error message.
- The Contact Is in an Exclusion List. If you have an opt-out/exclusion list that the contact is part of and you use it as a “don’t send to” criterion for the email or the workflow the email is part of, then that contact won’t be sent an email.
- Account Suspension Due to Deliverability or Noncompliance Issues. HubSpot enforces an acceptable use policy for its platform. This includes a list of prohibited email actions like sending spam, using misleading names, addresses, or subject lines, and sending emails to purchased lists. Violating the acceptable use policy may result in account suspension and the revocation of email send privileges.
- Email Classified as Spam by Recipient Email Server. Some email servers may automatically flag communications as spam based on spam reports from other email users in the server. If a sending domain accrues too many spam reports, the server may mark all future communications from that domain as spam.
- Request to Email Provider Timed Out. This is when a request to send an email times out. This may happen due to a technical issue with HubSpot or the email service provider. The recommended solution is to try again later and, if the issue persists, check the HubSpot status page and the status page of your email service provider.
You can find the error messages explaining why an email wasn’t delivered by going to the “Recipients” tab in an email’s performance report and going to the “Not sent” subcategory. Here’s a screen capture showing where to find it:
HubSpot Email FAQs
A tool as important and frequently-used as HubSpot’s email tool is going to generate a lot of questions. While the previous sections should hopefully answer a lot of questions you might have had, here are a few more FAQs and quick answers to them:
Why Aren’t Images Showing in My Email?
There are a few reasons why an image put into an email might not display when sent to a contact:
- The contact’s email settings—some clients have security settings that don’t allow the display of images by default and require the recipient to either download the image or change their security settings.
- The image file size is too large—some email clients have an upper limit to the size of the images they will display. Going above this limit will keep the image from displaying. Use an image compression tool to prevent this issue.
- An issue with the image file in your HubSpot files—If you add a broken image to an email, it won’t display properly in the recipient’s email client. You should see that an image is broken during the editing process. This may also happen if you delete an image used in an email from your HubSpot database.
How Many Emails Can I Send Per Month?
Limits vary depending on your HubSpot subscription type and any marketing contact limit add-ons you may have purchased.
- Free accounts can send 2,000 emails
- Marketing Hub Starter accounts can send emails equal to five times their maximum marketing contacts limit (5 x 1,000, or 5,000 sends minimum)
- Marketing Hub Professional accounts can send emails equal to 10 times their maximum marketing contacts limit (10 x 2,000, or 20,000 sends minimum)
- Marketing Hub Enterprise accounts can send emails equal to 20 times their maximum marketing contacts limits (20 x 10,000, or 200,000 sends minimum)
Can I Edit an Email After It’s Already Been Sent?
Not really. You cannot change the content of an email in a recipient’s inbox after they’ve already received it. However, you can change an automated email so that it’s different for future recipients.
Additionally, you can edit a HubSpot CTA that’s in an email and the CTA will display the updated version of that CTA when it’s loaded in the email client for the first time. Note: Outlook reloads the CTA each time the email is opened, so the recipient will always see the newest version of it while Gmail only loads the CTA the first time it’s opened and will cache that version.
Why Were My Email Privileges Suspended?
If your use of the HubSpot email tool violates HubSpot’s acceptable use policy, HubSpot may suspend your account and restrict you from sending emails in HubSpot. This is part of HubSpot’s deliverability protection system which is used to preserve the HubSpot sending domain’s health so all users can keep using HubSpot to send communications.
To contest or remediate an email account suspension, follow the directions given in the banner notification in your HubSpot portal detailing the suspension. This may involve cleaning up your contacts and submitting an appeal to HubSpot.
You can find the full email suspension appeal process in HubSpot’s Knowledge Base.
Top 11 HubSpot Email Mistakes to Avoid
Sometimes, it’s more important to know what not to do than it is to know the best practices. So, what are some of the top mistakes to avoid when using the HubSpot email tool? Here’s an abbreviated list of mistakes to avoid:
- Sending Emails to Contacts Who Didn’t Opt In. One thing to avoid at all costs is sending unsolicited communications to prospects who never opted in. This can result in spam reports, unsubscribes, and other issues that negatively impact your email health and deliverability.
- Removing CAN-SPAM Required Information. Make sure that all of your email templates include the basic information required under the CAN-SPAM Act. Removing this information can create expensive legal liabilities.
- Forgetting to Scrub the Contacts Database. To preserve email health, it’s important to regularly scrub your contacts database for contacts with invalid email addresses or other issues that impact email deliverability.
- Sending Emails to Contacts Who Unsubscribed. If a contact has unsubscribed from all marketing communications, it’s important to stop sending them emails. It may help to create a workflow in HubSpot to change the status of contacts who unsubscribe from all contacts to non-marketing contacts.
- Using Misleading Subject Lines. Email subject lines should be indicative of the email’s content. Using misleading subject lines violates the acceptable use policy and can result in an account suspension.
- Sending from an Anonymous Domain. One thing that can get your emails flagged as spam or outright ignored is sending emails from “anonymous” or generic email domains. People like to know who’s reaching out to them.
- Leaving Out Preview Text. While not all email clients show preview text, it can be an important way to distinguish your emails from competitors in a recipient’s inbox. Be sure to include (and optimize) preview text for all of your emails.
- Sending Emails with No Value to the Recipient. Keep in mind that an email isn’t really about you—it’s about the recipient. What do they want or need? How can you help them? Sending an email stuffed with meaningless fluff or content not of interest to the recipient is a surefire way to get unsubscribes or spam reports.
- Not Segmenting Your Emails for Specific Subsets of Recipients. Part of delivering a valuable email is making it as specific to the recipient as possible. If all you generate are mass emails that go to all subscribers, your recipients might not feel like you’re really paying attention to their interests. You can address this by segmenting your contacts based on their needs or interests and creating email campaigns specific to each or using workflows to trigger targeted email sends when contacts fulfill specific criteria.
- Forgetting to Make a Plain Text Version. Some email client security settings may block designed elements from displaying in the email client. If you don’t account for this by creating a plain text version of the email, it may end up looking janky in the client’s inbox. Solve this issue by creating plain text versions of each email you send.
- Making an Email Too Long. According to Digital Information World, studies show that people spend an average of “just 9 seconds” reading emails. People get way too many emails to read a full manifesto in detail each time you send one. So, try to be brief and keep your email to salient points.
These are just a few of the email faux pas that you should avoid when sending emails in HubSpot. Have a major email mistake story to tell? Share it in the comments section at the bottom of this article!
Use Cases for HubSpot’s Email Tool
So, that was a lot of information about how to use the HubSpot email tool. But, what can you use it for? The shorter answer might be what you can’t use it for! The email tool is a central part of any HubSpot subscription and one that any business unit within an organization can find a use for.
Some examples of use cases for marketing, sales, and service teams include:
Marketing Uses for HubSpot Emails
- Lead Nurturing. When a contact converts on the company’s website, marketing teams can use emails as part of a workflow to nurture that contact from a new contact until they become a marketing qualified lead (MQL).
- Product Updates and Announcements. Send exciting new information about products and services to interested subscribers to keep them engaged with the brand and apprised of major changes to their tools and resources.
- Driving Prospect Engagement. Are you getting questions about your brand from prospects? Your marketing team can use HubSpot’s email tool to engage with them and track those interactions in the email tool—this can be further enhanced using the conversations inbox.
Sales Uses for HubSpot Emails
- Closing Deal with Prospects. Emails are a common way to send proposals and the electronic paperwork needed to close a deal online. With HubSpot, your sales reps can log when the contacts clicked on the e-sign link and other interactions.
- Sending Upsell Messaging. Have a current customer who could benefit from your other products and services? Let them know with an upsell email linking their current solutions to the new product/service that enhances them.
- Scheduling Meetings. Send meeting invites to prospects and book time with them by sending links to your meeting calendar in HubSpot’s email tool.
Service Uses for HubSpot Emails
- Getting Details about Service Tickets. Is a customer encountering an issue that they didn’t fully explain in their initial service ticket? Service teams can send an email asking for specific details or arrange a live discussion. This helps to enhance the service experience.
- Proactively Sending Updates. Is there a major change to your tools or a new FAQ you want to ensure your customers know about? Send a proactive update email detailing the change and how it might affect customers (or how they can use the updated solution). This can potentially reduce the number of tickets submitted after a major update.
- Confirming Issue Resolution. When closing a ticket, you can send an email to the customer detailing how the issue was resolved and log that activity in HubSpot. This can help keep the customer “in the loop” regarding their service tickets and provide important documentation for future reference.
These are just a few of the ways to use HubSpot’s email tools for different departments in your organization. Have a favorite use? Share it in the comments below!
Need Help Optimizing Your Emails in HubSpot?
To misappropriate an old cliché, the HubSpot email tool is easy to learn, but deceptively difficult to master. If you find yourself needing help optimizing your emails to maximize results, reach out to Bluleadz today!
Our team has extensive experience in the HubSpot platform and can help you discover opportunities to leverage your tools to transform the way you market, service, and sell to your customers.
HubSpot Email Tool Resources