HubSpot and email marketing Part II: Electric Boogaloo (HubHeroes, Ep. 28)

Alright, HubHeroes, we are back for Email Marketing and HubSpot Part II: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO! In our last episode, we told the epic tale of how email has stood the test of time in our marketing toolbox — it’s outlived Toby Maguire’s Spiderman, low rise jeans, beanie babies, *NSYNC, the entire Harry Potter movie saga, and more. 

🔎 Related: Email marketing strategy dos and don'ts (HubHeroes Podcast)

And there’s no signs of email slowing down – it’s estimated that email marketing efforts will generate $11 billion in revenue this year. I don't know about you all, but I'd certainly love a piece of that pie.

That's why we spent last episode digging deeply into how email has changed, and how business owners and marketing leaders need to be thinking about their strategy in 2023 and beyond. This week, we're talking about the tactics and technology. More specifically, how you make email magic using HubSpot. 

Even you most seasoned users out there need to huddle up for this one, because I guarantee you you’re going to learn a few very key HubSpot tricks that are going to seriously level-up your email game.

Here's what we cover in this episode ...

• What do even the most seasoned HubSpot users not realize is possible with the email tool in the HubSpot Marketing Hub?
• What are the most common mistakes people make with the HubSpot email tool?
• What do great review and preview processes look like for email?
• What are the most commonly underutilized parts of the HubSpot email tool?
• Templates vs. drag and drop in HubSpot ... are you missing out?
• How do you effectively measure the success of an email?
• Why does Devyn hurt Liz so deeply in this episode?
• Are you committing the greatest sending domain sin of all?

And a heck of a lot more! 

RESOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE

• Email marketing strategy dos and don'ts (HubSpot Podcast)
• How to set up your email sending domain in HubSpot (video tutorial)
• How to use HubSpot's email signature feature (video tutorial)
• Why go HubSpot Marketing Hub?
• Why go HubSpot Sales Hub?

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by silo departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge.

Never fear hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording.

This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

Liz Moorehead: There is literally nothing that gets me more hyped than safe harbor language and fine print. Am I right, guys?

George B. Thomas: Quiet. Legal. Quiet. I I really wonder. I wonder how many people have that memorized and say it word for word the way it is right now Mhmm.

In this moment in time.

Liz Moorehead: I don't know. 4 of us. But I'm going to say this once more with feeling Yeah. Quiet fives of 10 is speaking. I have returned.

I have returned. I left you alone for a week and somehow managed not to set everything on fire, which I was very impressed.

George B. Thomas: It was close.

Max Cohen: And

Liz Moorehead: you you also actually managed to have a pretty solid episode, which was exciting and hurtful. I don't I don't know how to kind of reconcile those

Max Cohen: 2 things. You've managed.

Liz Moorehead: I need to

George B. Thomas: be needed.

Max Cohen: You've managed to have a pretty solid episode.

George B. Thomas: I mean, you guys are alright without me, if I do say so myself.

Max Cohen: You guys didn't totally it up. Good job. Thanks, Norman.

Liz Moorehead: And I I did notice that George was a very good student and said humans about 18 times. So good job, George.

Max Cohen: Except he said it very cute.

George B. Thomas: Hey. I'm here for

Max Cohen: he said humans, and that was adorable. Yeah.

Devyn Bellamy: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah. It was okay. That was adorable.

George B. Thomas: I I mean, you have to know your place. And so I have come to realize that in in this galaxy, it's for me, it's all about the feelings.

Liz Moorehead: He's not gonna make sure to do that in the intro every single time, so I can't yell at him about it. But George, trust me, I will find something else to bug you about. Just you wait. I'll be out on the Davenport in the veranda. But actually, no.

All all kidding aside, here's what I'm gonna say. I really enjoyed the conversation last week to the point where, dare I say it, we need a part 2. We need a part 2. I have questions. Okay?

Because we are back. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. Anybody listening out there in our Hub Heroes universe, welcome to email marketing and HubSpot part 2, Electric Boogaloo, This Time It's Personal. Oh, I

George B. Thomas: love that movie. I love that movie. Oh, my God.

Liz Moorehead: Olivia Newton John and Sylvester Stallone, the buddy cop team I didn't know I needed. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Fantastic.

Anyway, my fellow hub heroes last week laid out a fantastic story about how email has stood the test of time in our marketing toolbox. It has outlived Tobey Maguire's Spider Man, low rise jeans, Jenco jeans, Beanie Babies, NSYNC, the entire Harry Potter movie saga. The only thing that is still hanging on, if you can believe it, I had to look this up. Hanson is still a band. So apparently yeah.

Yeah. So I don't know how I feel in saying this sentence. I don't know how I feel saying this sentence, but apparently, email marketing enhanced it. They're they got the longevity, which is horrifying. Anyway, emails shows no signs of slowing down.

It's estimated that this year, $11,000,000,000 in revenue will be generated through email. And I don't know about you guys, but that sounds deliciously tasty. And I want that. I want that. Me.

So you guys dug into a lot of the strategy in the last episode. Right? How folks can go epically right or horribly wrong when it comes to the strategy, the human strategy.

Max Cohen: Yes.

Liz Moorehead: If you didn't listen to it, queue it up for come to listen to right after this. But this week, we're now gonna dig into everybody's favorite thing, which is the tools, the tactics, the technology. More specifically, how to make email magic using HubSpot. Gentlemen, are you ready? Are you ready?

Okay. Had no one can hear. Yeah.

Max Cohen: I was

Devyn Bellamy: just my favorite thumbs up and everything.

Intro: It is

Max Cohen: like Yes.

Devyn Bellamy: The listeners are just, I guess, they're not ready.

Liz Moorehead: I know. You guys are thriving in an audio only environment. I'm literally like, are you ready? And I was I was expecting George to do his usual, like, yes. Put me in coaching.

Meanwhile, you all are just like, yes. That sounds Well, again. That's not happening. Yes.

George B. Thomas: And your mouse gets set.

Liz Moorehead: Go. I

Max Cohen: keep I knew as soon

Liz Moorehead: as he pulled up that sound board.

Max Cohen: Keep forgetting he has it, and it freaks me out every

Liz Moorehead: time. I didn't. I didn't. Because when we've right when we started recording, I said this is gonna be a problem, and then he just smiled, and it was really uncomfortable. That out of the way, George, how about this?

Put down the soundboard, pick up your brain, and I want you to answer this question for me. Yeah. What are even the most seasoned users of HubSpot missing about how dope the email tool is?

George B. Thomas: Oh, my gosh. Like okay. So I think everybody, first of all, fundamentally, gets in a hurry when they think about creating and crafting email. And so one of the things that I love to teach is a preview process that one should go through. And in that preview process, I talk about how you can actually look at personalization tokens that you've put in based on the contact.

You can also preview the smart content that you have in your email based on that personalization and those contacts that you can look at the, email in an email service provider that you have an audience that you know is gonna open it up in 7 different ways. And and so there's this whole preview process. I don't think everybody misses the preview process. I think a lot of people miss the preview process. But I have seen, to answer the question, the most seasoned HubSpot professionals actually create a list of internal employees and then send the test email to an actual list of employees.

Instead of leveraging the send a test email button that lives right up by the actions and previews button. Because I preach I'll preach it till the cows come home. The only thing you do when you do that is jack up your email analytics because no employee is gonna open a test email the way that an email should actually be opened by the people who give 2 rips about it. So if you're sitting here listening to this or standing here listening to this or you're on a boat or you're on a plane or you're with a fox and you're eating green eggs and hams and you're listening to this, That was a little too far. Just make sure you don't do that anymore.

Liz Moorehead: I love that you mentioned the preview tool because I'm always amazed by people who don't take the time to do that and or review process of any kind. I don't care if you're sending the email via smoke signals internally. You never wanna be the guy, gal, guinea pig, hamster who's sending out the email where you're excited for someone's compooper skills, if we all remember friends, right? Like I'm always amazed by people who do not take the time to actually review the stuff they're sending out because George, you're talking in some ways at 5 dimensional chess level for some of the people I see using the email tool. They don't even bother reviewing it in the first place.

There is no QA process. And I'm like, before we could even tell you these are the different ways in which you can preview it look at things the test email part I found really powerful because if you're just opening up the preview link it's not gonna tell you where something gets cut off.

George B. Thomas: We can hear you, but I'm still stuck on kerpoo kerpooper? What? Why did you say

Liz Moorehead: that, Gil? There was an episode of Friends back when you would go somewhere and type up a resume, and it was back when Rachel was learning how to get a job, and she didn't realize that she had printed up a bunch of resumes that said she had really great compooper skills.

George B. Thomas: Man, I went to, like, a pooper scooper for, like, the glitter box or something. I was just trying to figure it all out.

Liz Moorehead: I mean, I think that's where everybody who got her resume went to as well. That's kind of the problem. What about you, Max and Kevin? What do you think? What do you think people are missing even if, like, they're the most seasoned HubSpot pros when it comes to the email tool?

Devyn Bellamy: For me, it's the fact that email within HubSpot and ideally within your strategy is part of a larger thing.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Devyn Bellamy: Like, it's it's not a stand alone email tool, and it's not meant to be used as a stand alone email tool. There are so many features that are packed into every tier of HubSpot marketing, whether you're free or starter, you're pro, price, whatever whatever, one that you're using. The fact that you can have your email integrated into workflows and then have these, automated workflows work off of things that happen with other things. Like, if you see someone's interacting with your brand significantly or if they reach a significant level within the the lead scoring, you can automatically send an email. I'll I'll never forget when I was actually on the HubSpot website.

This was back 2015, and I was I was just drinking all the information in. And occasionally, I'm getting these emails saying whatever about whatever page that I was just on. Like, it was and it wasn't saying, hey. I saw you were on our website. You should definitely check this out.

No. What it was is it would

Liz Moorehead: I need an adult. I need an adult. What just happened?

Max Cohen: Definitely get a restraining order.

Devyn Bellamy: See, I I don't need buttons. I I just do it. But the, the the thing is

Liz Moorehead: Woah. Woah. Woah. I'm sorry. Did you just hip check George and Max under the shade bus ever so slightly?

Really did. My deep baritone has it.

Devyn Bellamy: Little bit. I I flex when I can flex, you know. I I do what I can.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. He he flexed. He flexed.

Devyn Bellamy: But the the thing is is that the the the email came off as timely and relevant, and I came away or I would have come away with it as, oh, yeah. I was just looking at that. And, oh, yeah. I was just thinking. But because I'm a marketer and I know how it works, I

George B. Thomas: was like, yeah. I like what you did there.

Devyn Bellamy: But, yeah, the the fact, that the email isn't just about sending newsletters or prospecting. You can do so much more with email within HubSpot.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Devin, you just reminded me of something, I wanna hit upon. And and, Liz, I know you wanted to go to Max, but I gotta jump in here for a second because I think one of the things that we deal with is as email markers, we're always thinking like out out out out out out out broadcast broadcast broadcast. And and so sometimes I think it's hard to get into the user experience mindset, but Devin reminded me of this podcast that I actually subscribed to. And I'll never forget, I needed some time out of the office.

I went and walked, you know, my my neighborhood, and I got finished with an episode of the podcast. And I kid you not, it was, like, maybe 1 minute, maybe 45 seconds, but probably a minute afterwards of me finishing that podcast. And all of a sudden, I heard, and there was an email in my inbox. And it was literally the resources that I would want to have at my fingertips based on the podcast I had just listened to. And I was like, oh my god.

Like, that to me was just an amazing user experience. A great way to use automation and email in hand in hand with a podcast kind of strategy.

Liz Moorehead: I love that. And you're getting to something where I know we're going back to the strategy. And George, just go ahead and say humans for me once, buddy.

Max Cohen: He wants

Liz Moorehead: Thank you. I love that. I love that. I mean, it's clearly not at Devin's caliber, which he's already made sure we understood, but it's pretty solid, George. Good good work.

Well, then I'll just talk like this for the rest of the podcast. Okay? That's enough. That's that's no. Okay.

That was a mistake.

Devyn Bellamy: You sound like you're trying to kill Roger Rabbit.

Liz Moorehead: Just like your pepper. I always love how smart we are.

George B. Thomas: Podcast ever.

Liz Moorehead: Recording on a Friday. Always recording on a Friday. Such a smart move. Such a smart move. No.

So the human piece of it and the reason why I wanted you to break out the humans is when people look at email generally and say like it's a broadcast channel. I'll tell you what I told one of my clients earlier this week. When you sit down to write an email, don't create content to broadcast, create content to connect. Imagine a person is sitting across from you and think about them as once more with feeling George, a what? Human.

Yes. See. But you're right. Like, if you're treating your strategy and the tool like a broadcast channel, that's gonna be amplified across the way you create the email, what emails you think you need to create, how you use the tool. Again, HubSpot is only ever gonna be as smart as your strategy.

Alright. Who else has thoughts? What even our most seasoned HubSpot people

Max Cohen: Guess I'm the only one left.

Liz Moorehead: Are missing with that tool.

George B. Thomas: I'll go.

Max Cohen: Yeah, Mark. Yeah. So I I think we kinda touched on this, but, like, thinking about it just past, like, a selling and a promotional tool. You know, there's so much you can do to support internal processes, using that marketing email tool. Right?

Whether it's internal email notifications, you know, ones that are probably kind of way better than the, you know, boring boiler plate ones you have if you just turn on your your HubSpot notifications in your settings. So, like, just thinking about how, like, you support the customer experience a little bit more versus just, like, shove content down their throat. Right? The other kind of piece of it too is, like, using it with the rest of the tool. Right?

And not thinking of email kind of in its own sort of little siloed piece of of your experience as a HubSpot user. You gotta remember, like, pairing HubSpot with things like the campaigns tool can help you give a much better idea of how emails the emails that are built to support all this extra content you're creating and making whether it's landing pages, workflows, blog posts, things you do with social, like, whatever it is. Like, you can see how well those emails are performing when they're supposed to be supporting these other assets that you're building. You know? And then when you start thinking about things like multi touch revenue attribution in the enterprise in Marketing Hub Enterprise, and even now today, customer journey analytics.

Right? So, you know, you pair something like email with, like, custom behavioral events. If you're like a email marketer for a SaaS company, and you're trying to get people to go out and actually, like, try a new feature. If you have that feature talking back to HubSpot and saying, hey, this user did this thing and it fires off a custom behavioral event. Well, now you as an email marketer at that SaaS company can send out an email to your user base, tell them to go try this new feature, and then figure out if they actually did it instead of just looking at your open and your close rate.

Right? So thinking about how you're tactically weaving email in with everything else versus just emails that are just like, buy something from me. Have you seen this blog post? Here's your ebook. Like, there's a lot more you can do with it.

Did this break you, George? What happened?

Liz Moorehead: George, do you need a minute?

George B. Thomas: No. I'm good. But just, like, first of all, Max is, like, ramped up. And then also, he changed his voice to, like, this other person, and and I was, like I

Max Cohen: didn't even use my

Devyn Bellamy: cell phone.

George B. Thomas: All the bad stuff. That's all the bad email stuff that he just listed.

Liz Moorehead: Maybe it's that new TV fireplace you have going on behind you in your new digs, Max. It's just giving you a whole new vibe.

George B. Thomas: Lights getting

Liz Moorehead: to me. New yon energy.

Max Cohen: I'm y'all out over here.

Liz Moorehead: Yum. Well, let's on yas. What are what are the on yas's? No. Just kidding.

So what are some of the most common mistakes you see people make with the tool? So again, we talk now about the things that people that are missing in the tool, but what are the mistakes that people are making? For example, George, I just know I am ready for you to spit a little bit of fire about people who are still using templates.

George B. Thomas: Well, yeah. I mean, there's there's that. The the amount of HubSpot Hubs that I go into, and they have not used drag and drop email. And it's, like, over, what, a year and a half, 2 years old. And they're you know, it's something that they bought from the marketplace, or it's something that they, you know, paid a developer to develop, and it probably still doesn't work in Outlook the way that it should, but everybody's kinda hanging on and doing the best they can.

Like, drag and drop email over templates in that email tool is by far the way that I try to get people to go in, show them how easy it is to build their own templates, multiple templates off of a single email by just dragging and dropping some stuff around. Not to mention, not to mention, templates don't have saved sections. And the fact that in the drag and drop email tool, you can have saved sections that go across all of your future emails. So if you want an image left, copy right, copy right image left, 2 buttons into, you know, 2 columns, whatever. Like, you can literally build the the brick blocks or Legos or however old you are.

If you know what brick blocks are, by the way, email me. Georgegeorgebthomas.com. I'm super curious if you even know what

Max Cohen: it was.

George B. Thomas: Roblox? Pre LEGO. Anyway, it's it's pre LEGO. Pre LEGO.

Liz Moorehead: Is it the Davenport of LEGOs?

George B. Thomas: It's it's, god, I'm old. Okay. But anyway, save sections. Like, you should definitely be paying attention to that and your drag and drop. And and if you're listening to this and you're on templates in your email tool, try something new.

Max Cohen: Classic template editor. Right? Is that what you're referring to?

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's still a tab, by the way. I'm waiting for the day when that can just go away.

But it's still a tab. People that love it. And if they've not done anything with the drag and drop, it's what opens first. And when I see it open first, Max, I live in, like, oh, no.

Max Cohen: The drag and drop email editor is, like, really impressive from from the times

George B. Thomas: that I've

Liz Moorehead: What's impressive about it?

Max Cohen: It's just, like, you have so much control, but it's, like, really only the amount of control that you need. Right? Like, it doesn't really let you go overboard, because the last thing you wanna do in a marketing email is go overboard. Right? I mean, I feel like that's one of the best ways to get to a a spam filter is, like, over design something and have so many lines of code in it, and it just be so crazy.

You know what I mean? But, like, for everything that an email needs to be, I feel like it lets you get there really, really easily.

George B. Thomas: I like that you brought design, but even past design, we as humans and that was normal, by the way. That was

Devyn Bellamy: It was still hot. Pure choice.

George B. Thomas: It was hot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah. Devin, don't try to don't try to kiss your child and make it okay. We remember. We know what you did. We know what

George B. Thomas: you did. Listen. We listen, Linda. We, as humans, we make mistakes. We make mistake.

I know. I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't really mean you, Liz. I'm just Oops, Linda. Checked up.

Check the Internet. I'm sure you'll figure it out. Listen. Is

Liz Moorehead: it some other content strategist? Are you

George B. Thomas: No. I don't know what Linda does. I Linda. Listen. Yeah.

So I digress. But here's the thing. We as humans this is the best podcast episode ever. We as humans true. We we we as humans make mistakes.

And so the fact that in the drag and drop email tool, you can convert a regular email to an automated or an automated to a regular like, if you started to build that email, and all of a sudden you, somebody above you decided, oh, you know what? I don't wanna do it as a one off. I wanna make it a sequence. Back in the good old days, you had to, like, restart completely over. Now you just flip it over to the thing that you wanna roll with and go.

That is thinking about the end user. That, ladies and gentlemen, is magical.

Liz Moorehead: What's the synonym for end user, George?

George B. Thomas: Human.

Liz Moorehead: Thank you. Look at him. There he goes. Look at him fly. Max, you look like you're ready to drop some knowledge on it.

Max Cohen: Well, I mean, I just, you know, I'm I'm just still I'm just still loving the drag and drop editor. Like, the the really cool thing is, like, when you think about it's an email platform built on top of your CRM too as well. Right? So things like products from your product library can just be dropped right in. Videos that you have sitting inside your content management system can be dropped right in.

Right. Just the button builder, like how it automatically takes care of lawyer, like, yeah. Meeting links. I mean, there's it's, it's just, I don't know. I just think it's, it's really cool and how much control you get over, like the sections and moving things around and like all that kind of stuff.

George B. Thomas: I just I like it a lot.

Liz Moorehead: Well, here's the thing about HubSpot. And, George, you were the one who taught me this, so I'm gonna, for once, give you credit.

George B. Thomas: Oh, wow.

Liz Moorehead: This one time.

George B. Thomas: My gosh.

Liz Moorehead: You know, when George George was the one who showed me like HubSpot at the end of the day is just a CRM. And I think where people get caught up is the quote unquote just at the CRM. But what that's actually what makes it so freaking sexy, a parking ticket that has fine written all over it. Because when people look at HubSpot, they're like, oh, it's a blog tool, oh, it's an email tool, oh, it's a this, I'm like, no, imagine you can take the database, the CRM of every single human you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that your organization is built to serve and support and elevate and do all of those amazing things, email is just a tool in that tool belt to to bring your sales CRM to life. And that is what makes HubSpot at the end of the day so much better than a lot of the competitors out there.

Because the other ones actually think, well, we're just a CRM, but look at this great Wiki we can make. No. Instead HubSpot says, look at all the humans in front of you. These are the people you're trying to serve. Across every single hub, you will get a set of targeted tools that will enable you to serve them at across different areas of the flywheel.

Look, Max, I'm saying flywheel, not flywheel.

George B. Thomas: I don't

Max Cohen: want you proud.

Liz Moorehead: But, like, and email email is just one of those things. Now I also am on team George too, so don't worry. But, like, that's what gets me excited about it. There's no such thing as just a CRM in HubSpot. The other ones, sure.

George B. Thomas: I I love all of what you said. I feel like I went to a little bit of, like, HubSpot church for a second. But there's two words there's two words that you said there that are are I just want people to understand how important they are when you attach them to the term CRM, and that is, Liz, you said serve and support. When you come from those mindsets, whether you're creating email communication, feedback survey, a form for starting a conversation, AKA conversion, you come from a different place when you're there to serve and support.

Liz Moorehead: Can I get an amen? Amen. Amen. Amen. I love that.

Speaking of amen, George, can you also make sure it's a little postscript to this section? Tell me that thing about sending domains again that people tend to screw up a little bit just sometimes, which make it in the way of their ability to serve and support?

George B. Thomas: Oh god. For all this. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, you know how people just never read the manual?

Like, you get a you you

Liz Moorehead: You mean, like, that you don't like directions?

George B. Thomas: You get a new well, hey now. Slow your roll. You get a new you get a new clock or a watch or a

Devyn Bellamy: IKEA.

George B. Thomas: I don't know, a workout or something. And and it literally has a pamphlet that says, this is how you use it. And it's like, you just kinda throw it to the side. There's a project in Hub Spot that is like a marketing setup project in the projects tool. It is literally like the things that you need to do before you think about taking this,

Liz Moorehead: Ferrari

George B. Thomas: of a CRM out for a test drive. And, sometimes I've just seen that people, like, off to the side goes the little thing that you're supposed to, like, figure out before you go because they've been using HubSpot for 3 months, 6 months, 2 years, plus some of the people that I'm talking about here. And I'll go to their, settings. I'll go to domains and URLs, and I'll go to email sending domain, and it will be empty. Meaning, for the last 3 months, 6 months, or 2 years plus, they've been sending emails, and there's been a nice little thing in people's email saying via HubSpot.

Max Cohen: Not if I set your portal up.

George B. Thomas: Great branding. Which is great branding.

Liz Moorehead: You tell it

Max Cohen: now. Not if you did onboarding with me. Man. Boy, that was the first thing that was the first thing everybody had to do when I was setting you up. Alright.

Absolutely.

George B. Thomas: Bro, that I same. Same. Right? For 2 years when I did HubSpot onboardings for HubSpot through Impulse Creative, we didn't step foot out of anything else that we're talking about until those setup tasks were done. Because it's it's important.

But again, if you're listening green dot, if there's a gray dot, chew all your fingernails off, start to sweat, and figure out how to fix your DNS.

Max Cohen: Part is that it takes 8 seconds to do this.

Liz Moorehead: Is it time to

George B. Thomas: 8 seconds?

Max Cohen: You go in. Maybe 10. You type in your domain. It says, okay. Copy this thing over to GoDaddy.

You copy it. You paste it into your what is it? You're you're you're making a something MX record. Is it?

Liz Moorehead: Oh, god.

Max Cohen: It's like 2 c names or something. Yeah. 2 c names or something in your DNS.

George B. Thomas: C names.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Names. It's literally so simple. It walks you through it. It's it's not hard.

Liz Moorehead: Devin, can you just say something that unbreaks my brain? Because you and I just both witnessed what the that was. Just just just just fix my brain. Sure. Tell me something else that people are messing up with this tool.

No, Max. You're done. We're good. You couldn't I

Max Cohen: wanna give the easy way. Wait. Before that, just for anyone listening not knowing what you're doing, You're essentially giving HubSpot permission to email on your domain's behalf. That's all it is. It's setting emails that look like it's coming from your domain.

And you're saying, yes, HubSpot. That's okay. Go ahead and do it. And then they can do it. That's essentially all it is.

Anyway, sorry, Devin. Go ahead.

George B. Thomas: Or or you're broadcasting to your 50,000 people in your CRM via HubSpot.

Liz Moorehead: If they even see it, it'll end up in their promo folder. Devin, save me,

Devyn Bellamy: please. Sure. In a second. I just need to jump on this train too. It's the ultimate in rookie moves, not fixing your domain.

It is it is it I will judge you 100% absolute amateur hour, if that's what you're doing. Yeah. Fix that. If your says from such and such via and then super long address, it doesn't make any sense. It's because you messed up.

So

Liz Moorehead: Wait, guys. Do you hear that? Do you hear the sound of everybody pausing going, oh, no. Oh, snap. And they're, like, hitting pause and they're, like, what was my last email?

Devyn Bellamy: Yeah. I I I For

Liz Moorehead: those of you who have rejoined us, we see you and you should feel ashamed, but fix it, and it'll be proven now.

Devyn Bellamy: Yeah. Devin. Mad judgment. But okay. So Bad judgment.

My, contribution is people who send multiple con multiple emails instead of just using smart content.

George B. Thomas: -Yeah.

Devyn Bellamy: -Um, you don't have to physically segment it as if you're sending letters to people. What you can just do is create the one email that has content that's relevant to specific people, and then you create lists of those specific relevant people. And then you send to those lists, but you make sure that your content only shows up for the people who it's supposed to. So you can literally have a red team and a blue team send one email and blue only sees blue information, red only sees red information. That's the simplest way I can put it.

Sending out multiple emails is gonna kill your, email health. It's going to skewer skew your numbers, and it's gonna waste your freaking time. Stop it. You can just do it all in one place and just send it out.

Max Cohen: And only because you got a CRM behind it. Right? That's another one of the beauties of your email tool and your CRM tool being the same thing.

George B. Thomas: Are we on mistakes right now? And now I Were we talking about mistakes?

Max Cohen: No. I'm kind of Alright. I'm

George B. Thomas: Imagine what Devin said about the blue team and the red team, and now expand that out to your monthly newsletter where somebody could have picked out of 10 areas of interest, 6 of them, and now they only see the 6 things that they're actually interested in instead of your long newsletter automagical, ladies and gentlemen, what you can do with what Devin was explaining.

Devyn Bellamy: And and the other side of that is from your coworker standpoint, they're gonna hate you if they have to go back and find an email. If you have 10¢ for every email you send out, you're gonna have a bad time. The only time I ever recommend splitting it up is when we're talking about localization. And it just makes sense to have whoever's working in that particular language or that particular region to be the one that owns the translation and the sending of the email. Outside of that, there are you can find yourself within 100 and 100 of emails, and it's bad data all over again.

Except this time, it's not your contacts. No. It's your emails.

George B. Thomas: Oh oh, you just reminded me of something. I didn't put it in our notes. No. No. No.

I didn't put it in my notes. But, Devin, you just reminded me, and it's probably back in, like, what are the most seasoned professionals getting wrong? If I say this and you're like, wait. There's what? Then it's one of the things that one of the seasonal, whatever.

One of the professionals get wrong. The fact that you actually can go to an email that you already sent and click on send to more, that you don't have to clone it and then send a whole new email, like, that sends you more so that all of your analytics stay in one place for one email instead of having, like, 7 emails over time with the same dang information, and now your analytics are, like, everywhere? Yep. I got another one. Here here, hold on.

Max Cohen: Just and I just need to say this, and

George B. Thomas: I kinda said it in the last episode,

Max Cohen: but we're gonna say it again. If you spend any time whatsoever getting mad about your previews in any version of Outlook, because the margin of the padding is getting messed up, do literally anything better with your life than, like, spend any more time at all on it. Just listen. Everyone's getting used to emails that look weird in Outlook. Is not worth your time because no one's even gonna notice it and no one's even gonna care about it.

The words are still gonna be there. Alright. You're not gonna lose the sale because your margins were messed up in Outlook's email client. Shill.

Liz Moorehead: It's so weird that that Max, are you okay? Do you need a hug?

Max Cohen: No. But there are a lot of people out there that will spend 14 hours trying to fix that when no one's gonna look at the email for more than 14 seconds? Not worth your time. Not worth your time. Do something better.

George B. Thomas: Just got some

Max Cohen: nap time back. Go pet your dog with every kid. Don't do that. Yeah.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. They they just got some nap time back. Thanks to our boy, Max.

Liz Moorehead: Well, I'm gonna say this also. I'm also you guys, I need you to pep it up a little bit. We're real low energy today. I need you to, like, start to

Intro: We'll do

George B. Thomas: what we can.

Liz Moorehead: Also, I have to go back to something that Devon said before we continue on. It's George's favorite phrase that I say that makes him grab the pen where he's like, I gotta tell Noah to cut this out. 7, you said something that always makes me think of South Park and I have to say this out loud, you're gonna have a bad time.

Intro: You're gonna have a

Liz Moorehead: bad time. Pizza, French fries, Pizza. French fries. See, George, you don't have to cut it out. It's about skiing.

It's only about skiing.

George B. Thomas: It's it's all good.

Liz Moorehead: Are you sure? Because I'm watching you have a heart attack in real time.

George B. Thomas: I'm okay. I'm okay.

Max Cohen: You okay?

Liz Moorehead: How about this? Do I wanna lobby a little easy one to bring you back down to earth?

George B. Thomas: Yeah. That's fine. That'd be good.

Liz Moorehead: Okay. I love the idea of email being used to serve and support the humans. I'd love that. But we can't make assumptions that the emails that we're creating even with the best of intent are actually doing their job. So what are some of the most effective ways you can measure the success?

The meh or the failure of the emails that you're creating in HubSpot?

George B. Thomas: Oh, that is interesting. And I don't know if it's much as a a law because it actually could get pretty in-depth, but I do like this conversation. You know, first of all, just realizing that you can look at your email analytics as a whole. A lot of marketers I've seen historically go into 1 individual email at a time because that's what's on their mind because that's what they just did. But going to that analyze tab and looking at the last 3 months, 6 months, 12 months of what you've been doing.

And in that screen, there's a scatter plot that is my favorite. It's like what you've done really bad, what you've done really right. And when I teach that part of the tool, I'm like, these are things to pay attention to do over and over again and things to never say were a good idea. And and really it because it comes down to what are you gonna what actions you can take based off the data that you can see. Now let me swing back into an individual email to see if you're doing it right or not.

Again, we always have to be challenging our assumptions. And so my one of my favorite things on the end of well, I have 2, but one of my favorite things on the individual email is actually the click map, where I can see do does the audience I serve like to click on anchor URLs, or do they click on buttons? And the fact is, are you not having both in your email to see if they click on 1 or the other more times than not? Because maybe you should be testing that out. But seeing what they're clicking on is amazing to me.

And then I'm a big advocate of paying attention to over time what email clients people are actually using to open my emails so that I can modify my preview of the email service provider instead of of people who use Lotus 7.9 still, and you're not even looking to see if it works in that email service provider. Come on.

Max Cohen: It's probably all Apple mail. Hey. Speaking of Apple, I think we can is it is it is it time to stop paying attention to open rates? Yes. Okay.

That's what I thought. I mean, it's it's click through, obviously, to me. I don't know. Yes. But, like, here's the thing.

If Apple's opening every single freaking email, why are we even looking at it anymore when it's, like, by far the most popular client? Isn't it? Or is Gmail on the browser? I'm not sure. I mean, I feel like everyone's got Apple Mail on their phone.

Right? Or Apple Mail on their computer.

George B. Thomas: Don't even bring up Bimmy.

Max Cohen: Bimmy?

George B. Thomas: Don't even Bimmy. I don't know. Yeah. Bimmy and Apple and all the things that are happening around email. But but I I I like that Devon fought back.

Max Cohen: Alright. Fight me.

Liz Moorehead: I'm fighting back too. Let's be very clear here because hold on a second. Okay. I understand that the let's let's be clear. First of all, that number has been suspect for a very long time.

Max Cohen: That is not brand new information. Hasn't gotten, like, ridiculously more suspect lately? Max Max Yes.

George B. Thomas: Would you

Liz Moorehead: like to hear my response, Or do you wanna sit there under your fire

George B. Thomas: and do?

Max Cohen: I'm burning. Hit me with it.

George B. Thomas: I love you so much.

Liz Moorehead: Devin, I've never seen you make that face before. I wish other people could have seen it.

George B. Thomas: Oh, they can at some point. Trust me. But we'll talk about that later.

Liz Moorehead: Okay. No. Okay. Anyway, here's what I will say. I don't look at it and say it is absolutely a 100%, like 26.7% open rate.

But what I will say is, like, if I know that it's capturing approximately the same amount every time, whatever that number happens to be, if it starts contracting and getting big and contracting and getting big, I'm still able to spot trends. Even if I don't know definitively what that number is, I can still see whether or not that number is going up and down. I do agree that people take a lot like, look, if you're looking at your open rate or your click through rate or anything for that matter, because the privacy rules are wreaking havoc on your ability to trust the numbers. Some numbers are still getting reported and it still can give you some trend data, even if it's soft, even if it's more stuff that you have to extrapolate from. But this idea that suddenly every number has absolutely no meaning, I don't buy that.

Don't trust that it's absolutely 26.7%. Yeah. Like that's absolutely insane. And if you've been doing that at all, guys, that changed in, like, 2015. This is not brand new.

That would be my argument.

George B. Thomas: So so I I agree with you on trends. Now, Max, I do wanna double down here, though, because there is a place where this fundamentally falls apart with HubSpot. And what I mean by that is back in the good old days, I used to love to talk to sales reps about how they could watch this little widget that would fly out on the right hand side of their monitor and say, Billy just opened your email. And it was it was glorious. I would talk about wait 10 minutes, then reach out and say, hey.

You just happen to be on my mind. I wondered if you had any questions and be real human about it. And now I tell people when that thing slides out, ignore that crap like the plague, and wait to see if they reply to your email as a sales rep. Then go have the conversation that they actually wanna have with you because they're the it is just fundamentally is broken, and, yes, a lot more now with what is Apple is doing. And there's this thing called BIMI that's out there that you need to Google if you don't know about it where open rates are getting real, real dicey.

And especially when we're

Liz Moorehead: trying to

George B. Thomas: when we're trying to do, like, any type of automated CRM sales stuff off of it, like, you gotta be careful.

Max Cohen: I I just think, like, to me, it's a lot more interesting to say, like, okay. Cool. We're looking at click rate in an email. Because if I can get someone to, like, actually open up one of my emails and then actually click it, I did something really correct. Right?

Because, like, they saw what they needed to see, and then they'd made a conscious decision to stop doing what they're doing, and actually go check this thing out. And sure, like, that's a good metric, but I think what's even more interesting is going and actually taking a look at, like, the bounce rates of those pages. Because if they go and take a look at those pages and they immediately come off of them, that means there is a huge disconnect about what you're promising in that email versus what's actually showing up when you get them there. And you're measuring kind of how, like, deceptive you may unintentionally or intentionally quote. And they go, well, that's not what I expected.

I think kind of, like, testing that sort of transfer on how how much is what they're actually seeing when they clicking lining up with what you are promising, and was that actually valuable to them, and did they actually spend any time there, or did it get them to convert? That, like, looking at the kinda connection of all that, to me, is always, I think, just so much more valuable than like, did my subject line get them to open up the email. I mean, like, I'm the person who opens up all the emails just to get them to unread. That doesn't tell you anything. You know?

So I don't know. Skeptical.

Devyn Bellamy: So I I I'd like to jump in here with my little, you know, pushback. My thing, open rates are a metric. They are even a performance indicator. I would not make open rates a key performance indicator if I were asking for a report. My thing is always about interaction and engagement.

The thing is with open rates in HubSpot, there's a little nifty thing in HubSpot where you can just scroll down and see time spent viewing email, and that will give you a lot of insight into how the emails are being utilized. But open rate and and the thing is, I wanna preface this by saying it's as a channel manager, as an email marketer, it's really easy to get locked into your individual metrics and just kind of lose the force for the trees. The thing that you wanna focus on, you wanna take a step back and look at whether or not your emails are generating desired out outcomes. Open rate is not enough of a desired outcome unless it's a transactional email about a service update or something. What what you should be doing is focusing on engagement beyond just opening the email.

Are people clicking in your email? If you have a hilariously low click through rate, then chances are that your content is not that compelling. Subject line, you know, fantastic. Good job. Yay.

But the thing is is that you haven't done your job as an email marketer. Your job is to get that person to take the action that you're calling them to, or to keep them informed. And and full transparency, I'm not a huge newsletter person. I don't like getting updates. I I I don't read them.

I don't care. I mean, I'm sure you're a wonderful person. I'm just not gonna read

Liz Moorehead: Devin.

Devyn Bellamy: With the Devin, you

Liz Moorehead: betray me.

Devyn Bellamy: With the exception of The Hustle, the single greatest newsletter I've ever read, I absolut I

Liz Moorehead: Is that Big Sprocket talking? Is that

Devyn Bellamy: big sprocket? It sounds like it would be, but they appeal to me on so many different levels, both the content but also as a marketer. You can see what they're doing, as marketers and how they're incorporating, like, the video and everything. It's it's just dope. But back to open rates.

Open rates are one small metric in a much, much larger picture.

George B. Thomas: There is literally steam coming out of Liz's ears right now. I'm just gonna be My case is gonna

Liz Moorehead: be told that I understand, Liz. You're wonderful, but you'll never be dope like the hustle. That's fine, Devin. I won't remember this forever. It's fine.

I'm fine.

Devyn Bellamy: Dope to somebody, Liz. Somebody,

George B. Thomas: thank you.

Liz Moorehead: But not for not to you.

Max Cohen: No. No.

Devyn Bellamy: You are. Just not not not newsletters. Just I don't Oh, shit.

Max Cohen: I love you to death.

Devyn Bellamy: I'm not I'm not gonna read the newsletter,

Max Cohen: Liz. Yeah. More shots fired.

Liz Moorehead: And on that note

Max Cohen: I Well, Liz,

Liz Moorehead: Liz, to be fair shutting Devin's mic off.

Max Cohen: How do we know that you're not here shilling for big newsletter?

George B. Thomas: Oh, think it out.

Max Cohen: You're a spy.

Liz Moorehead: I don't know. But let me just grab my skim mug.

George B. Thomas: No. It's okay.

Devyn Bellamy: Oh, man.

George B. Thomas: Oh my gosh.

Liz Moorehead: I you know, as much as this chaotic energy has just really, you know, made my day, it's not like I haven't had my pro heart broken now just with a hammer. Thank you, Devin. Just kidding. Right? If if people walk away from this episode only remembering one thing about executing email in HubSpot other than the fact that Devin is meanie, what should it be and why?

Devin, you will go last, George.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Mine's real simple. Take your time. That's it. Take your time.

Quit being in a hurry. Design it right. Write it right. Think of the user experience. Preview.

Test. Test. Test. Test some more. Test.

Take your time. Send.

Max Cohen: I'm gonna say, yes. Take your time, but don't spend

Liz Moorehead: I'm sorry. You say yumps?

Max Cohen: Take your time. Yum. But don't spend too much time.

Devyn Bellamy: Analysis. There's a

Max Cohen: No. Yeah. It's

Liz Moorehead: not Your turn yet.

Max Cohen: Margin. Margin and padding paralysis. That's

George B. Thomas: chill. It's all gonna be okay.

Liz Moorehead: Okay.

George B. Thomas: It's gonna be okay.

Liz Moorehead: I'm gonna break my look. Alright. I'm gonna break my own rule. And so one thing I'm gonna say 2 things. 1, don't forget the humans.

Don't. I don't care how great a tool is. If you're not thinking about the humans you're serving first, you're gonna have a bad time. Number 2, when it comes to measuring the success of your emails, don't go in blind trying to let HubSpot tell you whether or not it was successful or not. Maybe go into creating each email with I don't know, let's say a goal.

So that way by the time you're getting to the reporting, you know what you're looking for. Devin, now you may speak.

Devyn Bellamy: Thank you, Liz. I feel warm and special inside.

Liz Moorehead: You're very welcome. So You don't don't do that. Then

Devyn Bellamy: The thing is to remember with email, and I I've said it, like, a couple times already, email is part of your larger marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy should not be email marketing end statement. That's that's that's not a good strategy. I mean, I I in this day and age, I can't think of a business model where sending emails alone works. I mean, unless it's extreme word-of-mouth or you're extremely famous, like if Ryan Reynolds sent me a personalized email right now, I would read it.

I would read the heck out of it.

George B. Thomas: I would open it.

Liz Moorehead: Oh, okay. So it's Russell and Ryan Reynolds.

George B. Thomas: I've got it. Okay. Ryan

Liz Moorehead: Reynolds can sell

Devyn Bellamy: me anything. Like, literally anything. I've been a fan of his since Van Wilder. Like, in in in a I liked Green Lantern. That's how much of a fan I am

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

Devyn Bellamy: Of Ryan Reynolds. So anything he sent me. But Yeah.

Max Cohen: List Send news.

Devyn Bellamy: If you get an animated green suit, that that might bring you up to Ryan Reynolds closer.

George B. Thomas: Plus 1. Plus 1 upvote.

Liz Moorehead: I'm not enough. That's all I'm hearing. I'm not enough.

Max Cohen: You are enough. Liz, we love you, but

George B. Thomas: You're enough.

Max Cohen: Newsletters, a 100%.

Devyn Bellamy: We love you. You is smart. You is kind.

Liz Moorehead: But I'm not important. And on that note

Max Cohen: You're so important.

Liz Moorehead: Gonna even

Max Cohen: Just not not any newsletter.

Liz Moorehead: Tend to be happy right now. You know what? I'm not gonna give you all an AI generated haiku this week. I just want you to leave.

Devyn Bellamy: Wait. Hold on. You you no. Damn. I've been for a week, I've been waiting for the 2 weeks, Liz.

I've been waiting for this.

Liz Moorehead: I I I know. Go ahead.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Because god knows I didn't do no AI generated haiku last week. That's

Liz Moorehead: Alright. Hold on. You shouldn't have asked me to do this, Devin.

George B. Thomas: We're in trouble because you know it's gonna be about newsletters. It's gonna be a haiku about freaking newsletters, and then she's gonna get the last word because it's like the recording will stop, and that's where we're headed, ladies and gentlemen.

Max Cohen: What what what was being Ryan Reynolds' newsletter? No.

George B. Thomas: I'm sorry. Oh, juicy goodness.

Liz Moorehead: It has nothing to do with newsletters. A haiku. Heartaches. Love, unrequited. Devin's affection, distant, lonely heart yearns on.

Please leave.

Max Cohen: Wow.

George B. Thomas: Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hub heroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes.

FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag, hashtag hub euros podcast on any of the socials, and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.