I’m getting a little concerned for HubSpot here. They do a fantastic job at making email engagement analysis very easy and powerful, with great reporting layout and tools to make performance comparision. However, the currency that makes this machine run is the engagement data itself and it’s becoming increasingly unreliable.
On a call with multiple HubSpot employees we were not able to find a single email metric: opens, clicks, web page views, even email read time that was reliable enough for us to base behavioural triggers or reporting on. Our stats are so inflated we have little idea of how we are really performing and so instead of being enabled, we are really flying data blind - our instruments are giving us false readings. As a marketer that’s a scary thing, we may think that our email content is really hitting home, where in fact there’s been little real engagement at all. We may pass on ‘hot’ leads onto Sales for them to lose confidence in what we are sending their way as all this ‘engagement’ amounts to 0 new conversations’.
A good example of how this fake data erodes HubSpot’s platform is the Email Health tool. A real value add that allows you to review your entire email marketing operation with a few clicks. However, it’s completely useless for us because as all the building blocks (engagement data) going into it are inflated, the results we pull out cannot be trusted.
As we work in B2B financial services we are facing the highest email security, so others in the post may not have the issue to the same degree, but given HubSpot as a platform is built on identifying engagement and enabling smarter marketing, if this fundamental issue isn’t tackled the value of the platform as a whole will diminish, making it harder to justify the invesment in it. Even for those who are real fans.