I have a question about sending out emails to employees in our company. I’m thinking of creating an employee journey, with onboarding e-mails, internal newsletters, other emails to employees in our company (think of birthday/ goodbye/events).
I know Hubspot is not built for this, but since it has all the features I’m wondering if more companies have tried it (instead of using another app). And in particular: how does this impact your reports/ deliverability? Because I would love to send e-mails from our marketing hub, since it’s in the company’s branding.
@KTV This is an idea that is not uncommon in the ecosystem.
Suppressing the activity from these emails may prove to be a bit trickier as you would have to suppress each email in the report. I don’t believe there is a way to suppress a domain or a sender via a marketing email.
For efficient onboarding, I typically recommend a product like pipefy. Even though it’s a separate software it integrates natively with Hubspot so you would be able to see the real time activity in the CRM.
I’ve done this quite a lot and it has always worked well (just keep in mind that these emails are tracked and in some countries this type of tracking violates employee privacy unless they have consented)
In terms of deliverability - it usually helps as there are very few, if any, bounces.
It can mess with the analytics a little on the whole if you want to know your overall client opens etc - but I usually make campaigns in HubSpot for:
Client marketing emails
SQL marketing emails
MQL marketing emails
Internal emails
etc
So if you do it this way it won’t affect your overall analytics.
@KTV To clarify on some of the above points - sending emails to internal staff as marketing emails WILL affect your email health in the portal. Your numbers will be skewed in this area as you can’t suppress specific campaigns from being reported on. You can only analyze certain campaigns.
A holistic view of your overall email health will include your internal emails.
Thanks a lot for your responses! So if I understand correctly, if I would seperate those withing campaigns (for example B2C Community for newsletters and Internal for employees) you could seperately analyze them easily?
About the overall health: I think in this case it would actually positively affect our numbers (we are quite a small company).
But about the privacy: that’s a good point. I will dive deep into that.
If you have separate campaigns you can analyse your email open rates etc from those campaigns yes. But, as Chris said, it will affect your overall email analytics as the holistic view of your overall email health will contain internal emails but its completely dependent on whether you mind that or not
In terms of reporting and email health, I don’t see too many issues. Unless you have employees which you expect to unsubscribe at high rates or even mark emails as spam, email health should not be a concern. If anything, I’d assume that internal engagement with emails is higher and would, if at all, benefit email health. For reporting you should be good as long as you have separate campaigns for internal marketing emails and don’t mix recipients lists.
The bigger challenge, in my opinion, is that marketing emails are automatically tracking recipient behavior. In this case, you would be tracking employees. In some countries, this is not an issue. In others, there is legislation which specifies what is allowed and what isn’t. If you’re unsure, I’d recommend aligning with HR / legal.
I did this for birthday/anniversaries, and a workflow of about 30 emails, one a day, for onboarding, and a weekly internal newsletter. Note that we didn’t really do email marketing aside from internal emails so I didn’t have reporting to worry about skewing.
Though the birthday workflow was more about creating tasks to send a gift and create social posts and create slack posts celebrating them, so a workaround there may be to have a workflow create a task to send a non-tracked email for their birthday?
For the privacy/tracking concerns, perhaps the newsletter can be sen to a team@ group address so the individual behavior may not be tracked? If you trust no one is going to try to unsubscribe the whole group :)?
For the date-specific emails sent to individuals such as onboarding and birthdays, if they are 1 to 1 “sales” emails not marketing emails, sent from a sequence or workflow, are they still tracked? For example, using the email composer directly in the workflow tool. @karstenkoehler may know the answer to this!
If you use Slack, sending the info through Slack notifications, via workflow, may prevent any privacy tracking problems?
For the privacy/tracking concerns, perhaps the newsletter can be sen to a team@ group address so the individual behavior may not be tracked? If you trust no one is going to try to unsubscribe the whole group :)?
There is always someone This has caused a lot of headache in the past. Transactional email (and the ability to remove the unsubscribe link) would be a way around that.
For the date-specific emails sent to individuals such as onboarding and birthdays, if they are 1 to 1 “sales” emails not marketing emails, sent from a sequence or workflow, are they still tracked? For example, using the email composer directly in the workflow tool. @karstenkoehler may know the answer to this!
As long as it’s a marketing email, yes. However, you gave me an idea. Let’s say there is an employee Jane Doe. They have a contact record which is also assigned to the HubSpot user Jane Doe. If you send an internal notification to the user, not an email to the contact, that internal notification would not be tracked. (It just so happens that contact and user are the same here.)
This has caused a lot of headache in the past.