Email Marketing Tool

rmccurry8
Member

Inserting Email Tracking Into Mail Merge

Hello, 

 

I am trying to find out if it is possible to add tracking when doing a campaign and using mail merge via word into outlook. Once I finish the mail merge, the messages go to my Outlook Outbox, but the HubSpot feature is grayed out, so you can't add it. 

 

Is it possible to add the image into the word document or what advice would you have to be able to track a large campaign? I want to use mail merge to make it personalized. 

24 Replies 24
andrus
Top Contributor

Inserting Email Tracking Into Mail Merge

Curious about the use case here. Is there a reason why you're not using the Hubspot Marketing email marketing tool instead of mail merge?

Andrus Purde | Outfunnel - The easiest way to connect sales and marketing tools
0 Upvotes
Mlaps
Member

Inserting Email Tracking Into Mail Merge

Using an email marketing tool has poor response compared to something like a mail merge.  On a couple of tests I've run, I'm getting an average of 10% response with mail merge vs. 1% with an email marketing tool.  The content I'm sending isn't really marketing either.  I've hand selected companies that I want to invite to various events.  I just don't want to manually send a similar email 30 times.

 

In my mind email marketing platforms are great when you're sending something that looks like marketing to 100s or 1000s of subscribers.  Mail merge works a lot better when you're sending to 30-50 names and you want it to feel personal.  

andrus
Top Contributor

Inserting Email Tracking Into Mail Merge

Makes sense, thank you for explaining.

 

So I'm a bit of an email geek and I wonder what causes the 10x difference. I doubt it's deliverability because deliverability of both Hubspot sales emails and marketing emails is solid. If content is the same, can the 10X difference come from email design/formatting? That emails designed like "marketing emails" create the perception that this email probably went out to 1000s of other people, so it must be irrelevant to me?

Andrus Purde | Outfunnel - The easiest way to connect sales and marketing tools
0 Upvotes
Mlaps
Member

Inserting Email Tracking Into Mail Merge

I should note that my test came from a differnet client that uses a non-Hubspot tool for marketing (Pardot), but yeah that's my suspicion.  Plus the unsubscribe at the bottom is a dead giveaway.  

 

I'm not a sales and marketing guy.  I've used mail merge rarely and many years ago, but a year ago someone I was working with showed me how to use it effectively for a campaign we were running.  A little while later I got a large client that wanted to do something similar, but they have a whole marketing department and professional tools.  Sounded great to me, I write the content and they make it look all professional, plus have tracking and automatic pushing into the CRM and unsubscribes and I no longer have to manually juggle multiple lists of people.  Then we sent it out to 100 people and I got exactly one response.  Sent to a different slightly smaller list and got zero responses.  Decided to try it my old way and the responses came pouring in, even though it was a much smaller list.  Wrote a plain text follow-up to the original marketing email and got a decent number of responses to that one as well.  

 

For Hubspot I'm working with a different smaller client that's pre-market.  I'm just using Hubspot to reach out and track conversations with investors.  We don't subscribe to the marketing tool, not because of the cost, but because I don't think that will be an effective way to reach our target list.  But mail merge would take a process that is fairly tedious now and speed it up.  Doing the exact thing we're doing with templates but automating it so that I don't have to click on 10 different buttons to send out one email.

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