Email Automation and Deliverability Best Practices

[katie_cort]

Hello! From working with customers on various email automation campaigns and working through deliverability questions that naturally come up, I wanted to compile a post that includes best practices on email automation (specifically marketing email), and email deliverability best practices. I hope this is useful.

Email Automation Best Practice

1. Think about your goal before beginning the workflow. Your goal will direct your entire campaign, audience, content and success metrics.
2. Select a persona you are targeting: What problem are you trying to help them solve? Think about their job, responsibilities, hobbies (aka buyer personas)
3. Repurpose existing content-> Videos, webinars, ebooks, blog posts whitepapers. Chances are this content exists but has not been used in an email to drive value
4. Set up a timeline. Patience is a virtue. Experiment with different times. How long is your typical sales cycle? Is it 30 days? A month? Should we space out these emails longer based on this?
5. Have metrics in place that tie to your goals in step 1

In terms of building the actual emails...Don't be too pushy in the first email.

Start with something funny, not salesly, providing value. If you do this, people will want to start opening up emails from you regularly. If every email you send is trying to get them to pay or buy, this does not reflect the buyers journey and people will not open/mark as spam. 

• Lead should be able to look at the email, and within 5 seconds know the value it provides. Timely and helpful is the key

Other key takeaways:

• In order to maximize the value you get out of lead nurturing emails, you need to optimize them. For example→ Who is the message coming from, when is it getting sent out, what the subject line is
• Personalize your voice. Use personalization tokens, write emails that are authentic and approachable
• Only one CTA or callout per email to keep it actionable

• You can schedule an email ahead of time, center it on a date property or on a static date so it is relevant to the person receiving it (timing is very important)
• Include social sharing links so people can share your offer
• Make sure the lead nurture campaign is related to the initial topic that drew them to you
• Give at least 2 days before next email send

Now on to deliverability best practices! This is very important because you can setup a beautiful workflow with perfect emails, but if your deliverability is no good, contacts will not recieve the emails you worked so hard on...

 

Deliverability Best Practices:

Deliverability is how likely it is that the marketing email will make it to primary inboxes instead of the spam folder. If I have good deliverability it means the email has a high likelihood of getting into the primary inbox. The key is healthy lists, contacts engaging with your email, and this is done by producing engaging and relevant content.

1. Only send emails to contacts who have provided express permission

2: Connect email sending domain

3. Don't include contacts who aren't engaging (suppress them- HubSpot has a setting within the email that is turned on by default)

4. If a lead is 12 months old, shouldn’t email them to avoid hard bounces

5. Create a workflow that sets contacts to non-marketing automatically if they hard bounce/unsub. Triggers= unsubscribed from all email=true OR email hard bounce reason is known. This workflow cleans up contacts for you!

6. Consider an email validation system. We recommend KickBox. Helps you catch emails that will bounce before sending to them!

If coming from other provider, the reputation is brought over and not lost. You need to focus on sending mail to engaged contacts and suppress folks who are not engaged to build a strong reputation using HubSpot email. 

I hope this tips are helpful and please post any feedback in the comments!

[Anonymous]

You have given very good information! Especially the deliverability thing seemed very practical. Often we focus on content and tools in automation, but things like reputation of sending domain and removing inactive contacts get overlooked, which later leads to going into spam.

I was also using WarmupSMTP.com in some campaigns recently, and it really made a lot of difference in the open rate.

I had a question - if a lead has opted-in but has not shown any engagement for the last 6 months, should we suppress him or would it be better to send a re-engagement email first?

Thanks for this insightful post.

I learned a lot by reading your experience.

[AAamir0]

Ohh that's a valuable knowledge what i gained thanks!

[kvlschaefer]

Hey, @katie_cort!

These are great tips 🙂

Thanks for sharing them with us!