- In this video, I'm gonna be walking you through
how to set up your email newsletter
and optimize it so that you get the absolute best open rates
and click-through rates.
I'm gonna be joined by one of our experts
here at HubSpot, Pamela Bump.
And then we're gonna be taking a look at a real email
that we've sent to our actual contacts
so that you can see how we've optimized our content.
Really lifting up the curtain here.
You know, just giving away all the secrets.
You know why?
'Cause we want to see you succeed and I love you.
You specifically.
Be sure to check out our email newsletter guide and lookbook
in the description below, which will guide you
through a lot of what we talk about.
With all that said, let's hit it.
Could you talk us through just what is a newsletter?
- So an email newsletter is a tool
that often marketers use
when they want to send their content,
whether it be blog posts, or sales, or deal opportunities,
to their customers or prospects via email.
- That was the most concise description
of a newsletter I think I've ever heard in my entire life.
- Thank you.
- Could you talk to us about different kinds
or types of newsletters?
- Yeah.
So I have helped the HubSpot blog develop their newsletter.
So I would consider that more
of an editorial content newsletter
where the goal is to share blog posts,
articles, things like that.
There's also article newsletters, such as The Hustle,
which we all follow at HubSpot.
And those are more like articles.
So you read a synopsis of an article or a full article.
Lastly, there are newsletters aimed
to gain conversions or deals.
So this might be a newsletter you get from a company
that is trying to sell you a product with products in it,
sales, or even coupons.
One important element is your subject line.
The subject line is the first part that people are gonna see
when they're looking in their crowded inbox,
seeing tons of email, they're looking at your subject line.
If you don't catch them, they're not gonna open the email,
they're not gonna read it,
they're not gonna click on your content, you've lost them.
You want your subject line to be attention grabbing.
Another great element is the body.
Once you get them in,
you want to have some sort of great body text
or hierarchy that really pulls them in.
You want them to feel like they've opened an email
and they're getting what you promised in the subject line.
People are gonna click towards the top,
so put your high priority stuff at the top,
but also pay attention to clickability,
because if they see something very boring
or enticing for them at the top, they're not gonna click
and they might even leave your email too early.
You want to nurture them into the email.
- If I have an email subject line, that's like,
"Big Sale on Jamal's New Cucumbers."
And then I begin my email body with,
"In 1993, my father told me..."
Like, that's the wrong - Yes.
- thing to do, - No, don't do that.
- 'cause people aren't...
- Don't do that.
Yeah, you'll wanna jump into the cucumbers.
- Give the people the cucumbers immediately.
- Give the people the cucumbers, yes.
- Okay, excellent.
Let's actually go ahead and get started
setting up a newsletter using the HubSpot CMS.
How does that sound?
- Yeah, sounds great.
(upbeat music)
- [Jamal] Here we are inside of the HubSpot CMS.
You can access email by going to, up at the top,
marketing, then email.
Let's say we wanted to start creating our newsletter
from screen scratch.
- [Pamela] Usually for most emails,
you're gonna wanna go for regular.
Automation is more advanced.
Once you get to this point
where you might want triggered emails,
or segmented emails, or emailing with smart rules,
that's when you would enter the automation space.
But for now, we'll just focus on regular.
- [Jamal] Here, you can choose
from a whole bunch of different templates.
Something else that's really cool
is if you head over to custom,
(Jamal mimics trumpet)
you see over here, we have Ridge offer email and Sonata,
'cause they actually came from the HubSpot marketplace.
So if you go over here to the little house looking thing,
then to asset marketplace, then over to templates,
then email, lo and behold,
you can download as many different templates as you want.
So HubSpot really gives you a lot of flexibility.
So we're going to go ahead
and use one of HubSpot's templates.
Which one should we use, Pam?
- [Pamela] Let's go with this one.
- [Jamal] Newsletter 2.
Let's do it. - Yeah.
So basically this is a drag and drop format
which means that you can take items
and drag them in if you'd like.
If you don't like how that looks, you can also delete it.
One of the first things you're gonna want to do
is determine what kind of content is gonna be in your email.
For this example, we can imagine that this starts
with an offer or conversion opportunity.
So we could say, "Cucumber Coupon."
And then you could add some sort of text
like, "Use promo code."
You can also link your text and your image.
So if you click on this image,
you can add links over here
to have even more linkable opportunities.
- [Jamal] Nice.
There's a field here for alt text.
How important is that?
- [Pamela] Yes, that is very important.
Imagine that you are looking at this email
as a low vision person or a person who is legally blind
and you need to use a screen reader,
the screen reader will read the titles, the descriptions,
and also the alt text of the images.
You're going to wanna fill out that alt text
giving the biggest highlights.
(bell dings)
- [Jamal] Here with the button,
that's where we're able to do our CTAs.
We can change this to cucumber.com.
I wonder if that's even a real domain.
I bet whoever owns that domain
is gonna get some free traffic from this video.
(bell dings)
- Say you want to write to someone,
say you wanna personalize things a bit,
you can do this with HubSpot
even without having an automated email.
You are going to go to personalize
and then you are going to say contact first name.
And then you're gonna want to pick a default value
because if for some reason,
the HubSpot software can't pull their name,
you want them to be able to see something
other than a null or a space.
And you have written a letter to them
instead of just saying, "Cucumbers for sale."
Personalization is very important.
We get a lot of emails from big companies every day,
it feels very impersonal,
it feels like they just want to sell to us.
So when you personalize,
it takes a wall kind of away from that.
It feels like Pamela from HubSpot
is sending you an email to Ashley.
When you say "Hi, Ashley," versus, "Hi, name,"
or don't even mention her name,
it feels like you know the person a bit,
you have learned about their persona.
And then when you preview, you can preview it as someone.
Say you wanna preview it as someone named Ashley,
you can see and it says,
"Ashley, there's cucumbers for sale."
- [Jamal] Wow.
- [Pamela] So Ashley can know about the cucumbers.
Another important thing to point out
while we're in the preview
is that you can see the mobile optimized version.
So here you can see that our headline is way too big.
- [Jamal] Yeah, not optimized for mobile.
- [Pamela] It's not optimized for mobile,
but that's why we have mobile previews.
A growing amount of people
are opening their emails on mobile.
So that's very important.
One more important thing to point out is your subject line.
As I mentioned, the subject line is very, very important.
You want it to be quick and clean, but also enticing.
(bell dings)
A preview text is also optional.
I would do it just in case people can see it,
but keep in mind that some inboxes do not show preview text.
So I would make this an enhancement of the subject line,
but not something that's required.
(bell dings)
- [Jamal] It seems like subscription type
is a mandatory field.
Why is that?
- If you unsubscribe,
which it's required to have a unsubscribe button
in your email, required by CAN-SPAM, GDPR,
to have an unsubscribe button in your email
and it should be visible and accessible.
Your IP and email delivery score might be impacted,
you don't want that,
you want people to be able to unsubscribe.
When they unsubscribe, that subscription type
is one of the things that helps HubSpot unsubscribe them.
For additional accessibility is you can go down here,
and go to customize, and you can update your HTMLs.
So the HTML email is very important
if some people with screen readers prefer
to receive an email as HTML,
so there's less pictures
and other issues clouding what they're reading,
that is helpful for them.
But you will wanna pull out some of the unnecessary code
to make sure they have a good experience.
So personalization tokens should work,
but I would keep in mind that in some inboxes they may not.
So it's up to you whether you keep them or not.
You can also send yourself a test HTML email
to make sure it works in your inbox
and is still sending that email to Ashley or someone.
And if not, it's showing the high.
For social, this is not gonna link,
so you can pull these out.
And if you don't like what you've created,
you can also reset it
and just go back to what the email was as basic HTML.
- What do you think the right cadence is
for an email newsletter?
- It really depends on your persona
and what you're trying to accomplish with your email.
If you are an editorial publication
and you really want traffic, more often would be important.
So potentially a daily email.
But if you're going to do a daily,
give people the option to do a weekly as well.
Daily can be a lot on someone's inbox
and lower engagement rates can tend to happen
if you send someone too many emails.
On the other hand, if you're doing coupons or deals,
you might only need a biweekly or tri-weekly cadence.
- And so I imagine some of that
is both doing a little bit of market research
for your industry and then also doing some A/B testing
and figuring out what the right thing is.
- Yes.
- As we're building out this email,
our email looked pretty awful,
but for a pretty well optimized email,
you can see I think a lot of what you were mentioning
about good practices in terms of eye-catching imagery,
good weighting, a small amount of text
with a very clear CTA,
all of that is kind of coming directly into play here.
And of course, we also have the unsubscribe
or manage preferences at the bottom,
which is not only necessary
so that you don't get folks
driving down your email open rate
if they just no longer want to engage with it.
It's also legally necessary
and you could end up in big, big trouble.
So be sure to include an unsubscribe link.
For this particular email, the subject line was,
"How to Create a Product Launch Email
[Outlines + Templates]."
Of course, most of the content that we're sending as HubSpot
is related to content marketing.
Naturally, it's going to be leaning more towards helpful,
how-to, that kind of stuff.
Preview text, which we talked about earlier,
was, "Ace your next launch
and learn how to write the perfect product launch email
with our tips and templates."
So you can see that, as you mentioned,
it was an embellishment of that subject line
to really kind- of hook folks in and get them interested.
- Yes, this is your analytics.
What you can see is how your email performed.
Open rate is the rate of people
that opened your email
compared to the amount of times it was sent.
So unique opens are one person that opened the email,
each individual person.
And then total opens are the total.
Then you'll have click rate,
click rate is the clicks based on the sends.
You can also see click-through rate,
which is the clicks based on the opens.
So click rate will always be much smaller
than click-through rate.
Click-through rate and open rate can be impacted
by Apple's iOS privacy protection,
which can mark things as opens or not opens
that should be marked as something different.
Then you can go down and see additional metrics.
- [Jamal] Yeah, okay, hold on.
Who is the one person that was like, "Yo, this is spam."
(Pamela laughs)
- That's always gonna happen on emails.
If you get someone marking you as spam,
I wouldn't pay too much attention to it.
Some people honestly just get frustrated by emails
and they go on an unsubscribe binge.
We've all done it.
So no hostility towards that person
if they felt it's just not for me, whatever.
- We're gonna find you.
I bet it was Ashley.
- Oh, Ashley,
she didn't like cucumbers. - She's like no more-
Yeah, no more cucumbers.
We're full now. - Yeah.
And then you'll look at your unsubscribes.
We send to a very large list
and we are always gaining subscribers.
We are used to seeing a larger number of unsubscribes,
but we're not too worried about that.
Usually if your unsubscribe rate is more than 1 or 2%,
you might wanna start looking at things.
Another thing,
these are what I would kind of call vanity metrics.
They aren't necessarily needed for huge decision making
'cause it's gonna vary on every email,
but it's really helpful when determining
how you're gonna organize your emails
and what content is really popular.
This ranking here shows the top clicked links
and you can see which links were most popular in the email.
Spoiler, it's likely going to be that the links
at the top are the most clicked links
because people will click the most on the stuff at the top
and then maybe veer off just naturally in emails.
The longer the email, the less of a chance the last item
is gonna get a solid large amount of clicks.
And that's just how the cookie essentially crumbles.
One interesting thing to look at
is the rate at which people glanced,
skimmed, and read the email.
How many people were super engaged with my email,
how many people were less so engaged,
but still paid attention to it,
and how many people just kind of opened it up,
scrolled through, said,
"Okay, I'm not gonna go deep into this email,"
and continued on with their day.
I think this is a pretty optimized email.
You usually will see read rates in the 50%, which is great.
Sometimes you'll see it go down to 30 or 40
if the email is longer and there's way more links.
If your email is shorter,
you might wanna see the read rate be a little bit bigger,
just because there's less email to engage with,
so if they're not engaging with the whole email,
that might be a little bit concerning.
And then you'll see engagement rate over time.
This is another thing, spoiler,
it's going to have higher engagement when it sends
and then less over time.
Email inboxes fill really, really quickly.
And then another thing that you can see,
which is the last kind of really interesting thing,
is who's opening your email and where essentially.
- I'm gonna be honest with you,
I'm horrified that we have this many people
using Yahoo Mail still in 2022.
I'm quite disappointed.
- It's pretty interesting.
- And there you have it folks.
As I said, be sure to check out the offer down below
of our email newsletter guide and lookbook
which will walk you through everything
that we just talked about in even more detail.
It's gonna be beautiful.
I can't wait for your newsletter to end up in my inbox,
so that I can hit manage preferences and say,
"Yeah, changes from weekly to daily."
Until that time, I'll see you later.
(upbeat music)