32. Using HubSpot to create emails that work. Where to start your Email Campaigns with HubSpot

Introduction

It's no secret that our inboxes are battlegrounds, where hundreds of emails compete for our attention every day. When you’re relying on email to grow your business, though, the question is, how do you make your email stand out?

In today’s episode, we’re going to take a closer look at the storytelling in emails. It is not just about weaving a narrative; it's about creating a connection with your audience. The goal is to turn your emails from promotions and announcements into stories that resonate, engage, and compel your readers to act.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

demodia.com/brandscript-worksheet

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Episode Transcript

It's no secret that our inboxes are battlegrounds where hundreds of emails compete for our attention every day. When you're relying on email to grow your business though, the question is how do you make your email stand out? How do you get people to open them and make them act? That's exactly what we're going to cover in today's episode. We look at how to create the perfect subject line and guide your readers into a narrative that compels them to take action. So without further ado, let's get started. Hi there and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice and help you to create marketing that works. It's so often that I hear people tell me that email's dead. People no longer read emails, I hear. It's not worth sending them out. I'm sure you've heard that as well. And I must say, I couldn't disagree more. Email is far from dead. In fact, it's still one of the most effective ways to reach your audience. In a recent survey that HubSpot did, for example, 77 percent of marketers said that their email engagement had actually increased in the last 12 months. And that's not a freak accident. The only thing I think that's changed over recent years is that people are now being more picky. They want to be able to choose what they spend their time reading, and if it's not of interest, then they're actively going to unsubscribe. So the question you're asking now then is how do you talk to the right people about the things that they're interested in? And that's what we're going to look at on today's episode. Storytelling in emails. It's not just about weaving a narrative. It's about creating a connection with your audience. The goal is to turn your emails from promotions and announcements into stories. Things that resonate, engage and compel your readers to act. The reason that storytelling is such an effective tool in email marketing is that stories evoke emotions. They make your content memorable. So let's talk about some of the specifics. The first thing that people see when it comes to your emails is the subject line. So when we're writing a subject line our job is to get people to stop scrolling through their inbox and click on that email and open it. The way that I found works best of all for this is to add suspense. People hate suspense. You think about it if you go to the doctors and you have some sort of test done there you hate the days that you're waiting for the results to come back. In fact there were surveys done of people that were waiting for medical results back. for fairly serious illnesses and they found that people were more concerned and more worried during the waiting phase than when they were actually diagnosed as positive with that illness. We hate tension. We hate having to wait for things and that's what makes storytelling so effective and how you can use it within the subject line of your email. So the first thing that people see is your subject when they open it. The subject line is where you're going to open your story. And it's where you're also going to open a narrative gap. It's where you're going to invite curiosity and where you need to prompt your readers to explore further. So, how about this, let's give it a try and see which of the following that you think you're going to be more inclined to open. If I put these two subject lines in front of you, which one are you going to open? So the first line I put to you. This one question won JFK the election. That's subject line one. The second subject line. The reason JFK beat Nixon in the election. That's line two. Which one do you think you would open more likely? The first subject line. leaves an open question in your mind. You know, your mind hates suspense, so it just has to know the answer, and you're compelling your readers to click on that and open it up and see what's going on. The second one in there, well, you know, it's just like every other email you get. It doesn't really mean anything, so you can forget it and move on. So that's the subject line. But storytelling doesn't stop at the subject line. The body of your email needs to continue the narrative as well. So here is where you need to weave the parts of your brand script together in a way that feels natural and relevant. I'm certainly not recommending that you use all of the talking points from your story in one email, far from. Instead, what I want you to do is to think of your emails like chapters in a story. So the first chapter in a book typically introduces the hero, and that chapter closes with an event that's going to change their world, the problem that we're introducing. In the next chapter we see them struggling to overcome this challenge until eventually they meet the guide in the story and they learn about the solution that they need to overcome this problem. And then the chapters go on through there until they finally come to some resolution. So with your emails, it's about striking the right balance between introducing the information that you need to get across to your customers and telling it in a narrative format, in the format of a story that guides them from one email or one point of your journey to the next. And you need to ensure that your message is both persuasive and enjoyable. So it's probably time in the show now that I think we should bring back Daniel. And let's talk a little bit more about the practical ways of how you create and send emails for your business. So welcome back again. And hi, Daniel. Thanks for joining us once again. How are you

today? Hi, Simon. Thank you very much. Yes, I'm feeling great. Good.

Yeah. Last week we were talking about personas. So how did your homework go last week? How did it all work

out? Um, it worked out pretty well. I had to do a little bit of research in HubSpot's learning pages, but, uh, in the end I managed to set it all up.

Good. So this week, yeah, we've been talking about emails particularly. And, uh, we're going to try and set up some emails today. So you've been sat down at the side of me earlier as we were going through the intro. So, uh, far away, what questions have you got with regards to setting up emails and how to use storytelling within your email structure? I've got

some questions that I think everybody would like to hear the answers to. Uh huh. So, as you mentioned in the intro, this is about telling a story with an email or a series of emails. Yep, mhm. So, what's the first step to take to create something like that?

So I think as we talked about earlier, it's back to your story. And using the elements of your story. So if you recall, your story starts off with the hero, and that's going to be the person that you're going to write the email to, and that the email is going to be about. And then you've got the other elements in there. So you've got the problem, and that's the key thing, I think, that you're going to use quite a lot in the email. So you've got the external problem and the internal problem. So the internal problems, a little bit like the symptoms of the illness. And the external problem is the big thing that's actually wrong with the company. So we can talk about those within the email, and that's going to be a great hook to the subject line as well. And then you want to think about what they want. So again, within the story script, we talk about what the customer wants at the end of this journey, where they're going to be, what's their aspiration. So we want to talk about those things within the story.

Alright, so you said there's an external and internal problem, right? Can you be a little bit more specific about that? Like, what do you mean exactly by external and internal problem?

The internal problem is, it's like going to a doctor's, you can think of it this way. When you go and sit down with a doctor, the doctor says, Hi Daniel, what's wrong with you? Yes. And you talk back to the doctor and you give him a whole load of things that are wrong with you. You know, aches and pains, cuts, bruises, whatever it happens to be. They're the symptoms. The symptoms of the internal problem. It's the thing that the external problem makes you feel. Okay. The external problem is then what the doctor is going to turn around to you and say is wrong. So, you know, we were talking earlier, you were out last week because you were off ill, so you were saying, you know, I've got a cough, I've got a headache, runny nose, you know, they're the symptoms. The actual problem that I'm going to come back to you and say is you've got the flu or you've got COVID or something like that. So that's the, the external problem.

Okay, so the external problem is what's causing the emotions that you feel, and the internal problem is what you actually feel.

Yeah, exactly. The external problem is the thing that's causing the issue in the first place, and the internal problems is the actual feelings that that makes you have,

yeah. Alright, I understand. Thanks for clarifying this. Can you explain how you would create a subject line using storytelling

methods? Yeah, okay. So when it comes to creating an email, the subject line has got to be one of the most important things, if not the most important thing. People have got loads of emails coming into their inbox every day and you've got to convince them to open that and actually read your content to start off with. So there's a whole load of best practices that people can go and read with regards to creation email subject lines. But when it comes to story, I would say that the things that you really want to do, you want to talk about, for example, number one, the problem. So if you highlight their problem in an email, and talk about the fact that we know you're suffering from this, here's the solution. Yes. That could be a way of getting people to actually read more. So talk about the problem and the challenges that they've got, and introduce that in the email.

And would you say In the subject line, you would address the external or the internal problem?

I don't think it matters. I think you can use both of them. And I think the key thing with email subject lines as within emails generally is you test those things. So you're going to try it out with different people and see what works best with your audience. Okay,

so you do A B testing to see what has the better effect.

Yeah, exactly. The other thing I would say in the email subject lines is to think about, again, what does a customer want? For example, they might want a new garage door, they might want a new gate for their garden, something like that. So you could talk about those sorts of things. Just some more general topics outside of the story side. You want to be able to personalize the headline. I think personalization is very key in there. So include the name in there, or you could talk about the fact that, you know, you're going to give them five steps for improving email deliverability within the pharmaceutical industry, for example, and you could personalize the email subject line by putting the specific industry of their customer in there. So that's something that HubSpot can do very well. You can put personalization tokens into the email subject line to make that relevant to them. I understand.

So within the subject line, to summarize this, you can talk about the problem that they have, but you can also mention the solution. To their problem and you want to personalize it exactly right so first i thought that it's going to be quite tricky to create a subject line that is part of a story but hearing your explanations it really starts to feel like It's doable with ease.

Good, I'm glad you think so, yeah.

So, after creating the subject line, how do we

proceed? So the next part is to think about what the body content of your email is. The story is the key thing here. If you've introduced the problem within the headline You could expand on the problem within your email so you can have a whole email is just about the problem and then you call to action at the end of the email is get in touch with us to find out the solution if you talked about something that the customer wants in the headline again use that part of the story in there so what I would say. With an email, it's about being relatively short and concise. Stay with one idea, maybe borrow one or two sections from your brand script, and just in one or two paragraphs, introduce those and tell us bits of the story in there. And don't try and tell the whole story inside your email, because otherwise you'll just confuse people.

Okay, well that makes sense. So that's how you create the subject line and the main content of your email. Let's keep the focus on the personalization for a bit. Okay, yeah. I know you can do personalization with HubSpot for your website and for your email content. How would you use HubSpot in order to specifically personalize your emails?

So there's a couple of technical bits that you can do with HubSpot to personalize email content. So I mentioned one of them just a few minutes ago. Within the subject line of any email, you can insert what HubSpot calls a personalization token. So you can put your cursor into a point in the actual subject line, and then there's a drop down. down at the side of the subject field where you can go and select a personalization token and put in, for example, the name of the person that you're typing to, you could go and select the industry of the company that they belong to, or you could use any other, uh, data that HubSpot knows about that specific contacts to personalize it. So it could be that, you know, you're talking to, uh, customers that have purchased a specific product and you can put the name of the product in there that they've purchased or the service that they've purchased in there. So personalization tokens is the first thing you want to use.

Do you have to create these personalization tokens beforehand or can you just create those ongoingly while creating the email?

No, personalization tokens is basically your CRM data, so the data that HubSpot already knows about your customer. Okay, so it's the sort of information that you can either manually enter in if you're going through and updating your pubspot sort of CRM data by hand, or you can capture that information through forms. So when somebody fills in a form, you know, you could ask them some data and then use that to personalize the content later on. All right. The other way to personalize emails is to use dynamic content. So we talked a little bit about that when we talked about segmentation last week, but what you can do is within the email, you could have like a paragraph of text in there, which gets changed based on the persona of the individual, or you might have a whole block. So if you've got something like a newsletter, you might have a promotional block inside your email. And you can personalize that based on content and what you know about people in there. So, in that sense, you'd maybe create three or four different blocks, and then based on the information you know about the person, you'd change that block around to show the one that's most relevant to them. Yes,

yes, I remember talking about this in the last session, and it makes perfect sense. All right, now, we learned how to create the email content itself. Mm hmm. Let's say our email is ready for the send out. How would you recommend to, to send the email? Would you recommend doing this manually or, uh, automated somehow?

Yeah, great question. So there's a couple of ways of doing that typically. So number one is you can create just a single send type email. So in that case, basically what you're going to do is you're going to create a list. of people that you want to send this to. And as we talked about in the last episode, you know, make sure that that list contains a specific segment of your audience that's going to be interested in the content of your email. Basically, you don't want to just go sending your email out to everybody. The other thing that you can do in there is to use automation. Again, HubSpot and most automation tools have a workflow engine where you can actually trigger emails automatically. So, for example, when somebody fills in a form to download a specific white paper or to download a specific template, what you might want to do is you might want to send them a sequence of emails talking about how to use that template, you know, how to fill it in or how to use it in their business in there. So in that case, what you would do is you would have a workflow that triggers those emails and sends those emails one after another just to people that download that workbook or template.

Okay, so you can automate it to send out several emails when somebody does a specific action.

Yeah, exactly. It doesn't have to just be a single email. You can automate and send out numerous emails one after one another. Exactly. All

right. So now we know how to create personalized email content for different segments of your audience and how to send those emails out or how to use those emails. Let's say we created our email and sent it to a specific segment of our audience. Now, how can I be sure that my efforts are. Really working.

This is basically down to metrics. So you can track a number of different key metrics in here. So the main ones that you're looking at is number one, the deliverability. So how many of the emails that you sent out actually received that email? So that will give you a good idea to start off with the quality of your list. You know, if only 40 or 50 of those people received the email, then you've got some serious problems with the quality of your email list. The second thing that you want to look at is then how many of those people that received the email actually opened the email. So most of these tools will give you some sort of statistic called the open rate that will tell you how many people opened it. One thing to be aware of with that though, there's been various changes going on in email tools over recent years. And it makes those statistics a bit less reliable than maybe they used to be. So for example, anybody using Microsoft's email tools, Microsoft doesn't show opens for many of the emails that people look at, and for Apple's email tools, they do exactly the reverse. They trigger the opening code in all of the emails, basically. So it looks as if every single email that you've sent has been opened. So open rates are a little bit dubious these days. The one to really look at though, and the one that's most important, particularly when it comes to your storytelling, Is click through rates. So click rates basically is the thing that's going to tell you how many people clicked on any links in your email versus how many people actually opened your email. And that's a really important statistic to look at because that's going to tell you how many people are actually engaged with your content and are interested in taking action based on the content that you've provided and are interested in going further into the story basically. Mhm.

So when you send out the email you first want to check how many people actually received it and then you also want to check How many people out of those that received it actually opened the email and then you say the most important one is to see Out of those who opened the email who actually clicked on something like a CTA or a button or a link Yeah, right exactly, right? Yeah. All right, Simon. Thank you very much for those insights. I Think they're very helpful. You're

welcome. No problems

Yeah, I now have a very clear image on how to use storytelling and also HubSpot to get the most out of my email campaigns. Good,

so you can go away and build the next part of your campaign this week then, and I look forward to seeing how that's going.

Yeah, that will be my next homework, I guess.

Exactly. Take care, have a good week then.

Thank you very much, and

yourself. Thanks again for that Daniel, and I hope that's helped you listeners out there too. If you're having challenges getting people to open or interact with your emails I'm offering you this, just drop me a note on LinkedIn, tell me what you've tried, maybe send me an example of some subject lines or something like that. And what I say we'll do is we'll include those questions and the answers to those in our next episode. So I think that'll give Daniel some bits that we can talk through there. On the other hand, if you don't want to do all of that yourselves, then you can hire a member of the Authentic Engagement Team. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your emails and give you an easier way to grow your business. So we're at the point in the show again where I like to give you a set of concrete actions that you can take away to help you improve your marketing and drive business through your sales pipeline. Today I want you to write and send an email. It's as easy as that. So remember these things. Think about who you're sending your email to. That's going to be the hero of your story. And then make the subject something that they care about. So, open a story loop. Think about that within the subject and hook your readers in. And then in the body content, build on the problem. And if you're feeling really adventurous, maybe you could create two or three emails and put them into a sequence. Once you've done that, you could follow some of Daniel's advice and you could set that up in HubSpot and send it to the list that we set up last week that relates to the hero or the persona that's relative to this particular problem and this particular email subject. One other added bonus I want to offer you this week. Send it to me too. My email address is simon at demodia. com and if you send me the email, I'll critique it for you and I'll send you back some ideas as to how you can improve that. So I think together we're going to have you growing your business through email within days. So that's all for today's episode of the Authentic Marketing Podcast. Thanks as always for listening and don't forget to book the podcast and follow me on LinkedIn. I love to hear about the things that you want to know and how I'm helping your business succeed. See you next time.