Welcome! I’d like to invite you to grab your coffee or tea and a comfortable seat, because it’s time to have a tough conversation about your marketing email strategy.
My name is Kenna, and I’m a marketer at Revenue River. I am responsible for building digital automation that interacts with a whole bunch of humans I’ve never met on a pretty frequent basis. Somewhat ironically, I am a quiet, think-before-I speak introvert who wears headphones and pretends to sleep in order to be left alone on planes. This approach carries over to the digital realm, so you can imagine how many automated emails I open. (Hint: very few.) How about you? What does it take for you to open an automated marketing email? From my airplane example, what does it take for you to take your headphones off to listen to the chatter?
As marketers we don’t like to even put ourselves in the same category as spam. Our efforts are researched, personalized, and data driven, much more than generic junk mail. But it is essential to understand the relationship between ‘spam’ and what we understand as cutting edge automated email marketing.
The difference comes down to data. Just like when starting a conversation with a person next to you on a plane, having the right feedback from the other person and ability to change your approach based off that will help your conversation be a success. Consider the same for a marketer leaning heavily on automation to reach a large database - the proper tools can help make it so that you are receiving feedback and direction on the best way to approach a recipient in a way that will drive positive generation.
With that in mind, here are 3 email automation tools that we bundle to help us drive exceptional results.
Key Terms to Know
Email: An electronic document transmission, containing an envelope (header) and message (content)
Automation: The use of technology to reduce or minimize human involvement in a process or task
Marketing: Creating, studying, and managing relationships to promote a product, service, or belief
Spam: Unwanted or unsolicited [digital] messages sent in bulk
Benefits of Bundling
Bundling Seventh Sense and LeadGnome into Hubspot creates an unparalleled ecosystem of intelligent engagement. The combination of these 3 software platforms uniquely aggregates data to allow marketers to send emails at the right time and to the right contact. This is accomplished due to the 3 unique capabilities of the bundled software. Combined, these technologies exponentially increase the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. We'll start by exploring what each software option brings to the table.
HubSpot Marketing & CRM technology is where all our contact data is aggregated and marketing emails are sent to contacts. HubSpot analytics record emails sent, open rates, and bounce rates, so this information is easily accessible for marketers. Hubspot, however, does not automatically update contact records based on the outcome (or lack of an outcome) from a marketing email.
Seventh Sense technology uses machine learning to analyze open and click rate data inside Hubspot to determine optimum send times and frequency for each individual contact. The idea of Seventh sense is simple: send an email at the time it is most likely to be opened. There are varying levels of send time optimization strategy. At one end of the spectrum is the least effective approach –blasting an email to a contact list at a randomly chosen time. Towards the middle of the spectrum are various upgrades to the basic email blast. Send times here are optimized by using a segmented database alongside best guesses, research, or A/B testing. At the far end of the spectrum sits Seventh Sense and the gold standard of send time optimization: personalized delivery time.
LeadGnome technology uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing to analyze auto reply messages and integrate the data directly into HubSpot. More than just reply email data mining, LeadGnome uses AI to analyze the context of a message and updates your CRM database accordingly. While LeadGnome can be integrated with a variety of CRMs, the native HubSpot integration includes a contact field group dedicated to LeadGnome contact fields. Custom fields can be added to this contact field group for personalized data analysis.
When all 3 components of the software bundle are in place, a few key actions occur that make all the difference in terms of whether an email is opened and engaged with, or marked as spam or unsubscribed from. First, using LeadGnome data, a contact record is continuously updated based on email interactions, for all contacts in a database who have previously been sent an email. Next, when a marketing email is scheduled to be sent, it is automatically held in the HubSpot toolset and sent at the time that a contact is most likely to open the email and engage with your content, based on Seventh Sense data.
While automated email marketing may have given rise to what we know as SPAM, this same automation technology will also be used by savvy marketers to set themselves apart in the crowded marketplace. Automated emails revolutionized the digital marketing landscape by enabling a single user to reach an entire database in a matter of minutes. While the sheer volume associated with automated emails often yields positive results simply due to scale, these results are often unsustainable. Additionally, the drastic increase of automated emails has created more skeptical, inundated, and fatigued end users. In short, it is no longer sufficient for email marketing automation to be limited to sending, receiving, and tracking emails. To reach these contacts and users, marketers must also automate which data is collected and how it will be collected, where and when the data is applied in databases, and what conclusions should be drawn and implemented from the analysis.
Bundling tools such as HubSpot, Seventh Sense, and LeadGnome allows marketers to jumpstart this advanced, yet essential, automated email marketing strategy. While it may be complicated, it is also light years away from SPAM, and that alone is worth the investment.
