Regardless of your industry, email marketing continues to be immensely successful. While open and click-through rates vary greatly by industry, both B2B and B2C brands consider the medium one of the most effective digital marketing tactics available.

Especially for companies who embrace inbound marketing, the success potential of email marketing can be immense. A number of studies, in fact, have found that brands who use email marketing to nurture their leads see significantly higher conversion rates and better transaction rates than those who don’t.

An inbound marketing platform like HubSpot, of course, has recognized that issue, which is why it includes a comprehensive email tool as part of its core features. As an active user, you probably already know about the basics of that feature, which includes an easy drag-and-drop editor as well as an option to segment and select your audience.

At the same time, a wide range of features exist that you may have never heard about. So for today, we’ll focus on 5 email tool features you don’t know exist that can significantly impact the success of your marketing efforts.

1) Personalize Every Aspect of Your Emails

Experienced email marketers know: personalization can be a core driver of success in getting your audience to open, engage with, and convert from your emails. In fact, one study found that personalizing your email can increase your transaction rates by 600%.

That personalization, of course, can go beyond addressing your audience by first name. While it’s simple to add basic personalization to any HubSpot email, you can also go further. For example, you can create smart content within your email, changing an image or block of text completely based on individual lead characteristics.

The results of this type of personalization are a degree of customization most email marketing tools can’t give you. Take advantage of them, and your ROI will multiply.

2) Customize Send Times Based on Your Audience

A number of studies have shown the ideal email send times for audiences across the globe. Depending on the time and date you send, the results you get can vary wildly. But what if your audience lives in different time zones and even continents?

Imagine sending an email to two leads: one has an address within 50 miles from your headquarters, while the other is located 5,000 miles away. Sending a single email to them will likely result in great engagement rates for one, while being non-optimized for the other.

Now, imagine a system that accounts for your audience’s time zone. Believe it or not, that’s exactly what HubSpot can provide. The system uses IP address geolocation to determine your audience’s time zones, and sends the message at an appropriate time for those recipients.

3) Restrict Your Audience to Engaged Leads

Low-performing audiences can kill successful email marketing. A contact that has not opened or engaged with one of your emails will become increasingly likely to mark you as spam, decreasing your delivery rate and putting you in danger of being blacklisted.

Fortunately, HubSpot’s email tool has an answer to these problems. Most email tools distinguish between so-called ‘whitemail’ or whitelist mail, sent only to contacts who have opted in, and blacklist mail, send to leads you have purchased or who have not otherwise opted in to receiving messages from you. HubSpot adds a third category: graymail, the segment of your audience that has opted in but not engaged with your emails.

By clicking a single checkbox in your email send settings, you can actually prevent the software from sending emails to members of that segment, defined as leads who have not engaged with 12 consecutive emails in a row. The result is higher recipient satisfaction, greater value, and higher deliverability.

4) A/B Test Individual Email Elements

Every experienced marketer understands the value of A/B testing, the process of pitting two slightly different variations of the same marketing tactic against each other to see which performs better. Over time, A/B testing can have a major impact in shaping your digital messaging.

It’s valuable to know, then, that HubSpot includes A/B testing capabilities in its own email marketing tool. By following this simple tutorial, you can test individual elements of your email such as your subject line, your call to action, or your layout.

The software does the work for you by creating two random audience segments, and sharing the results of your test with you so you can optimize for the future. You can even set up an automated process in which the variation winning the test will automatically become the default in future sends.

5) Analyze Your Emails for Sustained Success

Finally, don’t underestimate the complex reporting capabilities of HubSpot’s email marketing tool. Beyond simple open, click-through, and delivery rates, you can track a wide range of additional metrics that help you improve your email efforts over time.

To understand and improve your success in any type of digital marketing, you need to know how to set and track specific, measurable benchmarks. Too often, these benchmarks end at the surface level, such as overall reach and open rates. A tool that helps you dig deeper can give you a better understanding how your email marketing strategy is actually performing, and what you can do to improve it.

Use it right, and email marketing will become a vital tool in helping you improve your digital marketing efforts, nurture your leads, and grow your business. But to accomplish these goals, you need an email marketing tool that can help you succeed. HubSpot can be that tool, thanks to a wide variety of features that aren’t always immediately obvious.

Do you have any great HubSpot tips or tricks? Let us know in the comments below.

Much success,

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