Whether it is for your Nurturing campaigns, Outbound prospecting or any other one-off or continuous campaigns, personalization has become imperative to any relevant Marketing effort.
Unfortunately, email personalization is often taken lightly and is limited, in many cases, to simply repeating a generic message with a “Hello {FirstName}”.
In this article we will see together how to implement effective personalization in your emails by taking advantage of all the features provided by HubSpot.
Summary :
- The importance of personalization in your HubSpot email campaigns
- HubSpot Personalization Tokens
- How to implement personalization tokens in your HubSpot emails
- Integrate relevant personalization
- Rethink the collection of prospect information
- The Grail of personalization on HubSpot: Smart Rules
- What is a HubSpot smart rule?
- How to Implement Smart Rules in your HubSpot emails
- An effective method: segmentation by Persona
- Analyzing and optimizing your HubSpot email campaigns
- Endnotes
The importance of personalization in your HubSpot email campaigns
As mentioned earlier, email personalization should not be limited to telling your recipient that you know their first name.
This element is used by the majority of companies and in no way removes the “automated” side of your communications.
Generally speaking, I think it's a mistake to view personalization as a technique to trick your recipient into thinking the message was sent manually just for them. (I will soon share, in a blog post, the rare exceptional cases where ultra-personalization can be used for this purpose.)
When was the last time you took an automated email for direct communication?
Personalization must fulfill another objective, that of pushing the most relevant message to each recipient. The personalization must be based on their areas of interest, their objections, blocking points and challenges that they wish to meet in your industry.
The good news ? HubSpot allows us to personalize our email communications with this level of detail and collect the necessary information in a natural way for your leads.
The two HubSpot features we'll cover in this article are personalization tokens and smart rules.
HubSpot Personalization Tokens
How to implement personalization tokens in your HubSpot emails
The personalization tokens are the famous “{FirstName}” mentioned in the introduction. The concept is to integrate the value of a property of a contact (or of his company) into your email communication.
To embed personalization tokens in your HubSpot emails, place your cursor where you want it and click "Personalize" in the top right.
Select the desired property, specify a default text in case the recipient does not have a value for this property.
Once configured, the token will appear in this way on your email editor:
Integrate relevant personalization
Now that we have seen how to insert personalization tokens in our emails, let's analyze how to integrate relevant personalization based on the interests and challenges of our leads.
Instead of limiting ourselves to demographic personalization, let's implement property tokens dealing with the blocking points of our recipient:
In this way, we can take full advantage of the information collected to deliver a message with high added value focusing on a real point of interest identified beforehand.
However, to be able to integrate this type of personalization, it is important to plan ahead when collecting and organizing our contact information.
Rethink the collection of prospect information
When you offer forms on the different digital contents of your company, it is important to divide the information collected into two categories: Qualification properties (necessary for operational automations) and secondary properties (useful to facilitate the sales speech and the customizations).
It can be inconvenient to ask for too much information when filling out a form and the qualification properties take precedence. Fortunately, HubSpot allows us to collect this secondary information through “Progressive Profiling”.
Each time a Lead fills out a form, the properties already known will be replaced by new ones allowing a constant generation of information for each Lead.
With progressive profiling, you can easily retrieve information such as the “Obstacles” drop-down menu property presented in the previous part.
A second way to generate customization tokens is to create properties powered by workflows.
In our example, the multi-line text property “Obstacle’s solutions” is fed by the following workflow:
By performing this workflow, you can generate preconceived responses directly linked to information collected beforehand.
The Grail of Personalization on HubSpot: Smart Rules
What is a HubSpot smart rule?
Smart rules in HubSpot are an advanced way to replace entire email elements based on HubSpot lists.
You can thus send different email contents for each segmentation of your database.
By creating lists dedicated to visitor behavior, specific interests or identified blocking points, you can individually modify each module of your emails with relevant content adapted to the situation of each lead.
How to Implement Smart Rules in Your HubSpot Emails
To add a smart rule to an email module, click on the “More” button -> Add smart rule.
Select the list option and add your rules. Each rule corresponds to a variation of your module.
To modify each module individually, click on it and on the left option bar, select the version of your choice.
An effective method: segmentation by Persona
A simple and effective way to personalize your content through smart rules and create lists based on Personas.
Indeed, a persona is supposed to bring together leads concerned by the same challenges, interests and concerns on your industry.
Creating a variation by persona will easily help you boost the impact of your email communications.
Analyzing and optimizing your HubSpot email campaigns
Personalization is, like any marketing effort, based on testing, analysis, iteration and optimization over the lifetime of campaigns.
The KPIs of an emailing campaign
To measure the impact of your personalizations in your email campaigns, look at the following indicators:
- Open rate
- Click through rate
- Response rate
- Reading time
Through these 4 indicators, you will be able to effectively determine the relevance of your campaigns.
Think of grouping all the emails of the same campaign in a “HubSpot Campaign” in order to facilitate the analysis and comparison of your results.
A/B testing in your campaigns
In addition to offering a personalized experience for each of your visitors, you can test different types or degrees of personalization by carrying out A/B tests for each of your communications emails.
Warning: it is important to include only one modification per A/B test to be able to assess the relevance of the change. Changing multiple items at once will not allow you to identify the winning change.
Endnotes
I hope this article has given you another perspective on email personalization and the resources needed to implement it optimally on HubSpot.
If you want to deepen your HubSpot skills and find all the workflows created and presented by HS Simple, do not hesitate to request your free access to the workflow box. A private web page listing all the workflows requested by the community with an explanatory video and a simple action plan in the form of a “to-do list”.
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