Imagine that you've started to invest heavily in email marketing with HubSpot. You see good results, but you want to make sure you're doing everything you can to maximize your investment and protect your email deliverability. Should you invest in a HubSpot dedicated IP for your sender reputation? It depends.

If you send marketing emails, you probably expect that your subscribers will at least see your email in their inbox. But if you're reading this article, chances are you’re beginning to suspect your subscribers aren’t even seeing your' emails. If you're beginning to wonder "why is my domain email going to spam?," you're in the right place. In this post, we’re going to take a deep dive into how spam filters work and more importantly, how to how to avoid spam filters.

Ecommerce email marketing may not be the sexiest form of advertising but there’s no question it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to scale an ecommerce business. With an ROI of over 3600%, 56% of marketers say email is their top-performing channel for customer retention.

If you run an ecommerce business, you know increasing your average repeat purchase rate is important. But what makes a buyer become a loyal repeat customer?

With the pandemic, the downturn in undergraduate student enrollment at universities in the US and many countries worldwide is putting pressure on university marketers to deliver. In this environment, smart institutions are focusing on streamlining and improving their schools’ digital marketing strategy to make sure dollars are well spent. 

An insurance company increased revenue by 45% by sending MORE email. An ecommerce store’s revenue dropped 30% after adding a weekly email newsletter. These are both examples of the powerful effects changing email cadence can have on your bottom line. 

You've got questions and with split test automation for HubSpot, you've got answers!

At Seventh Sense, we don't believe in silver bullets, but rather real answers live within data. As one of our favorite sayings goes, "in God we trust, all others must bring data."

Testing and audience creation is an important part of optimizing your email marketing campaigns.  However, until now, testing capabilities in HubSpot workflows (the platform we use at Seventh Sense) were limited. This is what led us to build a custom workflow action (split test automation) to scratch our own itch and solve a common problem among HubSpot users.

Google Postmaster Tools is an amazing data source to add to any email marketers' toolkit. Once set up, Postmaster Tools allows marketers to track key deliverability metrics such as user spam reports and domain reputation across Gmail. Gmail users likely make up the majority of your mailing list if you are a US based sender, so this data can be a key gauge for how you're doing as a sender.

In general, we don’t recommend A/B testing as a primary metric for evaluating the performance of send time optimization.

Because send time optimization usually increases email health overall, the benefits of using this approach compound over time. Split tests take none of the long term benefits of using send time optimization into account. At best, a split test will only tell you how much lift STO gave to a specific email.

Earlier this year, Validity and Demand Marketing released their 2021 email marketing benchmark report. The report, which pulls from extensive data collected in 2020, provides a lot of useful insights into the state of email marketing.

Seventh Sense is a powerful email optimization tool, but we recognize it's not always been straightforward to use or easy to maintain. Up until now, integrating Seventh Sense with nurture campaigns and multistep workflows has only been possible via webhooks and required a HubSpot Enterprise Subscription.

Imagine is a business development company that offers Go-To-Market services, revenue operations optimization, HubSpot consulting, and more to help businesses overcome roadblocks and barriers to growth.

If you’re struggling with a less-than-ideal domain reputation and/or poor email deliverability, it might be time to take a closer look at your database’s email engagement. Why analyze your email engagement? In this blog, we’ll discuss why determining inbox activity level is key to unlocking the customer buying cycle, thereby improving deliverability, domain reputation, and your email marketing program’s overall engagement for highly active and even unengaged contacts.

Did you know that if your email list contains 10% or more invalid addresses, email service providers may deliver less than half of your emails? If your open rates have been declining recently, it might be because the emails that you sent never made it to the inbox at all. Email verification tools can be part of the solution to this problem.

“But I got my list via inbound marketing, I don’t have a problem!,” you say.

Guess what, after just twelve months 21% of the average B2B email list will no longer be valid. While the numbers are better for B2C lists, email list quality degradation is still a serious concern.

Email deliverability is a vital topic for marketers. After all, If your emails aren’t being seen by your subscribers, what’s the point in sending them? With that in mind, we recently partnered with our friends at Databox to survey a large cross-section of marketers on what steps they take in order to improve their email deliverability.

We received fantastic responses from 37 marketers, and we’ve assembled 22 email deliverability best practices from the tips they gave below. Enjoy, share, and please comment if you have any questions or let us know if we missed something!

Chatbots have become a staple in major online chat platforms like Facebook Messenger, which has over 1.3 billion users. Online chat is a faster and more convenient form of communication across the board, with people from all 195 countries using it.

A few weeks ago, we published a quick guide to writing an effective coronavirus email. Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll be living with COVID-19 and the disruptions that come with it for a while longer. With that in mind, we wanted to understand how marketers are approaching email marketing in this new time of social distancing.

It seems every article I read on “top email marketing tips” or “email marketing best practices” extols the virtues of A/B testing. Always be testing seems to be the mantra in many marketing departments. I’m about to make a bold statement that many may disagree with: Most marketers, especially in the SMB space, shouldn’t be spending resources running email A/B tests.

A few years ago, HubSpot released a feature called Smart Send, which is basically the ability to send marketing emails at the same time, across timezones- something numerous email marketing software providers had available, and many customers were asking for.  As an early HubSpot app partner, we've gotten a lot of questions, centering around, "How is HubSpot's smart time zone sending different from what Seventh Sense does for HubSpot customers?"

It's fair to say predictions often don’t line up with reality. Remember when Bill Gates predicted the end of spam by 2006? Still, there is a lot of value in analyzing the current business environment and looking for trends to guide you as you make marketing decisions. With that in mind, I hope you enjoy our predictions for the top email marketing trends that we expect to see in 2020. We’d love to hear your comments, did we miss anything?

The HubSpot App Marketplace features hundreds of third-party tools you can use to connect tools, teams, processes, and data in a single stack. Don’t have time to sift through the hundreds of HubSpot apps in the ecosystem to determine which HubSpot integrations are best-of-breed? Not to worry -- we asked our friends at Revenue River, a HubSpot Diamond level agency, to give us their favorites. They tapped 6 of their top marketing specialists to give their thoughts on the top HubSpot integrations you should be using in 2020.

Last year, Black Friday generated a whopping $6.2 billion in online sales and Cyber Monday broke records as the largest day ever for online shopping. There’s no question Black Friday weekend is an extremely important time for marketers. So what can you do to optimize your Black Friday email campaign strategy?

In this post, we’ll go over 9 often-overlooked strategies and tactics to make sure your 2019 Black Friday email campaign is a record-breaker.

As a marketing agency, we’re all too familiar with the struggles of email engagement.

Customer interests and behaviors change constantly. But your quarterly goals and product promotion schedules don’t always line up with what your customers care about. Generalized emails and batch-and-blast campaigns often miss the target, resulting in lost revenue opportunities.

Building an email list, especially if you do it the RIGHT way, is expensive. But what happens when your hard-earned email subscribers stop engaging with your emails? If you leave them on your list and continue to email them, eventually your deliverability may suffer. If your domain reputation falls, you’ll have a harder time reaching ALL your subscribers. But just deleting them doesn't seem like a great option either, does it?

Has your average email open rate taken a nosedive recently? There’s a good chance your content is not to blame. If you've started to wonder, "is my email going to spam?",  you’re on the right track. Your real problem is probably not content, it's more likely poor email domain reputation causing poor email deliverability. 

Over the past several years, Seventh Sense has primarily focused on helping businesses, organizations and educational institutions, use AI to understand and automate the process of sending emails to their audience at the most optimal time.

It’s vanity...it’s social proof…no, it’s subscriber counts!

First and foremost, I’m all for social proof as it’s one of the most valuable assets any company can have. 

Imagine this: Instead of sitting in a room brainstorming email subject lines or setting up countless A/B tests or spending hours each month pulling metrics, AI tools could handle these tasks and others, with minimal human involvement and at scale.

What would happen if we sent our monthly email newsletter at the worst engagement time vs. using send time optimization over 24-hours?

Marketers (being marketers) like to re-brand things. From “account-based marketing” to “viral marketing,” over the years we’ve coined literally hundreds of terms to describe various marketing strategies and techniques. In the last 10 years, that trend has continued as a broad basket of marketing techniques which have been divided into two camps - inbound marketing vs outbound marketing.

What’s the best time to send emails, and how often should I send them?

For Marketo users with email lists spanning multiple time zones, enabling the recipient timezone sending feature on email marketing campaigns is a no-brainer. Without recipient timezone sending enabled, your Marketo mail blast sent out at 9 am EST will reach your west coast readers at 6am.

If your list consists solely of early rising CEO’s, this is perfect, but most data shows open rates peak between 8-10 am.

Wait til 9 am PST?

Email marketing is still an effective way to reach your customers with a personalized message, even as social media has become more and more popular. A well-rounded marketing strategy includes email as well as social media campaigns.

The goal of any brand is to grab consumers' attention and encourage them to convert into customers. If there is one thing that improves revenue without spending money, it is optimizing conversions on your site. There's no point in attracting a ton of traffic if you aren’t implementing conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies to convert those site visitors into long-term customers.

 Do you feel stressed? You're not alone.

80% of marketers feel overloaded and understaffed and 1 in 4 say they experience "high stress" on a daily basis. Salespeople are stressed too. According to Hubspot, seven in ten sales managers say “challenging” is the number one way they’d describe their role.

I guess it's not surprising that some of the most common feedback we get from customers is that Seventh Sense makes their lives less stressful. Higher ROI from email is great, but its the "email insurance policy" that comes with sending email out over a longer time drastically reduces the likelihood of those "high stress" moments.

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of using machine learning to improve the email experience for marketers, salespeople and their customers. But the truth is, send time optimization is NOT for everybody.

Every ecommerce entrepreneur knows that the foundation of your online store lies in its marketing efforts — and email is still one of the sector’s top marketing channels.

Email marketing is cheap, efficient, and flexible, and forms the backbone of pretty much every ecommerce strategy.

(Warning, this blogpost may contain sarcasm)

I get asked the question “what's the best time to send email?” on a regular basis. I’m happy to report there is finally a clear-cut answer:

5pm on Tuesday.

Yes. According to Inc. Magazine after analyzing 1.5 billion emails,

How's your lead generation process? If you could use a little help finding more qualified leads, email marketing can provide a variety of solutions.

Collecting email addresses is a routine part of a digital marketer’s job, but how do you know if what you are receiving is quality? Just because you get a new subscriber does not mean the account is real, or that a typo did not happen. That’s where the importance of email verification comes in.

Between revelations about Facebook logging Android data and Mark Zuckerberg set to testify before Congress about Cambridge Analytica, Facebook had a bad month.

“Any social media platform, in time, is going to become MySpace,” said Sabretooth Advisors chief investment officer Scott Freeze in a recent MarketWatch article, “Nobody young uses Facebook.”

Over the last 15 years, my company has extensively studied organizations that are consistently growing at rates of 50, 100, 200, even 300% their industry's averages. What are the key things that these companies are doing that enable them to grow in such a way that they outpace their competition? It's like they've figured out a secret, and that's the focus of what I want to share with you today, the secret to fast growth.

Account-based marketing (ABM) has marketers and sales teams working together to examine the business issues facing the target prospect, map them to individuals, and tailor campaigns and sales efforts to address those issues at all levels.

The origin of email goes back to 1971 when even the smallest computers required a wheelbarrow to transport. In the early days, computers were a tool used for a limited set of tasks, they were part of a job for some, but it was the introduction of the Blackberry, iPhone and Android in the 2000’s that brought our inboxes to our pockets.

I recently read a blog post by Seth Godin Please don't kill the blogs, which is an "open letter" to Google where he expresses his frustration with the way Gmail has been putting his subscribers’ blog notifications in their "Promotions" tab instead of in the Inbox.

The great part about email is that it means we can get work done no matter what time it is. Unfortunately, the not-so- great part about email is that it means we think we should get work done no matter what time it is. If you ask American professionals what their biggest source of stress and worry is at work, they’re likely to say it’s the anxiety they feel when looking at their email inboxes. Because emails pour into our inboxes constantly throughout the workday, we’re always aware that there’s a pile of questions sitting there waiting for us to answer them — some of which may be urgent.

As an entrepreneur with a vested interested in email, not so long ago I’d argue with anyone that email marketing wasn’t a commodity. A recent conversation with an industry colleague changed my perspective. Looking at Merriam-Webster, a commodity is a ‘mass-produced unspecialized product’. By that definition, the sending of old-fashioned email blasts is clearly a commodity. Everybody can (and likely does) do it.

I have heard often that sales people are the easiest people to sell to.  I never thought I fell into this camp until a recent experience reminded me how important the buyer's journey is.  In this case, I was the eager buyer.  And by the end of my journey, I was reminded of a profane yet still memorable axiom taught to me by one of my best mentors on how a seller should treat a buyer: 

You can’t get to your final destination if you don’t know where you are. Every leadership team knows they have to keep an eye on important KPIs like ad performance, email engagement, leads, conversions, etc. Depending on how many different programs and platforms you use, tracking your metrics can be very challenging — your numbers are all in different locations.

When working on some more advanced workflows within HubSpot, I realized that you can only re-enroll contacts based on specific criteria. Then it dawned me that I could use a Seventh Sense webhook to re-enroll a contact based on any criteria or property I desired.To provide some more context, I was trying to have contacts re-enroll based on when a custom property had been met. Learning that this was not possible, I banged my head against the wall for some time trying to figure out how I accomplish this. The answer was quite simple and was in front of me the whole time.

Sure, send time optimization sounds cool. What's not to love about taking advantage of the data you have on each of your contacts (when they open, click, and convert, by time of day and day of week), and scheduling your emails to send to each contact at the time when each is most likely to engage with your email?

Marketing is sometimes a difficult world to understand. We have an endless and always-evolving dictionary of jargon that's helpful for those that speak the language but confusing to those who don't. We deal with nonlinear processes and the complex realm of human psychology and persuasion that doesn't always reduce to a spreadsheet.

People are hardwired to act habitually. Neuroscientists have traced our habit-based behaviors to a separate part of the brain from where decisions are made. As soon as a behavior becomes habitual, the decision-making part of the brain goes on pause.

Every salesperson and marketer wants to know, "When is the best time to send email?" We spend hours crafting our email campaigns and sales emails, creating copy and messages that we know will get a response—if they're seen. We need our recipients to open our emails in order to engage.

But so many emails go unseen, thanks to the sheer number of emails individuals receive daily. On any given day, our prospects are dealing with 100+ messages in their inboxes.

As a career salesperson, nothing was worse than hearing from an existing or prospective client days after I sent an email and being asked, "where's your proposal?" I knew it meant an immediate loss of trust and a slipped sales cycle. My usual response, "I sent it to you at 9 AM on Monday and left a follow-up voicemail" and the following reply of "oh, there it is...I usually have all-day meetings on Mondays and don't check emails till after the kids go to bed" helped to partially repair the trust, but I could never get back the time lost in the sales cycle.

Have you ever wondered if your emails are being read? What time your recipients opened them, where they were and what devices they used when they opened them? 

Updated October 6, 2021 - A lot has changed since we wrote this article in 2017! After reading this, you may want to check out this newer post we wrote on the same topic.