How many times have you sat in a meeting, on a call, or just in a conversation and wondered… “Why me?”

(OK, that’s a little dramatic.)

How many times have you sat in a meeting, call, or conversation that seemed extremely irrelevant to what you do, know, or care about?

We’ve all been there—trapped in a meeting that starts with, “Now I know this doesn’t apply to a lot of you, but…” You might feel annoyed, slightly disrespected, or just anxious to get back to what you actually have to do. That’s part of life for a professional of any kind.

Now, what about when you receive an email that seems irrelevant? Unlike a meeting you need to attend, you can opt-out. You can delete, unsubscribe, or even report it as spam.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Well… I dream of writing subject lines and emails that get people to open, click, and ultimately become sales-qualified.”

Those were my exact thoughts, stumbling the halls of Klem North Elementary in the late-90s.  

No, but I did want to be a writer. And even though it wasn’t exactly my dream, the truth is that emails are most of what I write today. As a former copywriter turned marketing consultant, I regard email writing as a craft.

If you’re in marketing or advertising, I’m willing to bet you also understand the importance of solid, purpose-driven email writing. (If you’re not in marketing, you probably at least appreciate it, or notice the difference between a good and bad email. There are a lot of examples of the latter.)

When it comes to email marketing, it’s a tough battlefield. There are many things that make the difference between an email that gets read versus an email that gets deleted. When you consider that the average individual’s email inbox is bombarded by marketing emails every single day, it’s easy to get discouraged.

After all, how are you going to get your emails in front of your readers? You've heard it before: customization and personalization make email relevant to readers. One of the best way to offer relevant emails is through email workflows that are designed to accomplish specific goals. This post shares 11 to get you started!

Email is one of the most important pieces of technology that we use today. While we might even rely too much on email, it’s a necessary part of the sales process. However, if you really think about it, the way we use email hasn’t changed all that much over the years. Sure, we now have email in our pockets (via our phones) but the actual tools we use are pretty much the same.

Or so you may think…

This is where some of the leading sales enablement companies (like HubSpot Sales) come into play. They are helping make salespeople smarter, faster, and able to improve one-to-one email communication in some big ways. Let’s take a quick look at some of the tools your salespeople shouldn’t be doing business without. 

The ultimate goal of email marketing is more leads, more customers, and more dollars being spent. But sometimes it takes a few steps between hitting that “send” button and seeing these results. If you aren’t tracking what happens in-between, you’re not going to know how your campaign has performed or what to expect from your campaign in the coming months. Here are the three metrics we recommend tracking for every email campaign you send.

Today we have a guest post from Ashley Lauwereins. Ashley is the Digital Audience Development Specialist with Swift Local Solutions, and is a passionate marketing professional with an extensive B2C background. Her interest in data, design, and researching new trends helps her get the results she wants. When not in front of the computer you’ll find her making jewelry, hiking, or volunteering.

Email is one of the best ways to get your message in front of your customer, but it is also one of the easiest ways to annoy your potential customers if not done correctly. So how can you ensure that you’re using this tool effectively for your business?

In marketing and sales, we send a lot of emails. We thank people for downloading our content, we offer additional resources, we ask them if they have any questions, we follow up with them to see how they’re doing, and we ask for their business. We know that most people are dealing with full inboxes, so we try to make our emails short, relevant, and valuable.

Of course, I’m also a buyer of things, so people send me follow-up emails asking how I liked the eBook or whitepaper I downloaded. A recent email was a perfect example of what NOT to do when sending marketing emails. 

All of us in sales would love to find that “magic bullet” email template that works every time it’s tried—the perfect formula and the perfect verbiage that will elicit the desired response from your prospects 100% of the time. Unfortunately, you’re not going to find it in this post. However, there are some sales email writing basics that will make getting a positive response from your prospects far more likely. Here are the essentials that I see overlooked the most.

Recently while reading an article on Inc.com written by Geoffrey James, I came across a thought-provoking infographic about the best email subject lines for B2B sales emails. While many marketers and salespeople take the subject line for granted and just fire away with their latest pitch to unsuspecting prospects, research is starting to show that certain types of subject lines can outperform others. Before you run off and start coming up with a list of great email subject lines you might want to take a minute and read this article because the findings might surprise you. I know that they were surprising for me.

The information below is taken from a study conducted by Sales for Life and Contact Monkey on over 30 million sales emails sent from Outlook and Gmail to see which subject lines have a better chance of being opened, and I am sure you will agree that some interesting facts came to light.   

Today we have a guest post from Mike Donnelly. Mike is the founder of Seventh Sense, a SaaS platform designed to plug into your Hubspot account and existing email systems and quietly listen—listen for the times that individuals engage with you, capture their patterns and allow you to take action on that data. Mike is a data fanatic who’s always looking for new and creative ways to help sales and marketing professionals get better at their trade.

Open rate is one of the most commonly-used metrics to judge the success or failure of email marketing campaigns. Every marketing automation system, including HubSpot, reports on this metric, and it’s the first thing most marketers look at after they’ve sent a campaign. But there are a few challenges with using open rates as a metric. We’re going to look at three of those, as well as what you can do to get a true picture of engagement.

How Email Open Tracking Works

First, every marketer needs to know how email open tracking works. When an email is opened, a transparent pixel (think of this as a picture you can’t see) is downloaded from a remote server. When the pixel is downloaded, it reports as an open. Each pixel is unique to every email address that the campaign was sent to.

How Your Email Open Data Tricks You

Because of the way email open tracking works, the data it produces isn’t the most reliable way to track engagement. Email open data is a shiny metric that sounds nice but, in reality, doesn’t give you a complete picture of your campaign’s effectiveness. Here are three ways your open data is tricking you: