As consumers, none of us love spam mail. As marketers, we’re not huge fans of it either. That’s especially true if you or your team has invested precious time and budget into an email or series of carefully crafted emails… only for them to end up in deliverability limbo.
How do messages end up in spam filters? Email service providers use a number of factors to determine what should end up in someone’s inbox. If you were to send a mass email to everyone in your contact list, this can often be flagged as spam, meaning your recipients will most likely never see it.
Messages are also considered spam if a person never engages with your brand or because a large majority of your audience hasn’t either. These issues could explain why your open and click-to-open rates are down.
"Based on a global survey in 2018 of nearly 13,000 marketing, creative and technology professionals in the digital industry, only 9% cited email marketing as their top priority."
Sending the right email at the right time can have a powerful effect on your engagement rates. Now, thanks to AI and machine learning, it’s never been easier for you to optimise email frequency and send times.
If you’re struggling to have an impact on email deliverability and improving your marketing results, it might be time to try one of HubSpot’s top email marketing integrations: Seventh Sense.
Hi, I’m Bridget, the principal inbound marketer at BabelQuest. Inbound marketing is all about getting that right message to the right people at the right time, and this is especially true for email marketing. Seventh Sense will help you do that and improve your engagement rates, get those people clicking, get those people to your website. The AI and machine learning aspect really does all the hard work for you, so you can get your head into other things. So make sure that you’re getting the most out of your email marketing, and thank you for watching. Good luck.
Transforming email marketing with Seventh Sense
Seventh Sense is an email automation tool allowing you to optimise email scheduling based on an individual’s habits to increase deliverability and reduce friction between teams across your organisation.
Emails are delivered through HubSpot using Seventh Sense’s AI to improve send times, striving to ensure high engagement rates from your contacts, no matter their stage in the buyer’s journey.
With access to your contact activity and workflows in HubSpot, Seventh Sense can determine when each person is most likely to engage with anything from newsletters and surveys to permission passes and one-on-one emails. Let’s take a look at how some of Seventh Sense’s capabilities can level up your email marketing even further.
Wait — What are integrations and why are they important?
Improving engagement with AI and machine learning
Seventh Sense uses AI and machine learning to develop an understanding of your contacts over time. Through statistical modelling, it looks at the open and click data in your marketing automation system to identify each individual's unique pattern of email engagement.
Based on this data, marketers can personalise email delivery times at scale. Each person in your contact list will then get their email at the time when they are most likely to engage.
"Artificial intelligence and machine learning are at the heart of what Seventh Sense does to help marketers increase the ROI of their email channel, ensuring their emails have the highest chance of being seen, read and engaged with." Mike Donnelly, CEO, Seventh Sense
Let’s say you bring in some new contacts. Seventh Sense will initially choose a random delivery time. With each engagement, it then better predicts an accurate send time for each person. For instance, you send a newsletter to someone on a Wednesday at 1 pm. They open it the next day, but they don’t re-open and click-through the email until Friday at 3 pm. Seventh Sense will then choose Friday afternoon as the optimal send time since it has a higher level of engagement.
According to Donnelly, marketers can create dynamic segments based on who a machine learning model predicts is more or less likely to engage with your next email: “This is extremely important for minimising email fatigue and maximising reach, deliverability, and ultimately driving more ROI from email.”
Related read: How to Organically Grow your Email Database
Increasing deliverability and click-to-open rates
As marketers, we put a tremendous amount of time and resources into growing our email lists, refining our messaging, and crafting creative email content. But all of that can go to waste if your emails don’t land in the inbox.
"A ‘99% delivered’ message is meaningless if those messages are delivered to spam." Mike Donnelly
Thanks to email frequency optimisation, more inboxes can be reached without being flagged as spam. Instead of sending emails out in one bulk, staggering the sends can trick the spam filter into thinking it’s a one-on-one message, which ultimately improves the deliverability rate of your email. You can choose to stagger your emails from over a period of one hour all the way up to seven days.
Once you’ve mastered delivery, the next step is boosting open and click-to-open rates. Both metrics are important for getting people involved in your marketing, communications, business, and products. Getting your contacts to open your email and step through the door is a great first move, but if you can get them to stay and browse your website, that’s where the engagement really matters.
Did you know...
...in one Seventh Sense success story, a BabelQuest client was able to go from an open rate of 18% to 45% within a year. Additionally, the click-through rate was originally 1.9%, which also jumped to 22.6%.
Reducing friction between teams
Increasing productivity and reducing friction between teams is essential for improving visibility. In HubSpot, there’s a widget that appears in the contact record which shows everyone from sales and marketing the most optimal time to get in touch with each contact.
Let’s say Seventh Sense is sending out an email to your contacts every Friday at 3 pm (when they’re most active) and you receive a HubSpot notification that they’ve opened your email. This is a good indication that it’s also an ideal time to send them notifications about a deal, new event, webinar etc., or even pick up the phone and give them a call. If you reach out to them soon after they’ve read your message or newsletter, your business will be at the front of their mind and they’ll be more receptive to what you have to say.
"Seventh Sense provides visibility across all teams. It gives you a better view of where your contacts sit, allowing you to know exactly when to reach out and boost engagement." Chris Carver, Inbound Marketer, BabelQuest
Send-time optimisation and re-engaging contacts
Have your contacts ever experienced email fatigue? This is when they get tired of receiving emails, so they either unsubscribe or ignore messages. It’s clear that timing is everything when it comes to email marketing, sending the right email to the right person at the right time.
If you send an email at the wrong time and your contact has yet to interact with it, the recipient might not actually be ignoring the message, they might simply not have noticed it in their inbox yet. With automated and personalised send time, you can ensure you’re targeting each contact when they are ready to engage.
"Every customer is different. Their needs can vary. There are several elements of an email that you can optimise for each customer to drive more results for your business."
Seventh Sense also plays a fundamental role in re-engaging inactive contacts. The system accesses the historical data in HubSpot from previous emails that have been sent to try and get those contacts back on board and have a greater impact with delivery.
Find out everything you need to know about integrations
Informative dashboard reporting
The reporting dashboard in Seventh Sense shows you passive, active, or unengaged contacts. If your subject matter is perhaps not having an impact, it can be helpful to see where engagement levels are low.
You can compare your active audience month-on-month and monitor email marketing performance. Often, you’ll see seasonal peaks and troughs through periods such as Christmas and over the summer, as these are times of the year when people go on holiday. However, if you notice a big difference between, let’s say, October and November, there’s most likely something that needs to be flagged and you’ll have to pay close attention to each month’s performance to determine the issue.
"By using a machine learning process, Seventh Sense is able to identify with a very high degree of accuracy which contacts are most likely to open your next email. In some cases, we’ve found 90% of engagement is coming from just 30% of the total audience." Mike Donnelly
Step up your email marketing game
Ready to start using AI and machine learning to boost your click-to-open rates?
With send-time optimisation, re-engaging inactive contacts, making use of informative dashboard reporting, increasing deliverability and reducing friction between teams, a little integration with Seventh Sense could be just the trick your email marketing needs to lift it out of deliverability limbo and into ROI heaven.
Looking to adopt the Seventh Sense HubSpot integration into your business operations? Read our latest integrations guide, ‘A Practical Guide to HubSpot Integrations’ to learn how you can implement new integrations and gain end-user adoption.
