What Are Programmable Emails and How To Use Them?

Discover what programmable emails are and how you could use them to improve your open rate, increase click-throughs, and deliver a better customer experience.

I want you to think back to the last time you were looking for somewhere new to live and you signed up for email updates from an estate agent/property company.

House hunting can be a real chore. Even people who enjoy it have to admit, it can take up lots of your time. So, whether we’re time-starved or we just want to be the first to know when a new property matching our selection criteria becomes available, we consent to be notified.

But those emails you receive, full of personalised recommendations? They’re just not possible with the standard level of personalisation offered by most email providers. Only with more advanced, programmable email capabilities has the company in question been able to build custom workflows that deliver highly personalised content quickly, efficiently, at scale.

Okay, they might not be able to pull the property of your dreams from out of… your dreams. But as inbound marketers and sales professionals, programmable capabilities are a dream in themselves, enabling us to send hyper personalised outreach that speaks to its recipients.

You go to lots of effort to manage your data. In this article, find out more about how you can use it to deliver automated, hyper-personalised emails full of dynamic content, at scale and at predetermined times — all the while never losing that personal touch.

Raring to get started? Don’t miss these five automation blueprints, available for you to download now.


So what are programmable emails?

Programmable email allows you to build highly personalised emails that leverage dynamic content based on the data you hold in HubSpot standard HubSpot records, custom objects and HubDB tables.

Take these 5 steps towards more effective email campaigns

Programmable email use case: the estate agent

Most of the time, the simple-to-use, point-and-click logic behind HubSpot’s standard workflow creation will be more than capable of delivering the dynamic email content you need to properly serve your prospects and customers.

But sometimes, your personalisation needs may be far more complex than a simple logic branch can deliver. You might also need to scale up this level of personalisation, far beyond what you can manage manually.

In those situations, programmable email is an effective solution. Let’s go back to our estate agent example. How exactly does programmable email deliver those perfect homes?

By leveraging a recipient's contact record, programmable emails offer dynamic content based around an individual’s site behaviour, viewing habits, and topic interests. At a very top level, it enables our estate agent to send emails with images and modules that the recipient has seen and is familiar with on the site — all kinds of small but powerful instances of personalisation that help to build familiarity, brand recognition, and trust.

But most importantly, it can also show them new properties that have gone online that meet the contact’s preferences saved in their contact record or an external system.

Data on the contact’s preferred price range, number of bedrooms, and whether or not the property has a garden can all be leveraged by programmable logic to send them suitable properties for consideration, wrapped up neatly in a helpful email. The email triggers automatically, it populates automatically, it can be sent to thousands of contacts, and for all these reasons, it helps to reduce manual marketing activity and costs, too.

In the context of the property market, this isn’t just helpful. It forms a fundamental part of the modern buyer’s journey and without it, the company would struggle to scale and grow.

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Programmable emails: how could your team use them?

As you can imagine, the applications for programmable email extend well beyond the housing marketing. In fact, the limit of their effectiveness is really just that: your imagination. 

Every industry has use cases for hyper personalisation and dynamic content that speaks to its recipients. When those recipients are your contacts and the success of your marketing campaign hinges on their engagement, being able to deliver the kind of content they’re looking for, at scale, without needing to get stuck in manually, is invaluable.

As anyone who’s managed a team will tell you, capacity is one of the ceilings limiting your company’s growth. By leveraging sophisticated automation of this kind, you remove one of those ceilings, clearing a path for your company to scale unimpeded.

And you do it all without ever losing sight of your contacts and what’s important to them.

Learn more about what to automate in sales and marketing using our five blueprints — available below.

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