(Watch Mike K. Tatum's session from INBOUND)
Are you struggling to create personalized content that resonates with your audience? Do you feel like your emails are getting lost in the sea of promotional messages? If so, you're not alone. Many marketers struggle with creating targeted content that engages their customers and drives conversions.
Enter Mike K. Tatum, Director of Lifecycle Marketing at Athletic Greens and INBOUND speaker alum. Tatum has been using HubSpot's products for several years and is a big fan of their smart content tool. He believes that it's "one of the most underutilized and underrated features" that can help you create personalized content that speaks to your customers.
Way back in 2014, HubSpot defined smart content in under 100 words. With the use of smart content, HubSpot users can utilize a number of customization options. The power of smart content extends beyond personalization tokens (i.e. Hi {first.name}). According to Tatum, who also teaches courses on HubSpot's products, some long-term users don't always get the full picture when it comes to the tool. For users just beginning their smart content journey, he suggests starting at the Life Cycle Stage. You can customize your email texts or videos based on the Life Cycle Stage of your contacts — subscribers, leads, marketing qualified, opportunity, customers, and evangelists. Product users can identify their most important call to action to target their audience. This can be done through a variety of functions while working within HubSpot's Marketing Hub and CMS Hub.
Email marketing is all about sending the right message to the right people. Instead of blasting a bunch of emails to everyone on your list, you can send one email that's tailored to a specific audience and campaign. In HubSpot, each audience can be designated to a specific list (i.e. marketing email engagement, page views, contact properties, etc.). Within the platform, you can get started with creating a smart rule. Tatum advises that when creating each of these rules to check against your email lists, it's crucial to arrange the rules in order of importance. The order is important because if you want to check first if someone is a lead, you would have that rule come first instead of the customer rule, and vice versa if targeting customers. Tatum notes that if you save the "wrong" rule to be arranged later in the list, you risk the incorrect audience getting your email. Setting these rules in order of priority allows the platform to check by order of importance until there's a "yes" response to qualify them to receive your email. In cases where the contact doesn't meet any of the rules, all "no" answers, Tatum advises including a more general version of the life cycle stage email to catch these contacts.
Tatum has some other great tips on how to use HubSpot's smart content feature with email marketing for SaaS onboarding, E-commerce, and product usage, etc., which you can watch in the video above.
Most recently, Tatum shared that "smart content allows you to make every email and website page feel like it was uniquely built just for your contact. In marketing, we talk a lot about the advantages of hyper-personalization at scale, and smart content is what allows you to create those types of experiences." If you feel inspired and want more information on where to start, check out HubSpot's 2023 practical step-by-step guide on creating smart content in a multitude of ways for your organization here.
The future of email marketing depends on personalized communications at scale — continue the conversation with other email marketers and learn from industry thought leaders at INBOUND 2023.
