For the better part of the last 12 months, we have been working diligently behind the scenes to add a completely revised email marketing system and contact database to HubSpot's core product. Today, we're happy to announce that it has arrived.
A Short History of Email as Part of HubSpot Software
For the past six years, the HubSpot community has been preaching the gospel of inbound marketing. We saw a fundamental shift in the way that consumers found and evaluated products and services. Pushing out messages through traditional channels had stopped working and successful business had to get found by their customers.
We were right.
HubSpot's original mission was to build a killer online marketing system that empowered our customers to get found online and generate inbound leads. In 2011, HubSpot customers generated over 34,000 leads per day using our software.
Over time, our customers have started asking, "what the heck are we are we supposed to do with all these leads?" This is good problem to have. As a response, almost three years ago, we built email marketing and lead nurturing into HubSpot Software. Last June, we took the next step by acquiring a like-minded company called Performable, and adding marketing automation to our enterprise product.
When the dust settled, we evaluated HubSpot's email marketing capabilities, and decided it was time to start fresh. Today, we'd like to show you what's new (we think you'll like it).
Centralized Marketing Database
As a marketer, your contact database is everything. Your email subscribers, your leads, your customers, this is the community you market to. For too many marketers this information is stored in separate databases. This means, in order to get anything done, you need to export, import, manipulate in Excel, and lose sleep because you know that you're probably losing leads, or worse, sending someone the wrong message.
HubSpot's new contacts database lets you keep all your leads in the same place and integrate with your CRM and existing systems. Because you're using HubSpot, you can also track your contacts' online browsing history, email history, form submissions, and social media information all as part of the same beautiful profile.

Segmentation and Targeted Marketing
The power of having a centralized marketing database lies in marketers' ability to segment their contacts and create targeted lists. HubSpot now lets you create static and dynamic lists (which automatically update) based on any contact field, previous list membership and form submission. This gives our customers the ability to create extremely focused lists for email marketing, which means your emails can be more personal and create more value for your audience.
Import and Integration with Existing Databases
HubSpot makes it easy to import your exisitng database(s), along with all your custom fields. If you're developer-minded, you can also sync your marketing database with an external system or CRM through our robust API.
Beautiful Email Marketing Experience
Crafting email marketing campaigns can be a pain. You need to check your lists, make sure they're up-to-date, import new subscribers, create your segment, build a template, craft your message, test your send, select your senders and supression list, and schedule your email.
To make this worse, most email marketing providers make you walk through a series of steps separated by screens. By the time you're done, you feel like you need to go back to the begining to check your work.
We feel your pain. That's why we worked our developers' fingers to the bone perfecting the experience of building, targeting and scheduling email. It may actually make the task of sending an email campaign enjoyable.
Personalization Based on Every Contact Field
Adding personalization to your email helps increase opens and clicks by creating a better experience for your recipients. Nobody likes feeling that they're being marketed to.
HubSpot lets you customize your email body, subject line, and sender with any custom field from your marketing database. If you're connected to Salesforce.com, you can also use any field from your a lead or contact record, including the lead owner.
Email Analytics for Campaigns and Contacts
HubSpot's new email system has both big picture and contact-level analytics so you can track overall opens and clicks and then drill down and to see the actions of each individual contact. And because HubSpot's email and contacts database are both part of the same all-in-one system, it's easy to create a new list based on the outcomes from a previous email send.
Beautiful, Best-Practice Templates
Emails should look good in Outlook, Gmail, on an iPhone or even a Blackberry. That's why we've created out-of-the-box, best-practice templates that are easy to customize with your company logo and colors.
We also made sure that HubSpot's new email system was designer friendly. You can now create customizable templates complete with editable areas, widgets, and tokens.
All-in-One Marketing Software
Beyond just email marketing, HubSpot software gives marketers the tools they need to get found, generate leads and close deals. This includes search engine optimization, blogging and social media, lead generation, lead management, email, marketing automation, and analytics.
HubSpot is the world's only end-to-end marketing platform.
If you are intersted in trying out our new email tools, or seeing what else HubSpot has to offer, we'd love for you to start a free trial today and take us for a spin.
Joshua Paul 7:26 AM on May 15, 2012
This is exciting. I need to carve out some time to evaluate how this fits in with our current HubSpot, email, and SugarCRM setup.
Carrie Surprenant 9:54 AM on May 15, 2012
I currently use HubSpot Professional edition. Is this available to me or would I need to upgrade?
Chris 10:12 AM on May 15, 2012
Is this available to all customers? I have not seen a change in my email manager. I assume it is because it is not available to my subscription.
David Cancel 11:09 AM on May 15, 2012
Hi there,
We are rolling this out to new customers first before starting the migration of existing customers.
If you'd like to migrate sooner, send a note to your Account Manager and let them know.
I think you're going to LOVE the new platform.
Cheers,
David - HubSpotter
Michael Hartzell 11:37 AM on May 15, 2012
Very nice. Since seeing the preview a couple months ago, there has been a mini-roar of questions and anticipation.
My favorite aspect is: Personalization Based on Every Contact Field
Thank you
Andrew Pitre 2:40 PM on May 15, 2012
Thank you all for the wonderful comments, we're excited about these new tools and we're glad to see that you are too!
We will be migrating existing HubSpot customers over to the new email marketing and contacts database over the next 6-8 weeks. If you would like to ensure that you get the earliest possible access to the new tools, please sign up on the following form.
http://learning.hubspot.com/email-contacts-signup/
Jeff Coon 4:56 PM on May 15, 2012
Very excited about this new functionality! This was the one piece of the software that needed some help. With this in place, sky's the limit :)
Andy Xhignesse 11:56 AM on May 17, 2012
Just finished a webinar on this new platform, this is a remarkable renovation! Awesome work Hubspot, although I've come to expect nothing less, you just keep on delivering beyond expectations!
Julia Stewart 12:21 PM on May 25, 2012
This sounds wonderful. I'm particularly excited about the prospect of creating new lists based on previous clicks. This is really important to closing sales for my business and the way I've been doing it is dismayingly time consuming.
Janet 8:43 AM on June 08, 2012
This is great! Looking forward to using it.
On another note, please fix this sentence: "Over time, our customers have started asking, "what the heck are we are we supposed to do with all these leads?" This is good problem to have."
Bob Hebeisen 4:14 PM on June 11, 2012
Just used the upgraded email tool today for the first time. A-W-E-S-O-M-E! Good process for building & testing the email, good access to WYSIWYG editor *and* raw HTML, good flexibility in design (I like the template with the right sidebar), and very intuitive reporting. Well done!
Webics 6:15 AM on June 28, 2012
You honestly have no idea how much this is going to help me. Thanks you much.
Also, I love that is has the ability to existing email databases to I don't to start from scratch, other systems have over looked this.
This is like a lead management and email marketing system all in one. I am surprised it has taken this long for somebody to invent something this helpful. Thanks again :)
Jordan Krizman 1:19 PM on July 18, 2012
Excited about the new email marketing features!
Troy SCott 6:30 PM on July 18, 2012
Very excited about this update, especially the email module, it was one thing that remained a bit of a question mark on how well we are doing with it - I love me some Hubspot! Great job everyone.
Rick Noel 1:10 AM on August 10, 2012
Awesome new features with the new email software and marketing database. For us existing HubSpot users, these features will enable us to take our Internet marketing efforts to the next level.
John Macmenamin 4:02 PM on August 13, 2012
Looks great, I really like the clean new user interface.
Jay Hopper 8:09 PM on August 13, 2012
We have HubSpot and our email sections is still the old version? Is there something you have to do to upgrade?