HubSpot email marketing gives you one of the most direct paths from contact data to revenue in a single platform. While HubSpot is best known for its CRM, it also offers a beginner-friendly email marketing platform. With its drag-and-drop editor, built-in CRM, and smart automation options, you can get professional-looking campaigns live in hours. If you want a practical, step-by-step walkthrough of the full process, this HubSpot email marketing tutorial covers everything from account setup to analytics.
The average email marketing ROI sits between $36 and $40 for every dollar spent. HubSpot's platform gives you the tools to claim that return, but only if you set it up correctly. Here is how.
Key Takeaways
Teams using a CRM like HubSpot are 128% more likely to rate their marketing strategy as effective compared to those not using one.
You can connect your email sending domain to HubSpot to ensure your marketing emails comply with the authentication standards enforced by major inbox providers. During the connection process, you will set up three separate DNS record types: DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
Visual workflow editors enable complex automations triggered by user actions, such as form submissions or website visits, saving 10 to 20 hours weekly.
The most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%).
HubSpot's analytics include revenue attribution, showing how much closed-won revenue can be attributed to a specific marketing email.
Step 1: Choose the Right HubSpot Plan
Before you create a single email, you need to be on the right plan for your goals.
HubSpot categorizes its features into distinct Hubs, including Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Operations, and Commerce. To access email marketing tools, you need to activate the Marketing Hub.
Here is what each tier includes for email:
Free: The free plan lets you store up to 1,000 marketing contacts and send 2,000 emails per month. This works for small newsletters, but is not enough for growing campaigns. Every email includes HubSpot branding, which cannot be removed without upgrading.
HubSpot email marketing gives you one of the most direct paths from contact data to revenue in a single platform. While HubSpot is best known for its CRM, it also offers a beginner-friendly email marketing platform. With its drag-and-drop editor, built-in CRM, and smart automation options, you can get professional-looking campaigns live in hours. If you want a practical, step-by-step walkthrough of the full process, this HubSpot email marketing tutorial covers everything from account setup to analytics.
The average email marketing ROI sits between $36 and $40 for every dollar spent. HubSpot's platform gives you the tools to claim that return, but only if you set it up correctly. Here is how.
Key Takeaways
Teams using a CRM like HubSpot are 128% more likely to rate their marketing strategy as effective compared to those not using one.
You can connect your email sending domain to HubSpot to ensure your marketing emails comply with the authentication standards enforced by major inbox providers. During the connection process, you will set up three separate DNS record types: DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
Visual workflow editors enable complex automations triggered by user actions, such as form submissions or website visits, saving 10 to 20 hours weekly.
The most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%).
HubSpot's analytics include revenue attribution, showing how much closed-won revenue can be attributed to a specific marketing email.
Step 1: Choose the Right HubSpot Plan
Before you create a single email, you need to be on the right plan for your goals.
HubSpot categorizes its features into distinct Hubs, including Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Operations, and Commerce. To access email marketing tools, you need to activate the Marketing Hub.
Here is what each tier includes for email:
Free: The free plan lets you store up to 1,000 marketing contacts and send 2,000 emails per month. This works for small newsletters, but is not enough for growing campaigns. Every email includes HubSpot branding, which cannot be removed without upgrading.
Starter: Starts at $9 per seat per month (billed annually), removes branding, and adds basic email and landing page tools.
Professional: Includes 2,000 marketing contacts and unlocks full workflow automation, A/B testing, and advanced segmentation.
Enterprise: Includes 10,000 marketing contacts plus multi-touch revenue attribution, custom behavioral events, and up to 500 custom reports.
For any business serious about content marketing and conversion rate optimization, the Professional plan is the minimum worth considering. The A/B testing, advanced automation, and analytics tools are what drive real marketing ROI.
Step 2: Set Up Your Account and Authenticate Your Domain
Once you sign up, you land in the main dashboard. From here, you primarily use three sections: Marketing, where you create emails, forms, landing pages, and automations; Contacts, to view and segment subscribers in the CRM; and Settings, where you configure domain authentication, compliance, and branding.
Domain authentication is the most critical technical step in this HubSpot email marketing tutorial. Skip it, and your emails risk going to spam regardless of how good the content is.
To ensure your marketing emails comply with the authentication standards enforced by major inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail, connect your email sending domain to HubSpot. The domain connection process involves setting up three separate DNS record types: DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo require all three for bulk senders.
Here is how to complete this in HubSpot:
Go to Settings > Website > Domains & URLs > Email Sending Domains
Click Connect an email sending domain and enter your sending address
Add two CNAME records for DKIM authentication, and create a TXT record for SPF and DMARC respectively
If you have an existing SPF record, add HubSpot to that record rather than creating a new one
Return to HubSpot and verify. The process sometimes completes immediately, but may take up to an hour to authenticate.
Most inbox service providers prefer emails authenticated by DKIM. Emails sent without DKIM authentication are more likely to bounce, go to quarantine, or be categorized as spam. Quarantined emails appear as delivered in HubSpot, but are not visible to most recipients.
Step 3: Build and Segment Your Contact Lists
Segmentation is one of the most important steps in an effective email marketing strategy. You want to send the right information to the right people at the right time.
In HubSpot, you build contact lists under Contacts > Lists. You can create two types:
Active lists: Update automatically based on contact properties or behavior
Static lists: Fixed groups you define manually or via import
When you group your contacts into smaller buckets based on similar interests or goals, you can more easily tailor your message to meet their needs. Think about ways you can organize your contacts to help you reach the goal of your email campaign.
Common segmentation criteria in HubSpot include:
Lifecycle stage (lead, MQL, customer)
Last email engagement date
Form submissions or page views
Industry, company size, or job role
Purchase history or product interest
If the existing properties in HubSpot do not cover all the data points you need, you can create custom properties to meet your unique business needs.
Step 4: Create Your Email in the Drag-and-Drop Editor
Navigate to Marketing > Email > Create Email. HubSpot gives you three starting options:
Regular: A standard broadcast email sent to a list
Automated: Triggered by a workflow action
Blog/RSS: Sends when new content publishes
With HubSpot's email marketing tool, you can draft professional-looking campaigns that display well across any device. You do not need designers or IT. HubSpot Marketplace offers multiple goal-based email templates that are proven to convert.
Key elements to configure in the editor
From name and address. Use a concise, familiar from name that your recipients will recognize. Avoid generic aliases like noreply@.
Subject line. Use clear, actionable, enticing language that is personalized and aligned with the body of the email. Check out our guide to Email Subject Line Best Practices That Boost Open Rates by 27% before you finalize this.
Personalization tokens. HubSpot contact records automatically provide subscriber lifecycle stage, membership type, and other relevant information to help you craft the most suitable subject lines, content, and calls-to-action.
Mobile optimization. Nearly 50% of email marketers say 40 to 60% of their email engagement comes from mobile devices. Preview your email in both desktop and mobile views before sending.
Preview text. This short snippet appears in the inbox preview alongside your subject line. Treat it as a second subject line.
Step 5: Set Up Automation Workflows
This is where HubSpot's real power shows. Automated emails consistently outperform one-off broadcasts because they reach subscribers at relevant moments.
With HubSpot's email marketing automation, you can create personalized email sequences triggered by user actions such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a resource. Use drag-and-drop tools to design professional emails without coding skills, and leverage workflows to nurture leads through the buyer's journey automatically.
To build a workflow, go to Automation > Workflows > Create workflow. Choose a trigger, such as:
Email engagement (opened, clicked, or did not open)
Workflows in HubSpot let you set up conditions and actions for different customer journey stages. For example, if a lead signs up for a webinar, HubSpot can automatically trigger follow-up emails based on their engagement. Workflows help you engage prospects at various touchpoints, nurturing them until they are ready to convert.
The most valuable automated sequences to build first:
Welcome series (triggered on first form submission or list opt-in)
Lead nurture sequence (based on content downloads)
Re-engagement campaign (targeting contacts inactive for 90 or more days)
Post-purchase follow-up (for e-commerce or SaaS)
For welcome email best practices specifically, read our article on Welcome Email Sequence Best Practices: 7 Proven Strategies.
Step 6: A/B Test Before You Scale
Optimize your email campaigns with A/B testing. Test emails to find the subject lines that receive the most opens and the content and calls-to-action that get you better engagement rates and higher sales.
HubSpot's A/B testing (available from Starter upward) lets you split-test:
Subject lines
Preview text
From names
Email body content or layout
CTA button copy or placement
Send time
Testing your emails leads to higher ROI. You can see up to a 28% higher return when you apply testing to your email program.
Run each test with a statistically meaningful sample size. HubSpot lets you define what percentage of your list receives each variant and how long to wait before declaring a winner.
Step 7: Analyze Performance and Iterate
After sending your email, HubSpot makes it easy to monitor performance.
Navigate to Marketing > Email, click any sent email, and select the Performance tab. You will see:
An AI-generated summary of the email, including benchmark performance comparisons and recommendations. The Insights tab shows comparative performance of this email against others in your account or benchmarks.
Key metrics to track:
Open rate: The average email open rate across industries is 42.35% as of 2025, though Apple Mail Privacy Protection has inflated this figure.
Click-through rate (CTR): The average email CTR across industries is 2.5%.
Click-to-open rate (CTOR): CTOR tells you what percentage of people who opened an email actually clicked something. It is the truest measure of content quality, with an industry average of 5.3%.
Bounce rate: Keep your bounce rate under 2% to maintain sender reputation.
Revenue attribution: This shows how much closed-won revenue can be attributed to a specific marketing email.
Review key engagement metrics including number of emails sent, open rate, click rate, click-through rate, and reply rate. Engagement data is also compared against the same data from the prior time period.
Track trends across campaigns using the Analyze tab for account-wide data. For more on which metrics matter most and why, read our in-depth piece on Email Marketing Analytics Best Practices.
HubSpot Email Marketing Best Practices
Before sending any campaign, run through this checklist:
Confirm all contacts have opted in before sending
Authenticate your domain (DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all verified)
Preview on mobile and desktop
Test all links and CTA buttons
Review personalization tokens for fallback values
Check plain-text version renders correctly
Schedule at the right time for your audience
Based on Mailmodo's State of Email 2024 findings, the best day to send emails is Tuesday. According to GetResponse's email benchmarks report, the best time to send emails is before your audience wakes up (4 to 6 am) or later in the afternoon (5 to 7 pm).
Before you send emails to a contact, make sure the contact has expressed interest in receiving emails from you. This ensures the best experience for your subscribers and helps you maintain high email deliverability.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is HubSpot email marketing free?
With HubSpot Marketing Free you can send 2,000 emails per calendar month. As you increase your subscription level, that amount increases based on your contact tier. The free plan is a useful starting point, but most growth-focused teams will hit its limits quickly. Advanced automation, A/B testing, and custom reporting require a paid plan.
What is the difference between a regular email and an automated email in HubSpot?
A regular email is a one-time broadcast sent to a list at a scheduled time. An automated email is part of HubSpot's Email Marketing Automation feature, which allows businesses to create, schedule, and manage email campaigns triggered by contact behavior or data changes. Automated emails are more targeted and typically deliver higher engagement because they reach contacts at the right moment.
How do I improve email deliverability in HubSpot?
Connect your email sending domain to HubSpot and set up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records in your DNS provider. Beyond authentication, keep your bounce rate below 2%, suppress unengaged contacts, and send only to opted-in subscribers. If your emails are getting stuck in spam filters, HubSpot's knowledge base provides a guide on how to improve email deliverability.
Does HubSpot support list segmentation and dynamic content?
Yes. One of the most important advantages of HubSpot automation is the ability to personalize emails for large audiences. Using CRM data, you can dynamically insert contact information, send personalized offers, and tailor content based on user preferences and behavior. Active lists update in real time as contacts meet or leave your defined criteria, so your segments always stay current.
How does HubSpot track email revenue attribution?
Organizations with connected CRM and marketing systems have a clearer view of how email contributes to revenue. HubSpot's email marketing tools are designed with native CRM integration that helps teams understand performance. Revenue attribution in HubSpot links closed-won deals back to the specific emails that influenced those contacts, giving you a clear picture of which campaigns are actually driving business outcomes.
Starter: Starts at $9 per seat per month (billed annually), removes branding, and adds basic email and landing page tools.
Professional: Includes 2,000 marketing contacts and unlocks full workflow automation, A/B testing, and advanced segmentation.
Enterprise: Includes 10,000 marketing contacts plus multi-touch revenue attribution, custom behavioral events, and up to 500 custom reports.
For any business serious about content marketing and conversion rate optimization, the Professional plan is the minimum worth considering. The A/B testing, advanced automation, and analytics tools are what drive real marketing ROI.
Step 2: Set Up Your Account and Authenticate Your Domain
Once you sign up, you land in the main dashboard. From here, you primarily use three sections: Marketing, where you create emails, forms, landing pages, and automations; Contacts, to view and segment subscribers in the CRM; and Settings, where you configure domain authentication, compliance, and branding.
Domain authentication is the most critical technical step in this HubSpot email marketing tutorial. Skip it, and your emails risk going to spam regardless of how good the content is.
To ensure your marketing emails comply with the authentication standards enforced by major inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail, connect your email sending domain to HubSpot. The domain connection process involves setting up three separate DNS record types: DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo require all three for bulk senders.
Here is how to complete this in HubSpot:
Go to Settings > Website > Domains & URLs > Email Sending Domains
Click Connect an email sending domain and enter your sending address
Add two CNAME records for DKIM authentication, and create a TXT record for SPF and DMARC respectively
If you have an existing SPF record, add HubSpot to that record rather than creating a new one
Return to HubSpot and verify. The process sometimes completes immediately, but may take up to an hour to authenticate.
Most inbox service providers prefer emails authenticated by DKIM. Emails sent without DKIM authentication are more likely to bounce, go to quarantine, or be categorized as spam. Quarantined emails appear as delivered in HubSpot, but are not visible to most recipients.
Step 3: Build and Segment Your Contact Lists
Segmentation is one of the most important steps in an effective email marketing strategy. You want to send the right information to the right people at the right time.
In HubSpot, you build contact lists under Contacts > Lists. You can create two types:
Active lists: Update automatically based on contact properties or behavior
Static lists: Fixed groups you define manually or via import
When you group your contacts into smaller buckets based on similar interests or goals, you can more easily tailor your message to meet their needs. Think about ways you can organize your contacts to help you reach the goal of your email campaign.
Common segmentation criteria in HubSpot include:
Lifecycle stage (lead, MQL, customer)
Last email engagement date
Form submissions or page views
Industry, company size, or job role
Purchase history or product interest
If the existing properties in HubSpot do not cover all the data points you need, you can create custom properties to meet your unique business needs.
Step 4: Create Your Email in the Drag-and-Drop Editor
Navigate to Marketing > Email > Create Email. HubSpot gives you three starting options:
Regular: A standard broadcast email sent to a list
Automated: Triggered by a workflow action
Blog/RSS: Sends when new content publishes
With HubSpot's email marketing tool, you can draft professional-looking campaigns that display well across any device. You do not need designers or IT. HubSpot Marketplace offers multiple goal-based email templates that are proven to convert.
Key elements to configure in the editor
From name and address. Use a concise, familiar from name that your recipients will recognize. Avoid generic aliases like noreply@.
Subject line. Use clear, actionable, enticing language that is personalized and aligned with the body of the email. Check out our guide to Email Subject Line Best Practices That Boost Open Rates by 27% before you finalize this.
Personalization tokens. HubSpot contact records automatically provide subscriber lifecycle stage, membership type, and other relevant information to help you craft the most suitable subject lines, content, and calls-to-action.
Mobile optimization. Nearly 50% of email marketers say 40 to 60% of their email engagement comes from mobile devices. Preview your email in both desktop and mobile views before sending.
Preview text. This short snippet appears in the inbox preview alongside your subject line. Treat it as a second subject line.
Step 5: Set Up Automation Workflows
This is where HubSpot's real power shows. Automated emails consistently outperform one-off broadcasts because they reach subscribers at relevant moments.
With HubSpot's email marketing automation, you can create personalized email sequences triggered by user actions such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a resource. Use drag-and-drop tools to design professional emails without coding skills, and leverage workflows to nurture leads through the buyer's journey automatically.
To build a workflow, go to Automation > Workflows > Create workflow. Choose a trigger, such as:
Email engagement (opened, clicked, or did not open)
Workflows in HubSpot let you set up conditions and actions for different customer journey stages. For example, if a lead signs up for a webinar, HubSpot can automatically trigger follow-up emails based on their engagement. Workflows help you engage prospects at various touchpoints, nurturing them until they are ready to convert.
The most valuable automated sequences to build first:
Welcome series (triggered on first form submission or list opt-in)
Lead nurture sequence (based on content downloads)
Re-engagement campaign (targeting contacts inactive for 90 or more days)
Post-purchase follow-up (for e-commerce or SaaS)
For welcome email best practices specifically, read our article on Welcome Email Sequence Best Practices: 7 Proven Strategies.
Step 6: A/B Test Before You Scale
Optimize your email campaigns with A/B testing. Test emails to find the subject lines that receive the most opens and the content and calls-to-action that get you better engagement rates and higher sales.
HubSpot's A/B testing (available from Starter upward) lets you split-test:
Subject lines
Preview text
From names
Email body content or layout
CTA button copy or placement
Send time
Testing your emails leads to higher ROI. You can see up to a 28% higher return when you apply testing to your email program.
Run each test with a statistically meaningful sample size. HubSpot lets you define what percentage of your list receives each variant and how long to wait before declaring a winner.
Step 7: Analyze Performance and Iterate
After sending your email, HubSpot makes it easy to monitor performance.
Navigate to Marketing > Email, click any sent email, and select the Performance tab. You will see:
An AI-generated summary of the email, including benchmark performance comparisons and recommendations. The Insights tab shows comparative performance of this email against others in your account or benchmarks.
Key metrics to track:
Open rate: The average email open rate across industries is 42.35% as of 2025, though Apple Mail Privacy Protection has inflated this figure.
Click-through rate (CTR): The average email CTR across industries is 2.5%.
Click-to-open rate (CTOR): CTOR tells you what percentage of people who opened an email actually clicked something. It is the truest measure of content quality, with an industry average of 5.3%.
Bounce rate: Keep your bounce rate under 2% to maintain sender reputation.
Revenue attribution: This shows how much closed-won revenue can be attributed to a specific marketing email.
Review key engagement metrics including number of emails sent, open rate, click rate, click-through rate, and reply rate. Engagement data is also compared against the same data from the prior time period.
Track trends across campaigns using the Analyze tab for account-wide data. For more on which metrics matter most and why, read our in-depth piece on Email Marketing Analytics Best Practices.
HubSpot Email Marketing Best Practices
Before sending any campaign, run through this checklist:
Confirm all contacts have opted in before sending
Authenticate your domain (DKIM, SPF, DMARC are all verified)
Preview on mobile and desktop
Test all links and CTA buttons
Review personalization tokens for fallback values
Check plain-text version renders correctly
Schedule at the right time for your audience
Based on Mailmodo's State of Email 2024 findings, the best day to send emails is Tuesday. According to GetResponse's email benchmarks report, the best time to send emails is before your audience wakes up (4 to 6 am) or later in the afternoon (5 to 7 pm).
Before you send emails to a contact, make sure the contact has expressed interest in receiving emails from you. This ensures the best experience for your subscribers and helps you maintain high email deliverability.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is HubSpot email marketing free?
With HubSpot Marketing Free you can send 2,000 emails per calendar month. As you increase your subscription level, that amount increases based on your contact tier. The free plan is a useful starting point, but most growth-focused teams will hit its limits quickly. Advanced automation, A/B testing, and custom reporting require a paid plan.
What is the difference between a regular email and an automated email in HubSpot?
A regular email is a one-time broadcast sent to a list at a scheduled time. An automated email is part of HubSpot's Email Marketing Automation feature, which allows businesses to create, schedule, and manage email campaigns triggered by contact behavior or data changes. Automated emails are more targeted and typically deliver higher engagement because they reach contacts at the right moment.
How do I improve email deliverability in HubSpot?
Connect your email sending domain to HubSpot and set up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records in your DNS provider. Beyond authentication, keep your bounce rate below 2%, suppress unengaged contacts, and send only to opted-in subscribers. If your emails are getting stuck in spam filters, HubSpot's knowledge base provides a guide on how to improve email deliverability.
Does HubSpot support list segmentation and dynamic content?
Yes. One of the most important advantages of HubSpot automation is the ability to personalize emails for large audiences. Using CRM data, you can dynamically insert contact information, send personalized offers, and tailor content based on user preferences and behavior. Active lists update in real time as contacts meet or leave your defined criteria, so your segments always stay current.
How does HubSpot track email revenue attribution?
Organizations with connected CRM and marketing systems have a clearer view of how email contributes to revenue. HubSpot's email marketing tools are designed with native CRM integration that helps teams understand performance. Revenue attribution in HubSpot links closed-won deals back to the specific emails that influenced those contacts, giving you a clear picture of which campaigns are actually driving business outcomes.
