Email Marketing Case Study: Moz vs. HubSpot

When used correctly, email marketing can increase sales, keep customers interested in your brand, and dramatically improve your overall ROI. When used wrongly, email marketing can irritate, bore or even defy people against your business.

Seeing as email is one of the best communication channels to connect with users, it makes sense that these companies have email marketing down to a science.

In this case study that takes a look at the approaches of both Moz and HubSpot to see their extensive lessons, we can learn.

The Opponents

Before we compare — let’s introduce the two names that we will be looking into:

Moz

Moz was founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in 2004 as a consulting firm and shifted to SEO software development in 2008.

It is software as a service (SaaS) company based in Seattle, Washington, U.S., that sells inbound marketing and marketing analytics software subscriptions.

HubSpot

HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006. It is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Its products and services aim to provide tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization.

Comparing the email strategies of Moz and HubSpot

Let’s take the look at their email marketing strategies:

#Welcome& Initial Marketing Emails

Welcome/Onboarding emails are one of the best ways to engage users and make your product division.

The goal of welcoming is to guide users through the setup or account creation process and educate them on how to use your product. Typically this is performed through a series of targeted emails that are triggered based on actions.

Here’s how each of the sites performed:

Moz Welcome Emails

The first was a transactional email that prompted users to verify their email address and activate their Moz account.

After verifying the email address, Moz sends second email to welcome their user and to check out their community perks.

What is The Good?

Moz emails look really good. The design has everything you want:

• Minimalistic copy
• Clear objective
• Fresh colors and a clean design

Moz does a great job of keeping these emails pointing out some of the benefits of the explorer and linked me directly to it.

HubSpot Welcome Email

 The first email was telling users to their email address and password and other available platforms.  This email encourages users to log in, and also included a calls-to-action such as downloading their app.

What is The Good?

HubSpot does a nice job of letting users know what is available through the platform. Even in the initial welcome email message, they talk about username and set a password and once you set password, you can log in anytime.

#Personalized Business Emails

Personalization doesn’t have to be limited to using your customers’ data. You also can personalize your brand. Personalization can soften the edges of big business and add a level of human connection between you and your customer.

Moz –Personalized Business Email

Moz sent their first mail from Team Moz, the other was from CEO or other team members. The email sent by a real person proved more likely to be clicked. This also showed customers’ positive reactions to a more personal business.

HubSpot-Personalized Business Email

They ran some tests in an effort to make their emails more personal and increase customer engagement. They tried sending two emails. First mail was from the company, Team HubSpot. The other was more personal. It was from someone on the marketing team.

#3 Informative Emails

The emails and newsletter of curated & informative content are more likely to be viewed as industry experts providing simple, highly valuable info resource. Sending informative emails to their customers give reasons for visiting your website, and improve traffic via your email can be remarkably easy.

Moz Email

Moz is crazy informative for an email. They try taking a topic of interest to their readers and really expanding on it. They really know their stuff. They’ve got lots of opportunities for you to convert a lot to their audience.

Moz uses their platform to curate the most interesting marketing content on the web and package it in what they like to call the “Moz Top 10”. This email has some major takeaways from the “new Google” update. While there’s the option to click through and read more, the email itself is informative.

HubSpot Email

Hubspot emails educate their audience, and over the time this helps in buying of their product or service.

The Showdown

From the above case study, these two giants go head-to-head on their email marketing game.

Overall, both have a clean design and relevant details. The objective for each email was clear; include important information out and there wasn’t any confusion in terms of what they wanted to say.

The Takeaway Lessons

• Design emails with a clear objective: If you have too many CTAs or too much content, the effort of your emails will be lost.
• Keep it simple: Don’t mess your emails with unnecessary information.
• Provide value: The more significant and personalized you can make your emails the better. This increases the probability of engagement with your emails and gives the reader a much better experience.
• Don’t give up for valuable information: Even if you are just sending a transactional confirmation message, you can still use this to achieve other marketing goals.

Conclusion

Email marketing can reap major returns if done correctly.  Email remains one of the most relied upon tactics for acquiring new customers and keeping the existing ones engaged.