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HubSpot Email Best Practices

This guide provides step-by-step instructions and best practices for creating, naming, QA-ing, and sending emails in HubSpot, ensuring all campaigns meet Tapp’s internal consistency, accuracy, and performance standards.

HubSpot offers two main email types—Automated and Regular—each serving a unique purpose in your marketing workflows:
  • Automated Emails are triggered by specific actions or workflows and are ideal for nurturing leads, sending follow-ups, or delivering personalized content based on contact behavior.
  • Regular Emails are manually sent one-time campaigns, best suited for newsletters, announcements, or broad communications.
In addition to explaining when and how to use each email type, this guide outlines the naming conventions, sending procedures, and quality assurance (QA) checklist that every Tapp email must follow. It covers everything from selecting the correct send and exclusion lists, to verifying links, alt text, grammar, and formatting.
 
By following these standards, you’ll help maintain a consistent, professional brand experience across all communications and ensure high deliverability, engagement, and compliance with internal processes.
 

HubSpot Email types

Automated:Triggered by actions in workflows: Sent automatically when a contact meets certain criteria (e.g., fills out a form, downloads an eBook, joins a workflow).
  • Personalized journey: Tailored to a customer’s behavior and lifecycle stage.
  • Part of workflows: Usually built into HubSpot Workflows for nurturing, onboarding, or follow-ups.
  • Best for: Lead nurturing, drip campaigns, re-engagement sequences, or post-event follow-up.
Regular: This is a manual send: You create the email and send it to a list of recipients all at once.
  • One-off campaigns: Used for newsletters, announcements, or promotions.
  • Scheduling: You can schedule a send time, but it will still go to everyone on the list at that set time.
  • Best for: Broad communication (e.g., “Monthly Newsletter,” “Holiday Sale Email”).

Naming Conventions

All emails must follow account naming conventions. Examples:
  • [Campaign] Subject line
  • [Campaign] 09.24 Subject Line
  • [Department] 09.24 Campaign Email 1

Sending an Email

  • Be sure when an email is created/cloned it needs to include the proper exclusion list as an Exclusion list in the "Send or Schedule Tab".
  • Ensure the proper send list (segment) is selected. 
  • Choose whether or not to send to unengaged contacts.

QA

All test sends need to be proofed, sent as a test to yourself, viewed in browser, and checked for consistency. Some items they all need to include:
  1. View in browser link
  2. Subject & preview text
  3. Exclusion list
  4. Consistent headings throughout
  5. Spelling/grammar with Grammarly Plugin 
  6. Links work/go to the desired destination
    1. For each section with an image and header, the same link should be
      1. On the image
      2. Hyperlinked in the header – change header to dark gray if blue
      3. In-line text
      4. CTA button
    2. If more than one link is used in the section, use the CTA button as the source of truth for what to use on the image and header 
  7. Images have human readable alt text
    1. If there are words in the image, all of the words should be in the alt text
    2. If there are no words in the image, the alt text should be either the same as the heading text for that section, or a description of the image
  8. Apostrophes and Quotations are straight, not curly 
  9. Remove symbols: 
    1. % (percent), & (and) and check for double spaces
  10. Personalization tokens:
    1. First name should be Type=Contact, First Name
  11. Dates
    1. Check that dates in email match those listed on events pages
    2. Date standard: 10 a.m. PT or 10 a.m. Pacific time 
  12. Lowercased words in headers:
    1. With, For, But, As, A, From, Into, To, Of
  13. Should use Em dash, not en dash when breaking up a sentence.
    1. Example - Wrong: For now - go here - then go here.
    2. Example - Correct: For now — go here — then go here.
  14. Footer
    1. Ensure copyright year is correct
  15. Campaigns
    1. Ensure the correct campaign is selected in the SETUP tab in the HubSpot email builder