Why the Best HubSpot Emails Make People Feel Something First

Read the first line of the last four marketing emails you sent. If each one opens with what your product does, it is competing with a feature list your reader has already skimmed this week. If it opens with something the reader recognises from their own week, it is competing with nothing.

That is the useful part of emotional marketing for a B2B team, and it is a claim about order. Feeling first, evidence second. People respond to their feelings first and their logic second, which does not make the logic optional. It means the spec sheet gets read by someone who has already decided to care.

The rewrite that does most of the work

Take the opening line of your next lifecycle email and replace it with a sentence a customer actually said on a sales call.

Use the exact sentence. "We were paying for two systems that both thought they owned the contact." "I could not tell the board where the pipeline number came from." A real one, in their words, including the parts that are not flattering to you.

Then follow it with the smallest specific thing you know: the property that was wrong, the report that took a fortnight, the number of duplicate records. Recognition, then detail. That order is the whole method, and it has a useful side effect, which is that you cannot write it without having listened. It fails loudly when you have not.

Emotionally charged moments are also the ones people tend to hold on to, which is why a recognisable opener is still doing something a week later, once the feature list has gone.

Where this goes wrong

We have written the version that reaches for feeling and forgets the specifics. It reads like a charity appeal about a data migration: big words, soft focus, not one sentence a reader could disagree with.

The test is simple. If a competitor could send the same email with their name swapped in, there is no feeling in it, only weather.

The four emotions, and the B2B version of each

The consumer campaigns everyone cites are still useful, as long as you translate them. The four that tend to get named as the core set are happy, sad, scared and angry. Each one has a version that fits a lifecycle email, and a version that gets you into trouble.

Happy: being named

Coca-Cola's Share A Coke put people's first names on the packaging. Coca-Cola reported site traffic up 870 per cent, and 76,000 virtual cans shared online within weeks of release.

What transfers is being named. Cheerfulness has nothing to do with it. The HubSpot version is duller and more effective: write to the job rather than the segment. A revenue operations manager at a 90 person business does not think of herself as a decision maker. Getting a first name into the greeting is trivial. Knowing which Lifecycle stage the person is genuinely in is what gets you the sentence.

Sad: the problem, told straight

Empathy is the emotion B2B teams already have the material for and never use. Your support inbox and your call recordings are full of people describing a bad week.

A case study that opens on the bad week, in the customer's own words, gets read further than one that opens on the implementation. The rest of it can be as dry as you like once the reader has recognised themselves in the first paragraph.

Angry: name the thing everyone puts up with

Always ran #LikeAGirl in 2014, challenging what doing something "like a girl" was supposed to mean. It picked up more than 60 million views on YouTube and an Emmy, and people are still bringing it up.

The B2B version is a refusal to be polite about a specific waste: the double data entry, the forecast nobody believes, the report three people rebuild by hand every month. Say the thing your reader complains about in private and you have their attention for the rest of the email.

Scared: the one to handle carefully

WWF's Stop Climate Change Before It Changes You used mutated human figures as a warning about global warming. It works because the picture arrives before the argument does.

Fear is the easiest of the four to reach for and the easiest to overdo. It is also the one with a legal edge in Australia, so it gets its own section.

Where Australian Consumer Law draws the line

The Australian Consumer Law prohibits conduct in trade or commerce that is misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead or deceive. That covers advertising, and it covers the promotional email you send out of HubSpot. It also does not care whether a claim was made to create urgency rather than to deceive anybody.

Which puts a few familiar email moves on the wrong side of a line:

• A countdown timer on an offer that does not end, or that resets when the reader comes back.
• "Only a few places left" when the number is not a number you hold anywhere.
• A result presented as typical when it came from one customer in unusual conditions.
• Risk stated as certainty. "You are exposed" is a claim about the reader's business that you are usually in no position to make.

None of that stops you writing to fear. It means the frightening thing has to be true, and specific enough that you could show your working if somebody asked. Which is, conveniently, also what makes it persuasive.

Three changes before the next send

Write from the call

Sit with one recording and take down the sentences, not the themes. Buyer personas are still worth building, and the pain points in them are better as quotes with a date on them than as adjectives your team agreed on in a workshop.

Put the customer in the story

Brand storytelling in B2B usually turns into the company telling its own origin story, which almost nobody stays for. The story a reader does stay for is the one where they are the main character and you turn up in the second half, competent and slightly late.

Colour does less than the wheel suggests

Colour psychology, the idea that a given colour reliably produces a given feeling, gets treated as more settled than it is. Warm colours and appetite, cool colours and creativity: a fun chart, and a weak lever.

In an email, the colour decisions that change your numbers are contrast on the call to action, whether the text is legible on a phone in sunlight, and whether the template still looks like you when images are blocked. Use the wheel for a mood board. Do not build a campaign on it.

Start with one email

Pick the lifecycle email with the most sends and the least response. Replace its first line with something a customer said. Change nothing else, so you can tell what did it.

If you want the mechanics rather than the psychology, there is more on writing HubSpot lifecycle emails that actually get read.