Our first meeting to discuss our task for the week featured long unnecessary breaks in the conversation due to our little knowledge on the subject of creating an email marketing campaign most especially the content creation part. Inspiration was not coming from anywhere and I am like what pushed me to Side Hustle Bootcamp, I should just have stayed where I was before. Don't say you heard it from here, but see if a person isn't ready to get his hands dirty, he shouldn't bother to register for the internship talk-less of nearing the Boot camp program. But in the midst of the stress and all the tasks, it would be worth it. Meanwhile, I haven't even told you our task for the week. Our task for the week was to "Using Hubspot, set up an email marketing campaign for customers". Enter cruise mode and follow me on how we went about our tasks this week, you'll surely learn one or two things as it was enlightening for us too.

Everyone using the Internet actively surely has an E-mail address as it is used for various purposes on the web and one of the features is to receive and send messages over the web. The use of this email for businesses serves as means to interact with their customers and potential customers which is referred to as Email marketing. An email marketing campaign is a sequence of marketing efforts that contacts multiple recipients at once. Email marketing makes communication with clients easier and more effective. It is a powerful medium between a company and its audience. Email campaigns are designed to reach out to subscribers at the best time and provide valuable content and relevant offers. Using email campaigns allows to build deep and trusting relationships with customers, they help not only to increase sales but build your brand image, convert and keep customers engaged. This knowledge shared on the Email marketing what was the result of our research process in understanding the Email marketing campaign and how it applies to customers. After conquering that feat, what was next thing in line was our customers. Who will be our customers?

Deliberations in-house concerning that didn't take time because of it's we understood we needed to come to a conclusion swiftly on it. We agreed and decided to go with the Airline industry and below is our company details.

• Name: SH Airways
• HQ: Ibadan, Nigeria.
• Founder: Garfield Drey
• Destinations: 70
• Tagline: A better way to fly.

With that sorted out, we moved to the main agenda to setting up the Email marketing campaign using HubSpot. HubSpot is an American developer and marketer of software products, a cloud-based CRM tool designed to help align sales and marketing teams, foster sales enablement, boost return of investment (ROI) and optimize your inbound marketing strategy to generate more, qualified leads and customer service.

Hubspot CRM has the following features:

• A customizable deals dashboard to view your entire sales pipeline.
• Email tracking, meeting scheduling, live chat, and prospect tracking.
• Gmail & outlook integration and email templates to help you easily email and communicate with leads.
• Email notifications, company insights, and pipeline management features that will help you stay on top of all of your leads.
• Automated logging and updating of customer deals and sales activities.
• A built-in activity stream with notifications delivered immediately after a lead opens an email, clicks on a link, or downloads an important document.
• Storage of up to 1 million contact and company records.
• The ability to record sales calls, send emails, schedule tasks, and assign tasks all within the HubSpot CRM.
• Automatic publication of emails, recorded calls, and sales notes to a contact’s unique timeline, to simplify the task of reviving cold leads.

Hubspot CRM has a website and mobile app to allow ease of use for users.

HubSpot CRM website

Using HubSpot CRM definitely would require expertise based how highly developed it is to be used for many business processes. We got on the learning field again and learnt on operating it and applying it to our very own project. After learning about it, we would require an account to setup the Email marketing campaign. When we opened our account the first time, we didn't get verified because our first pose was trying to act like a real airline. Since we couldn't prove our company presence, we were not able to go get verified hence basic functionality of using HubSpot CRM was denied us. So we reopened the account and explained how we were on an Bootcamp project with in-depth explanations and how we were trying to simulate a real company. Guess what, we then got verified and we're now able to move on with our project. Next thing for us was to create a landing page for subscription to SH Airways mailing list. We were able to create that using the HubSpot CRM for designing landing pages for Email based on an already existing template.

SH Airways E-mail Subscription landing page

Check out our Landing page here.

Having done with the landing page, the next was the contents to be sent out to our customers as at when due using the automation and the scheduling feature on Hubspot CRM. Our Email content list was created based on the various interactions customer can have with our company and putting in mind on keeping customer relationships great.

Here is our Email content list:

• Welcome E-mail for new subscribers.
• About SH Airways – an overview of the company.
• Book your next flight with us (promotional).
• Payment confirmation.
• Flight details.
• Thank you for flying with us (post flight).
• Quit dreaming, fly now (promotional).
• Birthday wishes and discount.
• Valentine love message.
• Holiday season discount.
• Apology for Delay in flight at Airport.
• Flight reschedule email by Airline.
• Flight cancellation email by Airline.

Email list on Hubspot CRM

After this, the "welcome Email for new subscribers" message was sent out to those that subscribed to the mailing list through the landing page. This is made easy by HubSpot on how it automatically stores contacts and create a contact list for those who subscribed using the landing page.

Creation process of Welcome message on HubSpot CRM

After sending out the mails we have the following screenshots from mailbox of one of the recipients.

With all these done, we were able to finish the task for the week.

Wow. What a week, this week was not for the weak, this week got us working actively as a team. Do well to like and comment. Thank you.