HubSpot Emails Did You Know You Can... A Nerdy Email Conversation

Email can feel basic. Until you try to migrate from another platform, rebuild what you used to do, and suddenly you are wrestling with deliverability, subscription confusion, and messages that never land the way you expected.

In this episode of HubHeroes, we go full nerd in the best way. We break down the different kinds of email inside HubSpot, what people get wrong right out of the gate, and a handful of features that can seriously level up how you communicate. This one is for any HubSpot user who wants to stop guessing and start building with confidence, especially if you are responsible for how your organization sends email.

What You Will Learn

1. Why “email” in HubSpot is not one thing, and why that misunderstanding creates chaos fast.
2. How to think beyond broadcast and build email like a relationship, not a megaphone.
3. What transactional email is really for, and why misuse can get you into trouble.
4. How to pull data from other objects into emails, and why that skill unlocks so much.
5. Why sequences still matter, even when you are focused on marketing emails and automation.
6. How programmable emails and smart subscription visibility can create real personalization at scale.

The Big Moments

One of the biggest early mistakes is assuming every email in HubSpot works the same way. It does not.

The conversation highlights a key distinction between marketing emails, one-to-one emails, and transactional emails. They all live under the umbrella of “email,” but they behave differently, support different use cases, and come with different rules. Once you accept that, your strategy gets cleaner fast.

What it means for you: stop trying to rebuild your old platform inside HubSpot. Start learning how HubSpot expects email to work, then build a system that fits.

Transactional Email And The “Do Not Abuse This” Line

Max brings up something a lot of folks feel in their bones. Transactional email can be expensive, especially when you only need a narrow use case. The episode references HubSpot’s transactional email add-on pricing at six hundred dollars per month, and talks through what you actually get for that cost.

More importantly, the team clarifies what transactional email is for. Think receipts, account updates, legal notices, and system alerts. Not marketing. Not “we have a new thing you should buy.” Transactional email is built for critical messages, including messages that still need to arrive even if someone has unsubscribed from marketing emails.

What it means for you: Use transactional email with care. If you treat every email like a loophole to bypass preferences, you will burn trust fast.

Custom Tokens And The “Other Objects” Breakthrough

This is one of the most practical teaching moments in the whole episode.

Max walks through why people get stuck when they try to use personalization that is not a contact property. The big idea is this: if you want an email to include data from another object, the email usually needs to be sent from a workflow that is based on that object. That is how HubSpot knows which record to pull data from when it fills in the tokens.

This also connects to custom email tokens in workflows, which are available in Marketing Hub Enterprise. Instead of relying only on standard personalization tokens, you can use custom variables and define where the data comes from while building the workflow.

What it means for you: once you can confidently send emails that include data from deals, custom objects, and other records, you start building more powerful systems. You stop duct taping workarounds.

Programmable Emails And Smarter Subscription Experiences

George shares a feature he only had to build for the first time recently: programmable emails powered by a HubDB Database and a programmable email module. The idea is wild in the best way.

A single email can change the header image, testimonial, main text, and call to action based on values stored in a Hub database table and triggered by a property. That is like smart content with extra horsepower. The team even teases using a “state” property to create a more geographic version of this kind of personalization.

Then the conversation shifts into subscription types. George calls out a common mistake: people write subscription descriptions for internal teams, not for humans. The preference center should make someone want to stay subscribed.

They also discuss custom visibility rules for subscription types, which can show or hide options based on segments. And they touch on Brands, which help separate preference centers, so unsubscribing from one brand does not automatically unsubscribe someone from everything.

What it means for you: personalization is not just tokens. It is also how you structure choices, preferences, and visibility so people feel respected.

Practical Next Steps

1. Audit your current HubSpot emails and label each one as marketing, one-to-one, or transactional. Fix anything that is in the wrong category.

2. Pick one email you currently send as a broadcast and rewrite it to invite a reply and create a two-way conversation.

3. Build a test workflow based on a non-contact object and send an automated email that includes properties from that object.

4. If you use sequences, create one single email sequence for a real, timely customer follow-up and test how it logs replies and activity.

5. Review your email subscription types and rewrite the descriptions so they sound like value a human would choose, not internal labels.

6. If your business needs local or segmented subscriptions, explore custom visibility rules so people only see what is relevant to them.

7. Open product updates inside HubSpot, filter by email, and spend fifteen minutes scanning what has changed. Write down one feature to test this week.

Who This Episode Is For

This episode is for HubSpot admins, marketers, sales leaders, and operations-minded humans who are responsible for email strategy and execution. It is also for anyone migrating from another email platform who keeps trying to rebuild the old system and wonders why everything feels messy. If you want clearer rules, better deliverability, and more trust-building communication, you are in the right place.

Finale Thoughts

Email is not just a feature. It is a relationship at scale. Pick one thing from this episode and go build it. Then pay attention to what changes when you stop broadcasting and start communicating. Your humans will feel it, and your results will follow.

Next step: choose one email you sent this week and redesign it to create a real two-way conversation.

TRANSCRIPT

George B. Thomas: Yeah, it is. We're gonna activate the powers. Welcome back everybody to Hub Heroes to show where we help HubSpot users just like you. Stop guessing and start building with confidence today. I'm super excited 'cause we're gonna be talking about.

Email. I know that may not sound exciting, but there's some things that I've learned along the way. Some things that Max and Chad threw into the Slack channel when I brought this up. Um, and honestly think email, but then also think today we're going full nerd in the best way, probably possible on this.

Because here's the thing, like we've, we've seen people come from. MailChimp. We've seen people come from active campaign. We've seen people try to build the same system in the system they once were. And you know, one day it's you're sending clean newsletter, the next day you're dealing with deliverability and subscription chaos and transactional confusion and.

It's just like a lot and some people aren't even getting a, a fifth or a 10th of what they could be getting out of a HubSpot. And so this, this episode, I think I'm, I'm gonna classify it, Chad and Max as a little bit of a, did you know style breakdown to HubSpot email some of the features that people might not know, might not be using, or people are just flat out.

Ignoring or misunderstand per se. And so we're just gonna kind of dig into this so hopefully we can help people make decisions, uh, or better decisions when it comes to HubSpot email, what they should and could do, uh, with all of the tools at their fingertips, which again, I believe there's probably gonna be several people.

That are listening to this and go, wait, what? You can do that. So let me, let me start this off. And whoever wants to go first can go first, but when you hear the words, oh, I'm scared what Max is gonna say. But when you hear the words HubSpot email, like what's the number one thing that you think people might get wrong?

Uh, right out the gate when, when we're talking about HubSpot email.

Max Cohen: Ah.

Chad Hohn: I

Max Cohen: I mean, get, yeah, I mean get, yeah. I mean, I, I know what my answer I think used to be,

George B. Thomas: What was, what was that?

Max Cohen: was, it was, this is not just your newsletter tool, you know what I mean? But like, I feel like newsletters are like back at the same time. But then I also think it's like those are not the same newsletters that I was ever talking about.

You know what I mean? Like, I think there's, uh. You know the newsletters that I would see people send out, which was all they were ever doing with the tool. Uh, was like the newsletters that were like, oh, we, we we're gonna be at this trade show and oh, we, uh, hired our new, we hired a new accountant to say hi to Jake.

And like, just like the stupidest you, uh, you know, a, b, C corporation acquires X, Y, Z. It's like no one, no one cares, um, at all. Right? Um, you know, and here's, uh, if there's too long and too dense, and obviously no one's gonna read 'em. Um, but now I think, you know, people are doing the whole newsletter thing, but the, but the thing is, it's like, I think you can get away with doing a newsletter if it's like content.

Like if it, if the newsletter is the content, not like the newsletter is like. Literally just news from your company. Right. Um, so I think those are like very different things and I wouldn't want to kind of confuse 'em, but, um, yeah. I mean, today, like, I don't know how many people are still like just buying HubSpot just to send a freaking email newsletter, but, you know, back in the day, that's, that's unfortunately all I ever saw, which is really annoying.

George B. Thomas: what, what's your thought on like what people HubSpot email are kind of get wrong?

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think not all emails are created equal in HubSpot. Funny enough, an email for a marketing email is not the same as a one-to-one email, which is considered a sales email, which is not the same as a transactional email. And there is a distinction between the different things and their use cases.

But technically under the hood, they're all quote unquote emails in the email object.

Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.

Chad Hohn: Um, and funny enough. Did you know? Did you know that we have email based workflows now, which is kind of cool for one-to-one emails,

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. But be careful because I don't want people to get confused. It's not like you can fire a workflow or do like, it's not sequences reimagined. It's like once a one-to-one email is in the system, then you can like trigger some things to happen based on that one-to-one email being sent. Because the title of that update is confusing as all get out.

Product team 'cause, 'cause immediately everybody's like dancing in the street and they're like. Popping bottles, and then they're like, oh, oh wait. That's not what I thought it was. But, but still, it's it,

Chad Hohn: It doesn't give you the ability to send one-to-one emails. It does give you the ability to trigger on them though, which can be really advantageous depending on what

George B. Thomas: without a doubt. Super powerful. I'm, I'm not trying to. Neuter the other word that I don't want to say on the show.

Damn. I'm not trying to downplay the, the, the power of the, the, the update. I'm just saying don't get confused. Where like all of a sudden you run from the show and you go and like, I'm gonna send one-to-one emails via workflow. No, no. But you can trigger some cool stuff after the fact.

Max Cohen: Can I, can I ask something? You know what really like, grinds my gears so much is, uh, how expensive transactional email is

George B. Thomas: Oh,

Max Cohen: comparatively, is that No, but, but also like, like I, I hate because what, it's like $600 a month or

George B. Thomas: uh, let me let, while, while you're talking

Chad Hohn: could be wrong.

Max Cohen: Oh, no, no, no. I'm pretty

George B. Thomas: let me, let me look.

Max Cohen: a month.

Chad Hohn: Really.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I could be wrong. I could be spreading some HubSpot misinformation here, but I'm almost a hundred percent sure it's

George B. Thomas: Let me see. Let me see. I'll look.

Max Cohen: what, like, what I

George B. Thomas: Oh my

Max Cohen: is like, what is that? Yeah.

George B. Thomas: Uh, so, so HubSpot, well,

Max Cohen: Is that

George B. Thomas: the first Google search that I did, um, HubSpot transactional email, add-on pricing overview. Uh, transactional email add-on $600 a month. Marketing Hub Pro.

Max Cohen: Is that from their site?

George B. Thomas: Of course I'm on HubSpot, bro. Yes. Yeah, I'm on the, I'm on blog.hubspot.com/marketing/hubspot-transactional-email.

I should have breathed before I tried to read this dash pricing. Um, but

Max Cohen: Yeah, read the entire file extension and all the UUID and

George B. Thomas: yeah, yeah,

Max Cohen: parameters

Chad Hohn: get the query prams?

Max Cohen: Yeah.

George B. Thomas: no, there's no query

Chad Hohn: there

Max Cohen: Hey, George. Go ahead, George. Go ahead

George B. Thomas: all right. Hang on, hang on. Hang.

Max Cohen: the end please. I'm need that.

George B. Thomas: lemme take a big breath.

Chad Hohn: G lid please?

George B. Thomas: Okay. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. For that minimum amount of $600 a month, uh, it's unlimited transactional sends.

It's also dedicated ip. Okay, and it's SMTP slash API integration. Um, there is also an additional dedicated ips you have to contact sales for that anyway, so why does that, why does the cost grind? Your gears though? Max.

Max Cohen: Because, well, right now it's like a selfish thing. Um, you know, just because,

George B. Thomas: Max wants to send transactional emails.

Max Cohen: Being in the event, being in the event space, we have plenty of people that want to use HubSpot to send like transactional emails for like registrations and stuff like that. And like we're eventually, we're building our own email infrastructure to be able to do all that stuff.

But like, you know, it just sucks to like go and be like, yeah, you know, you can send, uh, emails to people through HubSpot, but if they've unsubscribed from you, they're not gonna get those emails. And then it's like, or they're like, well, what can we do to combat? I'm like, you can get transactional email. And I'm like, it's.

More expensive than our product, but like you get, you know what I mean? It's just like, it's really awkward and like, I just remember how awkward it was like in the sales process too. Like, you know, you got a couple people that weren't even gonna really send that many transactional emails and then look at a $600 a month.

But, you know, I think it's more just me complaining, like, I'm not sure, like, what is the average cost? Like what's, what's the average monthly cost of a transactional email?

George B. Thomas: Well, and here's my question, why you're doing that Max like. Should, should an event email be transactional? Like I think there's gonna be listeners who are listening to this and they're gonna be like, well, what should be transactional and what shouldn't be transactional? Because if I know anything about humans, it's that if they could send and know that it never could not go, like they might send every email as a transactional email.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Um, let's

Chad Hohn: Isn't there some sort of rules though, when you actually purchase it, that they outline what you can and can't use transactional

George B. Thomas: There might be. There might be,

Max Cohen: Oh yeah, there absolutely is there. Yeah, there's, there's certain rules for it. I mean, the, the, the easiest way you can think of, like for transactional emails, like when, when something can qualify as transactional is like when you're sending something that's like a payment receipt or an account update or like legal, uh, legal notices or something like that, right?

So it's like you change your terms of service and you have to notify people in your database. That's a transactional email. Uh, it can't be anything that has like marketing in it. Right, because you're like, what? People may not know this, but what transactional emails basically allow you to do in HubSpot in a very, very base sense is email people, even if they've unsubscribed from your mailing list.

Right? Uh, and the, the reason behind that is like, well, even if someone's unsubscribed from your marketing, if they were to buy

George B. Thomas: They need billing.

Max Cohen: Like, you've gotta be able to

George B. Thomas: gotta get paid.

Max Cohen: what I mean? Like Exactly. And so like HubSpot will let you do that, right? Um, you know, and what'll happen is when you have transactional email and you go and like select a type of email that you're sending or setting up for an automation.

There is an option to select it as transactional instead of one of your subscription types. Right. And that will go to people regardless if they've unsubscribed from you or not. Right. Um, you know, so that's a transactional email and there's a couple of different ways to do it. Um, but there's three methods right there is.

It's like sending us a traditional email, like one-to-one. So that's good for like legal notices, right? Where it's like, oh, we're sending out a update to our privacy policy. Right. You'd basically just set up a one-to-one, like a, a a a, what they call 'em regular emails now, right? Where you're just sending it to a list and you would just choose transactional as the email, uh, subscription

George B. Thomas: love those privacy, uh,

Max Cohen: Then.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Max Cohen: Yep. Then there's, um, the. Automated ones where you send 'em through a workflow, which is like the same thing. Um, there's single send API, that's the second one, right? So like sending 'em through a through a workflow is like almost the same as sending to a list, right? It's no different. You're just choosing the type.

So there's single send API, single send API is pretty sweet. Um, what'll happen there is, um, you set the email up and you could put custom tokens in it, right? And basically what happens is you have some other outside system. Triggers a request to HubSpot to be able to send that email. Right. Um, and the cool thing about having those custom tokens in there that comes along with whatever, you know, payload you're hitting the API with to say, Hey, here's some values for this custom token in the email.

Right? And that, uh, will send the email, but also update those tokens with those, uh, custom things you wanted to send

Chad Hohn: values, they're values you don't have to have inside of HubSpot, which is super advantageous depending on what you're trying to do.

Max Cohen: And that often goes hand in hand with, uh, information that would only be in a transactional email, right? Uh, such as like a sensitive account number or payment information, like whatever it may be. Right? Um, oftentimes you'll see people like send over information from like a receipt that, and in like an HTML format or something like that, and, and send it that way when it's stuff you don't wanna store in your HubSpot database.

That's a really good method to do that. Uh, and then the other one is oh S-M-T-P-A-P-I, right? Or basically. The emails are sent from another system, but they're kind of like logged into HubSpot. So you can see it, I can't remember the exact like, use case for that. Like if you're already sending it through some other infrastructure, but you just wanna see it as if it was sent,

Chad Hohn: Yeah, it's almost like, it's almost like, uh, hitting the BCC address. But

Max Cohen: like compliance, it's like a compliance, it's like compliance copy, but inside of HubSpot instead of out into like some other system. Right.

George B. Thomas: You know what I

Max Cohen: yeah, if you weren't away of that.

George B. Thomas: updates is compliance processes. I

Max Cohen: Oh yes. Compliance stuff is really cool.

George B. Thomas: Oh, oh,

Max Cohen: there's one big thing to also like mention to people that I think this is like a lesser known thing, is that single send API stuff has been relegated to just transactional emails for a very, very long time. But there is now just a regular marketing email single send API.

So like you can, I'm pretty sure you can do single send API. On regular marketing emails without transactional email. Right. Don't you just have to have enterprise, Chad?

Chad Hohn: Yeah.

Max Cohen: Yeah. So that's

George B. Thomas: okay. So Chad, I have two questions for you, but before I do that, um, I did scroll down a little bit further on the blog that I said I was on to like, find out that, whoa, 600 bucks a month, which is. You know, that might be like, uh, under somebody's couch cushion for somebody listening. But, um, it says, making the right choice.

Choose transactional email. Add-on. If you send automated emails triggered by customer transactions, you need guaranteed deliverability of critical business communications. You want to protect your marketing IP reputation. You send high volumes of order confirmations, account alerts, or system notifications.

You require API integration for external system triggers, or you need unlimited sending without the marketing contact. Impact, consider alternative solutions if you only need occasional transactional emails. You don't currently use Marketing Hub professional or enterprise. You prefer specialized transactional email services with pay per send models, or you want minimized, uh, platform complexity and cost now.

Chad Hohn: I'm pretty sure that's called SendGrid.

George B. Thomas: Pretty much. Pretty much.

Max Cohen: Also, also dedicated IP is a separate sku.

George B. Thomas: I do believe

Max Cohen: almost a hundred percent sure it is. Yeah. And, and, and so kind of mixed into that, like this idea of like, um, you completely owning like your domain reputation and everything. When HubSpot sends marketing emails. Folks who are listening, they're all sent through the same like shared email sending like ips, right?

And that's a good thing because like what that means, you can do a company that hasn't emailed anybody from your domain anymore. It means that you can take advantage of HubSpot's, uh, exquisite email sending and deliverability and, uh, IP addresses that they have without you having to do any stupid warmup periods or any of this other shit.

Right? Um, so like there's a big, big benefit to that. Some people who like to be really, really hard, like, you know, their, their hardos about their domain reputation and they wanna be able to have complete control on it, and they wanna go, oh, some get screwed up for HubSpot. I don't want that to screw our stuff up, da da da da.

You can get dedicated ips from HubSpot, it's gonna cost more money, obviously. Right? But then like, you're not sending your stuff out of the main, you know, uh, shared sending swim lanes that everyone else is doing. However that works, right? Um, but just keep in mind like there's a warmup period. You gotta like do the work to get those domains functioning just like anything else.

But HubSpot is a pretty sweet automated process to like get it done. And from what I understand, it's pretty painless, right? Um, but, you know, don't, don't hate on shared sending email domains, guys. It's not that

George B. Thomas: Nah, I don't think it's that big a deal. So Chad, I have, I have two questions 'cause um, I'm, I'm new at this, like, trying to, you know, herd the squirrels. Um, one, I didn't know you were a prophet. I guess that's a statement more than a question or, uh, so I'll just go with it. You literally said in Slack, you said, uh, I know you got some cool insights about single send API at Max Cohen.

Uh, and he literally just went there already. Like he, he went there. Uh, now my question is, I started with the question of what are people getting wrong right out the gate with email? Chad, did you even answer that question yet?

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah. I, it was the

George B. Thomas: Oh, yeah. That's right. That's

Chad Hohn: right? So there's, they're not all created equal. And then I said the dreaded word,

George B. Thomas: Oh, well, we, we didn't, we didn't hear any

Chad Hohn: transactional email. No.

George B. Thomas: yeah. Okay.

Chad Hohn: I had to bleep it or we'd get going again.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. He'll

Chad Hohn: We'd get going on the topic again if I said it. But it was something email that happens one at a time. And you have to ensure that they have deliverability, Schmack, you're not listening.

Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.

George B. Thomas: Okay.

Chad Hohn: Uh, yeah. And then that's how we got off on that tangent. Squirrel.

George B. Thomas: Okay. Alright, well then let's, uh, let's, let's move on and, and carry on. So by the way, um, actually let me answer, uh, this real quick, um, because I wanna just give people maybe a different mindset or an idea to think about when they start to send emails. So many people, when I watch what they do with emails, it's one way. It's, it's broadcast. And the one thing that I would ask people to do is whether you're creating any type of email, whether it's a marketing email, sales email, transactional email, if it's, uh, something that we'll talk about in a little bit, which is literally like a, uh, maybe an email that's powered by Hub db.

Oh, oh, I'm teasing it. I'm teasing it. But, um, can you make it a, can you make it a relationship? Can you make it a two-sided conversation? Can you think about giving people the opportunity to reply? Can you actually make it a value? Because by the way, the tangent that, uh, max went on being in a with newsletters is, is it, if it's, if it's a value, it's gonna be okay, but nobody wants to learn about Jake, and I don't know if that's Jake from State Forum or Jake, my neighbor, but nobody wants to know more about Jake.

Chad Hohn: Okay. Jake from State

George B. Thomas: All right, so, so guys, what, what is a feature email feature, um, that you love that's maybe different than what we've talked about, um, that you think maybe most typical HubSpot users might not even know exists?

Max Cohen: Oh, uh, well custom email tokens and workflows now.

George B. Thomas: so,

Max Cohen: is

George B. Thomas: wax poetic on that.

Max Cohen: So this, so, so one thing that like really sucks here is that like, it, it's one of these like lesser known features that is just like hidden away in Marketing Hub enterprise. Right. Um, which is really annoying to me. Um, but, uh, custom email tokens borrows from the idea of those custom tokens from the single send API.

Right. Where basically, um, when you're sending emails through workflows. Okay. Instead of having to, um,

Chad Hohn: Marketing emails through

Max Cohen: yeah, marketing, sorry, marketing emails through workflows. But I guess this is just, this could just as easily work with transactional ones. It's like really any, any email sent via a workflow. Right? What you can do is, instead of putting in a personalization token, right, in that email, um, what you can do is you can type in brackets, custom dot, and then the name of any. Like variable that you want. Right? And then when you go and set up that email to be sent, right, it'll detect that there is, um, custom variables in there. Or actually, I don't know if it, I don't think it auto detects it just, it, it gives you the option if you have enterprise to add custom tokens. Right, where basically you put the name of the variable and then where the data comes from, or if it's some kind of like static value, right?

And so what's cool about this is it gives you a lot more of a flexible way to get like, I don't know, people normally call 'em like merge tokens or email mer mail me.

Chad Hohn: gonna say, does that support fallback values, like with the

Max Cohen: Uh, don't think it does. I'm not a hundred percent sure. I don't think it does. Right. Um, it might and I might forget how it does it.

Right. Um, but yeah, you can put these custom tokens in and then like use your workflows to basically pick where that data's coming from and injecting it. Right. And this is particularly helpful because like, I think a lot of people get kind of like screwed up in terms of like. How personalization tokens work in email when you're talking about tokens that are not just contact properties, right?

This is where people really kind of like break their brains around, like how to send an email that has data from a different record that's not a contact.

Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.

Max Cohen: In a workflow, right? So the basics, folks listening at home, right? If you don't have access to this awesome, uh, custom tokens tool, right? When you're building an email, all right, and you see, oh, I can put something else besides contact properties into this email, right?

One, you can only do that when you have the email set up as an automated one. You cannot do it as a single send or as a, sorry. A, a single send to a list, right? Or a regular, regular email to a list. You could only have contact properties in there, right? Because when the email's being sent, it only knows who the contact is.

It doesn't know any other objects that may be involved in this. So like you'll notice that you don't even have the option. To add properties from other objects. When you do a regular email, you might be able to do it with company, right? Because is it, doesn't it use primary company or something? Right? So, and you can only have one primary company when you're a contact, right?

So it has a way to figure that out, right? But everything else you can't. So let's say you wanted to send an email that had like, uh, custom object, uh, based stuff on it, and you have a custom object called, I don't know, ponies. All right. What you'd have to do is you'd build that email as an automated email, all right?

You would have all of your custom properties in there from contacts and custom properties from your ponies object, okay? That email has to be sent from a workflow that is centered around your ponies object. The reason being is that when a workflow. Enrolls it enrolls a specific object, so when it sends the email, it knows which one of your pony records to use to fill those properties in.

It's gonna know the contact as well, because an email always has a recipient, right? And so this is where like a, a lot of people also don't understand when you're sending an email in a workflow that's based on an object other than a contact. It's sending it to contacts directly associated to that object going through the workflow.

Yeah. The ponies. Right. And so like a lot of people like don't understand the nuance of that. 'cause I don't think it's like very well explained in HubSpot's

Chad Hohn: especially since workflows have started to become a little bit more like while under the hood, they are primary object based. It's not as obvious as it once used to be because it was very rigid at how you used to create. Now the, that abstraction layer over it where it's like, Hey, you know, you just gotta figure it out.

That it, it is a primary object based workflow,

Max Cohen: Yep. Yeah. It, it doesn't scream in your face. This workflow is centered around this object. Right. I, that's the one thing I

George B. Thomas: Uh oh.

Max Cohen: the new way that you do work, we're not gonna get into it, but like. It's because of that I, I do not like the, the workflow, but I like it. It was so much easier for my mental model and for teaching people and everything that, like you build a workflow around a certain object, you're not a workflow could be bigger around anything.

Like I feel like all they wanted to do there was like make it make it seem like, uh, you know, it was more flexible when like really it's just nah, we're just making it more confusing, amorphous way of getting into it.

George B. Thomas: Tune in next week as Max talks about the 12 reasons he hates the new workflow set

Max Cohen: Oh my God. Yeah. What's gonna be my 13th reason? Geez,

George B. Thomas: the thing. So if I recap what you said, right, I'm, I, because I've now gone over to knowledge.hubspot.com, as as one would do, um, use custom tokens in automated emails. Use custom tokens in automated marketing emails when sending emails through workflows.

You can create custom tokens based on data such as enrolled record data, associated record data, or information received from external sources via integrator. Actions. So just know that you can do those pieces. Ladies and gentlemen, also, by the way, max, you brought up ponies. Am I the only one that immediately went to like Genuine Pony, like the song and was like, anyway, okay, I digress.

I digress. Um, I almost danced just for you, the listening. I almost did a little bit of like a, you know, a little, anyway, let's move on. Let's move on. Chad, what.

Max Cohen: I was thinking of baby horses.

George B. Thomas: that's, I figured you were talking about, well, ponies aren't baby horses. Those are called cults and fos. But anyway, I digress. Uh, the ponies are ponies.

Um,

Max Cohen: What's a Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What's a pony If it's

George B. Thomas: no, no, no. A pony is like a small horse, but it's not

Chad Hohn: It's like a miniature

George B. Thomas: is a cult or a fo of a horse. Anyway, uh, you can Google that later. Uh, by the way. Yes, yes.

Max Cohen: thought the fall was just when it came out and like couldn't walk that well, and

George B. Thomas: not. You can Google it, by the way. Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, uh, a little unknown fact is, uh, your boy, George B. Thomas, used to be a certified, uh, riding instructor western and English, and worked at a ranch where we did, uh, we did horseback rides over 4,200 acres.

Uh, so there are pictures of me wearing a cowboy hat, but that's not why here, why we're here. Chad, what is a HubSpot email feature? That you love that most people probably don't know exists?

Chad Hohn: Uh, yeah. Well, I'll give an example of how a business that I worked for kind of had to use emails, and I guess correct me if I'm

George B. Thomas: to use

Chad Hohn: there's like a,

George B. Thomas: What do you mean by had to use emails.

Chad Hohn: Well, we use it a little bit of a non-conventional way. So first of all, let me just kinda like circle back here and you guys can just sanity check me if either things have changed or I've always been wrong.

But, um, you can send emails as like an owner property. However, when people reply to those emails as an owner property, unless it's hooked up to an inbox, they don't get 'em right.

Max Cohen: Uh.

George B. Thomas: I think you can. I think, I think that's one of the reasons why you use an owner property and owner email as a token, and then I think they do get them, but you have the ability to also set a different reply email in there if you wanted to.

Chad Hohn: I just remember always being in there and seeing that if the email that you are having them reply to isn't hooked up to an inbox as a warning, then they're not gonna get it. And it seemed like they made it look like, unless it was connected to a HubSpot inbox, but I could have been wrong there.

Max Cohen: Well, I think you'd still get the email, but it wouldn't log. The reply

Chad Hohn: It wouldn't log the reply in

George B. Thomas: That might, that might be what it was happening.

Max Cohen: yeah. Yeah.

Chad Hohn: That I think is what it was. And so that, yes, I, that's exactly it. It doesn't log the reply, and this is why we did this, and so I'll outline this. So this was like, it wasn't transactional, but it was a little bit of a situation where we would. Need to send a timely notification to a customer from whomever was doing interactions with them.

And this was like a physical one-to-one on site, uh, inspection of their house. Like this is when I worked at Roofing Business Partner. And so it's like, okay, we're doing an inspection of your house, um, and we want to send an email as the inspector of the roof. And so we would actually use just a single automated sequence email.

With all the personalization tokens. So it would send as a one-on-one email and then get logged in HubSpot and then the sequence would be done and they wouldn't need anything else. And it would be like, Hey, thank you so much for having us out. Like here's your proposal, a link to it. Here's, you know, some variables about your projected costs.

Click on the link, you can sign it here. Like all that kind of stuff. And so I think there is in some certain scenarios. The ability to use automated sequence

George B. Thomas: Mm.

Chad Hohn: for nons spammy things to get around some of the quirks of the marketing email tool and some of that auto logging stuff with replies, right?

Um, and that's what we did. So using a, just a single email, long automated email sequence. And that was it to get, uh, basically a good send out with pertinent information to the customer to make sure they never got, uh, dropped once all the properties in HubSpot were known, which was connected from an, uh, external, externally integrated system.

George B. Thomas: nice. Very nice. So I have, I have, um, two, I'll talk about one first because I think the second one might tend to send us into a spiral of other conversations around a thing. Called subscription types in HubSpot. But anyway, the first thing that I wanna mention that I think that more people could be doing, and again, I think this might be enterprise feature, um, but it's programmable emails.

Um, and, and the reason I'm bringing this up is because I've been using HubSpot since 2012, and it wasn't until this year. The year of our Lord and Savior 2020, I'm just kidding. 2026. Um, where I actually got asked by a client to create a programmable email. And what that meant was I was able to create a programmable email module that looked at a hub DB table.

And we were able to pull certain information outta that hub DB table and it was based on a, a property and what, whatever this property was set, that was like one of the indicators in the hub DB table. And so now we'll be able to send that. And the header image is different. The test testimonial is different, the main text is different.

The CTA button is different and it's all different based on the information that's looking at for this property code. In the line of the hub DB table and it's like this, like I think smart content but on like steroids and like it was one of the most fascinating journeys to go through. One, creating the module, um, thanks Claude code and AI assistance.

And then, um, setting up the hub DB table and then previewing it and seeing just it magically change. Based on this stuff. So programmable emails, if you, if you have not, um, used that or thought about using that for a very, like, granular way, and we're about to do this in a, in another way, by the way, where the property is literally gonna be state.

Then it basically is a geographical send based on the state that they're in in and what the email will actually send. So like once you think about one way to do this, you might think about multiple ways to do this, but like programmable emails based off of Hub db.

Chad Hohn: Cool.

George B. Thomas: The second one I'll bring up, 'cause I'm super curious if you guys will have thoughts around just HubSpot subscription types in in general.

Yeah. Yeah. Max,

Max Cohen: real quick, George, is programmable email still in Beto?

George B. Thomas: Um, it might still be in beta. Yeah.

Max Cohen: Dude, it was in beta when I was an

George B. Thomas: Uh, it might be, uh,

Max Cohen: That's crazy.

George B. Thomas: it's, but it's, I would call it like, it's

Max Cohen: forever beta.

George B. Thomas: but it's really, you know, how some beta suck and,

Max Cohen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I get that. It's good. It was working back then. My guy, like, I don't, I don't know why it's like they still call it beta.

George B. Thomas: I, I don't know. I, um, 'cause it's good and it, and it works really well, so, but yes, um, I do believe it when I go to the knowledge base for information around it, it still does say beta uh, version. Here's the other thing that I, um, have not done, uh, since 2026, or I might have started this in 2025, but the end of 2025 is, I don't know if people understand that they can actually create custom visibility rules for subscription types.

And what I mean by that is usually people will create subscription types where it's like the newsletter, the podcast, the, you know, the blog, the marketing, the one-to-one, the customer service or success, or whatever you wanna call it. One thing that people usually get wrong with that is they like give a description that feels totally internal instead of external, and never teases anybody to wanna stay subscribed.

It's the worst. That, that the email pers uh, preference center, when you go look at it, it should look like you're trying to entice them to stay subscribed. Not something that says how Bob sends his sales emails. Like that's just done. Anyway. This is different though because this is custom visibility rules where you can say things like, if somebody is in, let's say a segment and because they're in this.

Segment, we wanna go ahead and create this subscription type that is X, y, Z. And so now they only see the, I'll give you a real world example. I help a company and they, uh, they have franchisees and people will sign up to these different like. Franchisees. And before there was just like a, a kind of like a local, but it was like for all locals, for like everybody everywhere.

And now there's actually visibility rules that's like. Boulder, Colorado, and two cities next to Boulder, Colorado. And you might have only see those two, but not see all the things, and therefore be able to subscribe to something that's very spec. And by the way, this is the magic word. If you have a business where you need a granular level of specificity in which people can see or not see the things that they're subscribed to, then custom visibility rules in HubSpot might be super dope for you

Max Cohen: I think the, the, the other is I, because business units have now, uh, rebranded into brands.

Chad Hohn: Brands?

Max Cohen: Right. And is that still the mechanism that controls like having multiple, um,

George B. Thomas: can have d Yeah, that's another thing too. Like if you're an organization, great. Uh, by the way, I don't think that's in the list of things that I shared or things that we wanna talk about. But if you do have an organization where you basically have like potentially two or three different kinds of brands.

And you are like, man, I wish I could get them to subscribe to these different things based on brands. It used to be called business units, but you can get brands, uh, which then would give you like these defined different segments basically. And I don't mean lists. But like maybe pillars, uh, inside your HubSpot portal where one of those things is like different logos, different colors, different themes, but a very important piece of this conversation is different email preference center.

And so you could have different subscription types per the brand that you're trying to get them to. So a real world example of this is like george b thomas.com, sidekick strategy.com beyond your default.com. Well. Good God. Like there's a bunch of different ways that you'd want people to subscribe to those things and with brands.

A KE

Chad Hohn: Like all roads may lead to George, but each one of those, if they un, if they wanna unsubscribe from sidekick strategies, you don't want them to also unsubscribe from George B. Thomas

George B. Thomas: I mean, you should get dad jokes of the day no matter what, if you'd like. No, I don't. I don't even have that, but yeah, yeah, yeah. I send those as transactional emails on a dedicated ip because you're gonna get my dad jokes. No, I'm just kidding. I, I don't,

Max Cohen: And you get mailed a hard

George B. Thomas: yeah,

Max Cohen: too.

George B. Thomas: We snail mail it to you every day.

Chad Hohn: from a llama that pulls it on down.

George B. Thomas: So, so, okay guys, I can't believe we like a ton of time, but is there one thing that you wanted to say in this episode that you haven't had the chance to say yet about email in general or an email tool as we kind of head out for today's episode?

Max Cohen: I'd, I'd, I'd really, uh, double down on like the whole, like if you're a new, uh. Uh, like, like HubSpot admin. I think one of the most valuable things that you could, like valuable skills immediately you can go get, is figuring out how to send emails, uh, that have data from other objects on 'em. Like go, go, like.

Go build an email, use a a different object to have some properties in there. Learn how to, like, send it from a workflow. Get like familiar with like, you know, thinking about, all right, if there's more than one contact associated to this object, how do we target it with an association label? Like all this kind of stuff.

Go figure it out on your own. It's like one of the best ways to kind of like understand how like systems and objects and email and contacts all like interact with each other inside HubSpot. So go figure that one

George B. Thomas: Chad, what are your thoughts?

Chad Hohn: Yeah, I mean, I think, um, you know. Uh, don't undervalue sequences either because they're super helpful for your team. And I think a lot of people think about, well, sequences are my hack to get around being able to send E one-on-one emails in an automated way,

George B. Thomas: Hmm.

Chad Hohn: I mean, we had a, a specific use case for what we were doing at that time 'cause it was really relevant and we wanted to make sure it was timely.

But I would say like sequences are based on templates which also have similar variable construction. Um, and you can even put like. If you're really fancy hyperlinks inside of URLs, as long as the, or sorry variables, so custom properties inside of URLs, as long as they're on the query parameter side.

Unfortunately it doesn't work inside the path side of the URL 'cause some of the tech stripping they have, but like don't, don't undervalue sequences as a really useful tool for your team, understand how to build them and the difference between the automated sequences and manual or more traditional HubSpot sequences as well.

'cause it all does tie back to email. But also other things, if you're B2B, LinkedIn, if you're, uh, you know, tasking to remind you to do different things on a cadence in structured outreach, and you can report on the sequence itself to understand its, its, um, effectiveness,

George B. Thomas: so here's an honest question 'cause by the way, I got got a while back ag ago because, um, sequences for me were always sequences. And then all of a sudden sequences became sequences or dynamic sequences. Does it, does it make sense for us to just do an episode on like, uh, templates, maybe snippets, templates and sequences, or even just an episode on sequences in general, like.

Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.

George B. Thomas: I'm, I'm asking you guys, but I'm also asking just the listeners, if we should do an episode on sequences. Give us a heck yes. Somewhere on socials or tag us or email us if you have our email, whatever. I'm super curious, but for, for today, the one thing that I'll kind of round this out with is HubSpot is always changing.

And there are so many things that you probably don't know that maybe you know now or there's still things that we haven't even had a chance to talk about. For instance, if you're not enterprise, or even if you're enterprise, you might not know that there's a send frequency. Uh, setting that you can set so that you're not sending too many emails in a day.

My suggestion would be to go over to the product updates in your, uh, HubSpot portal and just filter it by email and look at all the things that are possible or being created in real time and really become a student of email. Of communication of, you know, whether it be one-to-one or it be marketing emails, transactional emails, but how, how are you leveraging it to have conversations two-sided, and how are you using it to add value?

That's what I would want you to do.