The Catalyst Stack - Aug 7, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s The Catalyst Stack

Say you’ve been using HubSpot Sales Hub for awhile and are now ready to activate marketing. And you’ve recently upped your licensing to including Marketing Hub. A natural way to start might be launching a nurture campaign to target a segment of your contacts. In this week’s Catalyst Stack, we look at steps you should follow before launching that first campaign.

Marketing Activation & Campaigns
What to do Before You Launch Your first Nurture Campaign

Launching your first nurture campaign in HubSpot can feel like a big step. But the groundwork you lay before turning anything on often determines whether the campaign succeeds or stalls out. This week, we’re walking through what you should get in place before launching your first nurture workflow using HubSpot Marketing Hub.

Whether you’re just starting with email marketing or building a broader nurture strategy, this checklist will help you launch with more confidence and fewer missteps.

1. Start With the Goal

Before creating emails, workflows, or forms, get clear on the actual goal of your campaign. Is this nurture effort meant to warm up leads after a content download? Re-engage stale contacts? Help convert people who have shown interest but haven’t yet taken action?

Start by deciding how you will measure success. This could include opens, clicks, and form fills, but those should not be your only focus. Ideally, your nurture campaign connects to meaningful outcomes like qualified leads, demo requests, or new deals in the pipeline. HubSpot makes it possible to tie campaigns to these outcomes, but only if you set up the right tracking and attribution points at the start. Take the time to define what success means for your business, and make sure your reporting is aligned with those goals.

2. Define the Audience and Enrollment Criteria

Once you know your goal, you can define who should be in the campaign.

Use lists or workflow triggers to pull in the right contacts. This might include people who filled out a specific form, visited key pages, or are tagged with a particular lifecycle stage or persona. Be intentional here. The more targeted your audience, the more relevant your messaging will be.

Just as important, set clear rules for who should be excluded. Suppression lists allow you to filter out contacts who are not a fit for the campaign. These might include people who have already converted, contacts who are unengaged, or those who are too early in the buyer journey. You should avoid sending nurture emails to someone who is already in conversation with a sales rep. Not only does it create confusion, it also risks undermining the trust you’re building.

3. Confirm You Have Consent

Do you have permission to send marketing emails to the contacts you’re enrolling?

If your database includes contacts from lead lists, networking events, or older imports, make sure you’ve captured proper marketing consent. This is especially important if you’re operating in jurisdictions with privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA.

If you’re unsure, consider running a one-time re-permission campaign or use progressive profiling on forms to capture explicit opt-in over time. It’s better to start with a smaller, permission-based list than risk deliverability issues.

4. Orchestrate All Campaign Components

A nurture campaign isn’t always just an email sequence.

In many cases, you’re launching a coordinated effort that spans social media, blog posts, landing pages, forms, paid ads, and follow-up emails. That means collaboration across different team members, timelines, and tools.

Use HubSpot’s Marketing Calendar to keep everything organized. It helps you visualize asset deadlines, launch dates, and dependencies between components. Having everything on a shared calendar keeps everyone aligned and reduces last-minute surprises.

If your campaign involves more than just email, the calendar becomes your home base.

5. Plan the Marketing Assets

Keep it simple for your first nurture campaign. A solid sequence of three to five emails is a great place to start.

Think through the structure. Are you introducing your company, sharing educational resources, highlighting customer stories, or driving toward a specific offer? Keep a clear narrative arc across the sequence.

Use HubSpot’s drag-and-drop builder if you’re just getting started. If you need more control, templates can be coded or adapted with developer help. For more advanced use cases, add dynamic logic to your templates with HubL. For example, you might personalize certain sections based on industry, job title, or other custom properties stored on the contact record.

6. Set Timing and Cadence

Decide how much time you want between emails. Two to four days is common for early-stage nurture, but that may vary depending on your audience.

Will each email send automatically on a fixed delay, or should it wait until the contact opens or clicks the previous message? HubSpot workflows give you the flexibility to choose either path.

Also consider how long the entire sequence runs. For example, a five-email nurture could span two weeks or two months. The right pacing depends on your message, audience, and goals.

7. Run a Final QA and Compliance Check

Before you activate your campaign, do a full test. Make sure emails render well on both desktop and mobile. Check your links and forms. Confirm subject lines are compelling but not spammy.

Be thoughtful about which domain you use for sending. If you’re launching a large campaign, consider using an alternate sending domain to reduce risk to your primary one. For example, if your main domain is a .com, and you also own the .us version, it might make sense to send from the .us. This helps protect your primary domain from potential deliverability issues or spam complaints. It’s not always required, but it’s worth considering.

8. Launch, Monitor, and Improve

Once everything is tested, go live and continue monitoring performance closely.

HubSpot provides performance dashboards that let you see how each email performs and how the campaign is driving impact. Set aside time to review results weekly. Tweak subject lines, adjust timing, or test new content if results plateau.

Your first nurture campaign sets the tone for how your business communicates over time. With clear goals, strong targeting, and the right foundation, it becomes an engine for engaging prospects and moving them toward action.

Final Thoughts

A nurture campaign is not just a task to check off. It is a coordinated effort that requires planning, alignment, and clarity across your marketing and sales teams. If you take the time to get the foundation right, the campaign becomes far more likely to succeed.

Start by defining the campaign’s business goal. Make sure it connects to real outcomes like qualified leads or new opportunities. Once you know what success looks like, build out the structure to support it.

The most effective campaigns are not built in isolation. They depend on clean data, marketing consent, and a clear understanding of who the audience is. Every part of the campaign should work together toward the same goal. That includes the emails, timing, enrollment logic, suppression rules, and tracking. When all of these elements align, your campaign has a much better chance of delivering real business results.

If you are just getting started, keep the campaign scope manageable. A smaller campaign that runs smoothly is better than a complex one that misses the mark. Build momentum with a clear plan and strong execution. Then, layer in complexity as your confidence grows.

HubSpot provides the tools to support all of this, but the tools only work when there is structure behind them. A good nurture campaign is part strategy, part systems thinking, and part content. Get those parts working together, and you’ll have something worth building on.