Rather than following the traditional ABM practice of limiting outreach to a curated list of 50–100 high-priority contacts, the decision was made to run a fully personalized email campaign to the entire 250-contact Aviary list across all three tiers. The rationale: the traditional constraint was logistical, not strategic. AI-driven personalization removes the manual effort bottleneck, making it practical to send individualized emails at scale.
This campaign is sent externally (outside HubSpot) via an AWS mail server, requiring custom reporting and pre-send email validation.
See also: [1] | [2]
Send to all 250 contacts across all three tiers simultaneously.
"The constraint with ABM was saying, keep it small — that had more to do with the physical reality of how much effort it was. There's not really a marketing reason to only target 50." — Mark Hope
Because the contact list was already built with personal emails for all three tiers, there was no reason to artificially throttle the campaign. The unknown quality distribution across the list also argued against pre-filtering — better to cast wide and let response data surface the best targets for future focused effort.
| Parameter | Detail |
|---|---|
| Total contacts | ~250 |
| Tiers covered | All three (Tier 1, 2, 3) |
| Personalization method | AI-generated individual emails |
| Sending infrastructure | AWS mail server (external to HubSpot) |
| Volume risk | Negligible — AWS sends millions/hour; 250 is buried in normal traffic |
The contact list must be validated before sending to remove invalid addresses and avoid spam traps. This was identified as a required step based on a parallel issue encountered with another client (Papertooth), where unvalidated lists resulted in spam trap hits.
No throttling is needed. Sending 250 emails from an AWS server poses no deliverability risk — the volume is trivially small relative to AWS's normal sending load and well within account limits (up to 1M/day).
HubSpot's native reporting will not capture this campaign because emails are sent externally. Mark will build custom reports to track performance.
Metrics to track (TBD):
- Open rates
- Reply rates
- Bounces / unsubscribes
- Tier-level performance breakdown
This campaign reflects a broader principle worth capturing: AI collapses the effort curve for ABM personalization, making the traditional "keep it small" rule obsolete. The new constraint is list quality and deliverability hygiene, not writing capacity.
See [2] for the generalized insight.
Discussed in the Mark / Sebastian Aviary Sync on 2026-02-20. See source doc for full transcript.