Marketing & Growth

How to launch an email marketing campaign as Professional Services Founders

Marketing & GrowthFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You have 12 people billing hours, a pipeline in HubSpot or a Google Sheet, and a mailing list somewhere in Mailchimp that you emailed four months ago. Launching an email campaign means exporting a contact list, writing copy in a Google Doc, figuring out which segment hasn't heard from you in 90 days, manually suppressing current clients, and hoping someone remembered to update the list after the last project closed. You're the rainmaker, so this falls to you — usually at 9pm before a proposal goes out. The result is a spray-and-pray blast, not a campaign tied to your actual pipeline stage or service line.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A contact segmentation layer that pulls from your live HubSpot deals and Gmail threads so your email list reflects where each prospect or past client actually sits in your pipeline — not a stale CSV from three months ago.

A campaign workflow that drafts service-specific outreach, queues it by segment, and tracks replies back into your CRM so you know who responded and which engagements turned into proposals.

A weekly Growth Analyst digest that tells you which emails drove site visits, proposal requests, or reply threads — so next month's campaign is smarter than this month's.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Email Agent Growth Analyst

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your HubSpot contacts, companies, and deals on a schedule and syncs your Gmail messages on a schedule — both update automatically so your segments stay current. Stripe invoices sync on a schedule so Starch knows which past clients have closed engagements. Calendly bookings sync on a schedule for follow-up tracking. For sending, connect Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when the automation runs. PostHog connects from the integration catalog for site-traffic attribution in the Growth Analyst digest.

Prompts to copy

Build me a contact list segmented by: (1) active clients on retainer, (2) prospects in HubSpot with a deal stage of 'Proposal Sent' or earlier that went cold more than 60 days ago, (3) past clients whose last invoice in Stripe closed more than 6 months ago. Pull names and last-contact dates from Gmail threads and flag anyone I've emailed in the last 30 days so I can suppress them.

Draft a re-engagement email for the 'cold prospect' segment. We're a 12-person management consultancy. The email should reference the service area we last discussed (pull from the HubSpot deal name), keep it under 150 words, and end with a single low-friction CTA — a 20-minute call. Give me three subject line variants.

Every Monday at 8am, email me a digest: how many people opened last week's campaign, which links got clicked, any replies that came into Gmail from campaign recipients, and whether any of those contacts moved to a new HubSpot deal stage. Flag anyone who replied but hasn't had a follow-up scheduled in Calendly.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect HubSpot (scheduled sync) and Gmail (scheduled sync) in Starch — your deal pipeline and email thread history become the source of truth for who's in which segment and when you last touched them.

2 Connect Stripe (scheduled sync) so Starch can identify past clients by closed invoice date, not just by what someone remembered to tag in the CRM.

3 Open the Starch CRM app and tell it your segment logic: active retainers, cold prospects by deal stage and silence window, and lapsed clients by last invoice date. Starch builds the segmented contact view against your live data.

4 In the Email Agent app, paste in your cold-prospect segment and prompt Starch to draft re-engagement copy for each service line you sell — strategy, implementation, fractional — with subject line variants. Review and edit; you're approving, not writing from scratch.

5 Set a suppression rule: anyone emailed in the last 30 days or currently in an active deal stage gets excluded automatically. Tell Starch this in plain language and it applies the filter before any send queue is built.

6 Connect Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign from Starch's integration catalog and have Starch push the final segmented list and draft copy into your campaign tool. The agent queries your email platform live when the automation runs.

7 Schedule the send — either trigger it manually after your review or set a time-based automation in Starch. For a consultancy, Tuesday 7am or Thursday 8am tends to land better than midweek noise.

8 Set up the Email Agent to monitor your Gmail inbox for replies from campaign recipients. Any reply gets flagged, summarized, and logged back against the contact's HubSpot deal record so you have a thread history without manual copy-paste.

9 Wire up the Growth Analyst app with PostHog (from Starch's integration catalog) and Gmail. Tell it: 'Every Monday, email me campaign open rates, click-through by segment, any Gmail replies from recipients, and whether any contacts moved deal stages in HubSpot this week.'

10 After week two, use the Growth Analyst digest to identify which segment and subject line drove the most replies or proposal requests. Tell Starch to build a follow-up sequence for non-openers using a different angle — the agent drafts variant copy against the same contact list.

11 For contacts who replied but haven't booked a call, set a Starch automation: 'If a campaign recipient replied to Gmail but has no Calendly booking in the last 7 days, draft a follow-up nudge and surface it in my inbox for one-click send.'

12 At month-end, ask Starch to pull a campaign summary: total contacts reached by segment, reply rate, proposals generated, and any Stripe invoices created for contacts who came in through the campaign. This becomes your ROI number for the channel.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q2 2026 Lapsed-Client Re-engagement — April Campaign

Sample numbers from a real run

Cold prospects (HubSpot deal stage ≤ Proposal Sent, silent 60+ days)	34
Lapsed clients (last Stripe invoice closed 6+ months ago)	21
Suppressed — active retainer or emailed last 30 days	8
Total campaign sends	55
Gmail replies logged back to HubSpot	9
Calendly calls booked from campaign	4
Proposals generated (30-day window)	2

In April 2026, a 12-person management consultancy ran their first Starch-built campaign. Starch pulled 34 cold prospects from HubSpot — deals that had gone quiet since January — and 21 lapsed clients whose last Stripe invoice closed before October 2025. Eight contacts were suppressed because Gmail showed a thread in the last 30 days. The Email Agent drafted two versions of a re-engagement email: one for prospects who'd been quoted on a strategy engagement, one for past clients who'd done implementation work. Subject line A ('We wrapped [Project Name] in September — quick question') outperformed subject line B by 2.4x on reply rate, per the Growth Analyst Monday digest. Nine replies came in; the Email Agent flagged all nine in the Starch inbox, summarized each thread, and logged them to the corresponding HubSpot deal record. Four booked Calendly calls; two turned into proposals by month-end. Total campaign setup time: about 90 minutes across two evenings, versus the founder's previous approach of manually exporting from HubSpot, building a list in a spreadsheet, writing copy solo, and never knowing what happened after the send.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Reply rate by segment (cold prospects vs. lapsed clients) — the number that tells you if the message landed, not just if the email opened

Proposals generated within 30 days of campaign send, attributed by contact segment

HubSpot deal stage progression for campaign recipients — did cold deals move forward?

Gmail follow-up lag: time between a campaign reply and your next response (the Email Agent surfaces this)

Revenue sourced from campaign contacts in the trailing 60 days (Stripe invoice attribution)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Mailchimp alone

Mailchimp sends emails; it doesn't segment from your live HubSpot pipeline, log replies back to deal records, or tell you whether a recipient turned into a closed engagement — you do that manually.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot's marketing tools are solid if you're already paying for the Marketing Hub tier, but at 12 people you're probably on Sales Hub only — and adding Marketing Hub for one campaign per quarter is expensive overhead with significant setup time.

Apollo.io sequences

Apollo is built for outbound prospecting to net-new contacts; it's awkward for re-engaging lapsed clients or past-client lists where the relationship history lives in Gmail and HubSpot, not Apollo's database.

Manual Google Sheets + Mailchimp export workflow

This is probably what you're doing today — it works once, falls out of date immediately, and gives you no attribution back to deals or invoices without another hour of manual matching at month-end.

ActiveCampaign with CRM add-on

ActiveCampaign can do contact scoring and automation, but configuring it to mirror your actual HubSpot deal stages and Gmail thread history requires a dedicated setup project — which you don't have time to run.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent, growth analyst all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually send the emails, or does it just draft them?

Starch drafts the copy, builds the segments, and logs replies — but the actual send goes through your existing email marketing tool. Connect Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign from Starch's integration catalog and the agent pushes the list and content there. You keep your existing sending infrastructure and unsubscribe compliance; Starch handles the intelligence layer on top.

My HubSpot is a mess — deals aren't updated, stages are wrong. Will this still work?

Partially. Starch syncs what's in HubSpot, so if a deal is in the wrong stage it'll segment incorrectly. The good news: the Starch CRM app can show you exactly which deals look stale or miscategorized before you run the campaign, so you can fix the worst offenders first. Cleaning 20 records takes 20 minutes when Starch surfaces them as a list instead of making you scroll the pipeline.

Can Starch pull in contacts from Google Sheets instead of HubSpot if that's where my pipeline actually lives?

Yes. Connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live. You can build segment logic against a Sheet the same way you would against HubSpot — just tell Starch which columns map to status, last contact date, and service line.

What about CAN-SPAM and unsubscribe compliance?

Starch builds the segments and drafts the copy; compliance mechanics (unsubscribe links, suppression lists) live in your email platform — Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, etc. Don't route cold outreach through Gmail directly at scale; use a proper sending tool for anything above a few dozen contacts.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My clients sometimes ask about data handling.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If a client's security review requires SOC 2, that's worth knowing upfront. For most 12-person consultancies running marketing campaigns against their own contact data, this isn't a blocker — but it's an honest limit.

Will the Growth Analyst tell me which campaign drove a specific proposal, or is attribution just directional?

It's directional rather than pixel-perfect. The Growth Analyst correlates campaign reply dates with HubSpot deal activity and PostHog traffic in the same window. If you need hard first-touch attribution tied to a UTM parameter, you'd build that in PostHog directly and have Starch surface the data. It's not a substitute for a dedicated attribution tool, but for a firm your size, 'which segment generated the most conversations' is usually the question that matters.