Replay Webinar : Best Marketing Practices in Pipedrive

Why Run Email Campaigns Directly in Pipedrive?

Running your email campaigns inside Pipedrive gives you a major advantage: all your CRM and marketing data are unified. No need to sync data between external platforms or rely on integrations to know who clicked or opened your email. Everything happens in one place—and it’s visible right in the contact’s timeline.

This seamless experience brings major benefits for your team: marketers can create and track campaigns, and salespeople can instantly see which leads are engaged. It boosts collaboration, clarity, and conversion rates.

External tools like Mailchimp or Brevo may be powerful, but they often require additional setup and don’t integrate as deeply. With Pipedrive Campaigns, it’s all native, real-time, and tailored to your existing contact base.

🧼 Step One: Clean Your Database

Before sending your first campaign, you must ensure your contact list is clean and verified. A messy database full of outdated or invalid emails can:

• Hurt your sender reputation
• Lower your deliverability rate
• Put your domain at risk of blacklisting
• Cost you money for emails that never arrive

Pipedrive charges based on the number of subscribed contacts. That means every invalid or unreachable address still costs you—without any return.

To solve this, the hosts recommend using tools like Captain Verify to clean your email lists regularly. Simply export your contacts, upload them to the platform, and remove the invalid ones. They also recommend Mail Tester, a free tool that analyzes your campaign’s spam score and highlights technical or structural issues.

💡 Pro tip: Do a cleanup at least once a month to maintain a healthy list and maximize your campaign performance.

🔧 Setting Up Campaigns in Pipedrive

Once your database is in good shape, it’s time to set up your campaigns. There are a few initial steps you’ll only need to do once.

1. Authenticate Your Domain

To improve deliverability and prevent your emails from landing in spam, Pipedrive asks you to verify your sender domain. It generates DNS records you’ll need to copy into your domain provider’s settings. Once validated, your domain is marked as “trusted,” which improves your email success rate.

You can even connect multiple domains—for example, one for regular communication and another just for marketing campaigns.

2. Add Senders and Set Reply Options

You can configure one or more senders for your campaigns. Each sender can also have a different reply-to address. For example, your marketing email could come from “newsletter@yourdomain.com,” while replies are directed to your sales team.

3. Set the Marketing Status

Only “Subscribed” contacts can receive campaigns. There are several ways to mark a contact as subscribed:

• Directly when creating a contact
• Through web forms with opt-in checkboxes
• Via API or no-code tools like Make
• With bulk editing (only if you have proper consent)

Pipedrive also supports double opt-in, which is highly recommended for compliance and deliverability. However, double opt-in emails must be sent manually, one by one.

🎨 Creating an Email Campaign

Now comes the creative part: building your campaign. Pipedrive offers several options for designing your email:

• Use one of the built-in templates
• Start from scratch with the drag-and-drop editor
• Import your own HTML code (for advanced users)

You can include images, buttons, columns, social links, and call-to-action blocks—all with customizable layouts and colors. The editor is intuitive and lets you preview everything before sending.

Personalization is easy and powerful. You can insert dynamic fields like the contact’s first name, company name, or deal stage—both in the subject line and in the body of the email. A subject like « Hi Alex, ready to boost your pipeline? » feels much more personal and clickable.

Don’t forget to track your links using UTM parameters. These let you measure how contacts interact with your emails in tools like Google Analytics. You can create UTMs manually or use free online generators.

Before launching your campaign, test it with Mail Tester. It checks everything from your domain reputation to your image-to-text ratio and gives you a score out of 10. This helps you fix issues in advance and increase your chances of landing in the inbox.

📊 Tracking Performance and Following Up

Once your campaign is sent, Pipedrive gives you detailed stats: opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes. But the real power lies in what you can do with that data.

Let’s say 30 contacts clicked a link in your email. You can build a custom filter for “Contacts who clicked Campaign X,” and use that filter to send a targeted follow-up. Maybe you invite them to a webinar or offer them a free trial—whatever makes sense based on their interest.

These filters can even be dynamic. That means if more contacts engage after your email goes out, they’ll automatically be added to the follow-up list. You can schedule these next emails in advance and create powerful, behavior-based sequences without leaving Pipedrive.

This is where sales and marketing really align: your sales team knows exactly who engaged, and your marketing team can re-target hot leads with timely content.

🤝 Using External Tools (If Needed)

While Pipedrive Campaigns is ideal for most users, some companies may already have robust setups with other tools like Brevo, ActiveCampaign, or Mailchimp. In these cases, it’s still possible to connect these tools with Pipedrive using:

• Make (Integromat): for custom workflows and syncing
• Outfunnel: a plug-and-play solution designed for syncing marketing tools with CRMs

However, these options often come with added costs and don’t always give you native visibility of your engagement data. That’s the core advantage of using Pipedrive Campaigns—everything stays within your CRM, accessible to everyone.