How we achieved Unified Attribution for a Financial Services Firm: Mailjet to HubSpot
A MARKETING AUTOMATION CASE STUDY
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Industry Financial Services |
Platforms HubSpot + Mailjet |
Engagement Type Strategic Partnership |
Core Win Unified Attribution |
The Partnership
When a financial services client came to us at Zola Consulting, they already had a sophisticated cold email outreach strategy ready for execution, targeting tens of thousands of prospects in their ideal customer profile. Beyond execution, they needed to ensure that they could prove if the campaigns were working or not, at a more granular level. Every open, click, and conversion lived in Mailjet - the marketing platform used for cold email outreach. Their CRM lived in HubSpot. And the two platforms had never talked.
The client brought the strategic vision: get full marketing visibility in one place without exceeding monthly data volume limits in the CRM which would’ve resulted in a much higher expense. Zola Consulting brought the technical architecture and best practice methods for integration and execution, eliminating the need for the Client to constantly jump between Platforms and manually create Marketing Qualified Leads in HubSpot from activity tracked in Mailjet.
What the Client Brought to the Table
The client came in with clarity. They had already made smart, deliberate choices about how to run their outreach program:
- A scaled cold outreach program with campaigns regularly reaching about 10,000 prospects per send
- A disciplined approach to data limits and hygiene: cold prospects stayed out of HubSpot to protect contact limits and CRM data quality
- Clear business goals: they wanted attribution data and marketing insights on one platform, not separate reports cobbled together
- A HubSpot instance already configured for their prospecting pipeline — the foundation was there, it just needed to be extended
The Challenge
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The Gap |
Why It Mattered |
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Campaign metrics lived in Mailjet only |
Marketing performance was invisible inside HubSpot — no dashboards, no attribution, no historical record |
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Cold prospects couldn’t be imported into HubSpot |
Bringing in 50,000+ contacts would inflate the database, distort CRM data, and increase costs. In the meantime, select engaged contacts had to be created manually in HubSpot |
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No link between outreach and conversion |
When a cold prospect eventually became a client, there was no way to connect that outcome to the email or campaign that started the relationship |
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Reporting required manual effort |
The team had to pull Mailjet exports and cross-reference them — time-consuming and prone to error |
The Solution
Zola Consulting designed a lightweight integration that pulled campaign and email-level performance data from Mailjet into HubSpot Custom Objects — delivering full marketing visibility.
Key Design Decisions
- Metrics without contacts — Campaign and email statistics (deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes) sync as structured HubSpot records. No cold prospect contact records are created unless they are identified as Marketing Qualified Leads (clicked, replied, downloaded an asset or visited a landing page).
- Email-level granularity — Each individual send is tracked as its own record, enabling side-by-side comparison of subject lines, audiences, and send timing.
- Attribution-ready data model — When a cold prospect converts and enters HubSpot as a Marketing Qualified Lead, their originating campaign is preserved and travels with them through every pipeline stage — MQL to SQL, through deal negotiation, Closed Won, and into customer retention. No touchpoint is lost.
- Zero disruption to existing workflows — The integration extended the client’s HubSpot instance without restructuring anything that was already working.
The Results: Full Campaign Visibility in HubSpot
With the integration live, the client’s HubSpot instance now surfaces a complete Cold Campaign Metrics view — campaign by campaign, email by email. A representative sample:
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Campaign & Email Subject |
Delivery Rate |
Open Rate |
Click Rate |
Bounce Rate |
Unsubscribe Rate |
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Campaign & Email Subject A |
98.15% |
15.09% |
5.66% |
1.89% |
0% |
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Campaign & Email Subject B |
97.68% |
7.44% |
0.47% |
2% |
0.09% |
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Campaign & Email Subject C |
100% |
13.33% |
2.22% |
0% |
0% |
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Campaign & Email Subject D |
97.97% |
7.45% |
0.19% |
1.78% |
0.06% |
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Campaign & Email Subject E |
97.17% |
17.59% |
1.34% |
2.12% |
0.37% |
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Campaign & Email Subject F |
97.07% |
15.86% |
1.25% |
2.34% |
0.2% |
Full-Funnel Attribution: From First Email to Closed Won
What makes this integration more impactful is not just the campaign dashboards — it’s that attribution persists across the entire revenue lifecycle. For the first time, the client can answer: “Which cold email campaign generated our highest-value clients?”
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Prospecting Cold email sent via Mailjet. Campaign metrics captured in HubSpot. |
MQL Prospect engages (clicks, replies, visits to landing page, resource downloads). Enters HubSpot as a Marketing Qualified Lead with campaign origin included. |
SQL Sales reviews and qualifies the lead. Campaign and email attribution carries forward into the deal record. |
Deal / Proposal Active negotiation. Attribution visible to both sales and marketing simultaneously. |
Closed Won The deal closes. The originating campaign and email is credited in reporting. |
Customer Retention and expansion tracked. Full revenue lifecycle connected back to the first touchpoint. |
Every stage of that journey — from the moment a cold prospect first opens an email to the day they become a paying client — is now connected. Marketing can prove its contribution to revenue. Sales has context on every lead. And leadership gets one accurate picture of what’s driving growth.
The Shared Win
The right outcome wasn’t just a working integration — it was a fundamental shift in how the client’s marketing program operates. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
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Single Platform, Full Picture Cold outreach performance now sits alongside warm pipeline data in HubSpot. Marketing and leadership see the complete funnel — from first email to closed deal — in one place. |
Insight That Drives Strategy Open rates above industry average confirm which messages resonate. The client can now double down on what’s working — with data to back every decision. |
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CRM Integrity Preserved Tens of thousands of cold prospects stay out of HubSpot. The CRM reflects only engaged contacts — clean, accurate, and built for the client’s actual pipeline. |
End-to-End Attribution Campaign origin is preserved from the first email open all the way through MQL, SQL, Closed Won, and customer retention. Marketing can finally prove its revenue contribution — deal by deal. |
In the Client’s Words
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“I brought Joy in to support CRM and marketing operations, and she quickly became a true strategic partner. She went well beyond HubSpot execution. She audited our full systems, identified where things were breaking down, and streamlined everything so it was actually built for growth. The result was cleaner processes, stronger alignment, and infrastructure we can confidently scale. Joy is thoughtful, sharp and incredibly reliable. I would absolutely work with her again.” Katherine Gray Founder, KGray Marketing |
About Zola Consulting
Zola Consulting is a Salesforce and HubSpot consultancy specializing in CRM strategy, marketing operations, and revenue operations for small-to-mid-sized businesses. Founded by Joy Okere — a consultant with 15+ years of analytics experience, 11 Salesforce certifications, and 6 HubSpot certifications — Zola brings enterprise-grade thinking to growing teams across various industries.
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