A practical guide to HubSpot AI draft emails

Anyone who's ever tried to scale an email marketing campaign knows the grind. You’re trying to be personal and effective, but your contact list is huge, and there are only so many hours in the day. It’s no surprise that teams are looking to AI for a helping hand, and big players like HubSpot are adding new tools to the mix. But are they the right solution for everyone?

This guide is a straight-talking look at what HubSpot AI Draft Emails can actually do. We'll walk through the features, dig into the real costs (including the ones in the fine print), and highlight some major limitations you need to consider before you sign on the dotted line.

What are HubSpot AI Draft Emails?

HubSpot's AI email tools aren't just another gadget bolted onto the platform. They’re a set of features woven directly into the Marketing Hub. The big idea is to use the customer data you already have sitting in HubSpot’s Smart CRM to help you write better emails, faster. Instead of just guessing what will land, the AI looks at things like contact details, past email interactions, and other CRM info to generate copy that feels relevant.

It really comes down to two main parts:

• AI Email Writer: This is your starting point. You feed it a prompt, and it spits out a draft of an email for you.

• AI-Powered Email: This is the broader toolkit that includes deeper personalization, smart send times, and even a feature to copy email designs from other platforms.

Essentially, it’s a tool built for marketing and sales teams who are already living inside the HubSpot ecosystem. It's designed to make the most of the data you already have to save you time and, ideally, get you better results.

Key features of HubSpot AI Draft Emails

Okay, so what can you actually do with this stuff? Let's get into the nitty-gritty.

Automated content and design generation

The biggest and most obvious time-saver here is the content generation. You can pop open the email editor and give a simple command to "Breeze," HubSpot's AI assistant. Ask it to write a promo email for a new product or a follow-up note for webinar attendees, and it will generate a full draft, subject line, body copy, and call-to-action included.

It also has a pretty clever trick up its sleeve for design. If you have an email template from another platform like Mailchimp that you really love, or even a mockup from Figma, you can upload it. The AI will analyze the layout and rebuild it as an editable HubSpot template. That can save a ton of tedious manual work.

Of course, there's a small catch. While it's quick, the AI is only as good as the instructions you give it. If your prompts are vague and you don't spend time editing the output, the emails can end up sounding a little generic.

CRM-driven personalization at scale

This is really HubSpot's main selling point. The AI does more than just slot a "[First Name]" into the greeting. It can pull from your CRM data to reference a contact's job title, their industry, recent activity on your website, or where they are in your sales funnel. The whole point is to make mass emails feel like they were written one-on-one.

But this personalization has a hard ceiling: it only works with data that lives inside the HubSpot CRM. For a lot of companies, that's a problem. The most valuable, real-world customer knowledge is often scattered everywhere else, in your help desk, internal wikis, and thousands of past support chats.

This is where a tool like eesel AI takes a totally different approach. It’s built from the ground up to connect all your knowledge sources. It can plug into your help desk (like Zendesk or Freshdesk), pull information from internal docs in Confluence or Google Docs, and learn from your team's past conversations to provide answers that reflect the customer's full history.

Data-driven optimization

HubSpot’s AI also tries to act like a smart strategist, helping you figure out when and how to send your emails for the best results. It has a send-time optimization feature that looks at when each contact has opened or clicked your emails in the past and then staggers the send to hit their inbox at their personal peak time. So, no more blindly sending everything at 10 AM on a Tuesday.

It can also help you avoid writing the same old boring subject lines. The AI can generate a handful of different options for an email and help you A/B test them, using what it knows about your audience to suggest copy that’s more likely to get opened.

HubSpot AI Draft Emails: Pricing and critical limitations

Now, let's talk money and the fine print. HubSpot’s AI tools are impressive, but they come with some hefty costs and functional roadblocks you need to know about.

The full cost: More than a monthly fee

First things first, you can't just add these AI features to any plan. They are only available on the Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise plans. And the sticker price isn't the whole story; you also have to factor in mandatory onboarding fees that can be a bit of a shock.

Here’s a quick look at what you can expect:

Plan	Starting Price (Billed Annually)	Key Requirements & Hidden Costs
Marketing Hub Professional	$800 / month	Includes 2,000 marketing contacts. Requires a $3,000 one-time onboarding fee.
Marketing Hub Enterprise	$3,600 / month	Includes 10,000 marketing contacts. Requires a $7,000 one-time onboarding fee.

On top of that, HubSpot uses a "HubSpot Credits" system for some of the more advanced AI features. This means that even after paying for your plan and onboarding, heavy use of the AI could lead to extra variable costs.

Limitation 1: The walled garden problem

HubSpot’s AI is really smart, but only inside the HubSpot bubble. Outside of that, it’s completely in the dark. If your company uses a mix of different tools for different jobs (which most modern companies do), this is a major issue.

Think about it: where does all your company's knowledge actually live? Your product team documents new features in Confluence. Your support team solves tough customer problems in Zendesk and brainstorms solutions in Slack. HubSpot's AI can't see or learn from any of that. This seriously cramps its style when it comes to answering questions that go beyond basic marketing or sales info.

This is what makes a tool like eesel AI fundamentally different. It was designed specifically to connect with the apps you're already using. With over 100 one-click integrations, eesel AI pulls your entire knowledge base together, so it can give helpful, context-aware answers without making you move everything to one closed-off platform.

Limitation 2: The steep on-ramp and lack of flexibility

Deciding to go with HubSpot is a big commitment. The high starting costs, non-negotiable onboarding fees in the thousands, and typical annual contracts mean you're making a huge investment of time and money before you've even sent a single AI-powered email.

In contrast, eesel AI is built to be self-serve. You can sign up, connect your help desk, and have a working AI agent up and running in minutes, often without ever talking to a salesperson. The pricing is clear and straightforward, with no surprise fees per ticket resolved. And with flexible monthly plans, you can get started with much less cost and risk.

Limitation 3: A marketing tool, not a support automation engine

At the end of the day, HubSpot's AI was built for marketers and salespeople. Its features are all geared toward top-of-funnel stuff like generating leads and closing deals. It simply wasn't designed to handle the messy, unpredictable world of customer support.

It's missing the specialized tools that are essential for real support automation, like smart ticket routing, the ability to take actions in other apps (like looking up an order in Shopify), or a safe way to test your automations before they go live on real customers.

This is another spot where eesel AI's focus on support really makes a difference. Its workflow engine gives you complete control over how the AI behaves. And its simulation mode is a huge advantage. You can test your AI setup on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have performed. This gives you solid forecasts on how many tickets it will resolve and how much you'll save, letting you fine-tune everything before a customer ever interacts with it. That’s a level of confidence you just can’t get with HubSpot.

The verdict: Are HubSpot AI Draft Emails right for your team?

So, what's the bottom line? Should you use it? It really boils down to who you are and what job you need to get done.

It’s a good fit for: Teams that are already all-in on HubSpot. If your CRM, marketing, and sales all run on HubSpot and your main goal is to scale up your marketing email campaigns, then its AI tools will feel like a powerful and seamless upgrade to what you're already doing.

It’s not a good fit for: Customer support teams, IT help desks, or any business that depends on a variety of best-in-class tools. For these teams, HubSpot's AI is too locked down, too expensive, and missing the key integrations and support-focused features needed to actually move the needle. If you need real support automation, you need a tool that plays well with your other systems, not one that tries to replace them.

The future of AI in support is connected, not siloed

While HubSpot AI Draft Emails offer some genuinely cool features for marketers, their usefulness is tied directly to the HubSpot platform. This "walled garden" approach might have worked in the past, but it's starting to feel out of step with how modern teams work.

The smartest AI tools don't force you to abandon the apps your team already knows and loves. They work by connecting your scattered knowledge sources into one intelligent brain that can be tapped into from anywhere. Choosing the right AI partner isn’t about finding a bigger platform to get locked into; it’s about finding one that makes your current setup better, offers clear value, and gives you the control you need to automate with confidence.

If you're looking for an AI solution that plugs into your existing help desk and knowledge bases in minutes, not months, give eesel AI a try. See how companies are automating their frontline support by connecting the tools they already use.