topic Cleaning List for Newsletter emails in Email Deliverability

Cleaning List for Newsletter emails

IArtsLtd — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 13:57:33 GMT

Hi, I tried to send our 1/4ly Newsletter to our clients but it apparantley had too many Dropped emails? (dont even know what that means!). I noticed that some of our recent clients are on that bounce list - not sure why as we have recently communicated with them? Also how do I clean this list? Shoud I just delete everyone and upload another list with 20 names at a time? I don't have an opt in list as we are new to a CRM and sending out emails. All we have is a list of emails from clients we have worked with over time. My package does not allow me to send out a pre-email to ask to subscribe. So not sure what to do?

Re: Cleaning List for Newsletter emails

karstenkoehler — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 14:24:45 GMT

Hi @IArtsLtd,

Could you check what the exact reasons were? You can do so by navigating to your marketing email and finding the Recipients tab. In there, you should see an "Not sent". For contacts in here, HubSpot should display a reason why the email was not sent:

One common here, as you already pointed out, is that the email has bounced. HubSpot will automatically exclude previous hard bounces – that's something that you do not need to take care of. (If you want to identify these contacts you can do so by creating lists and filtering for Email hard bounce reason, you'd be able to find these contacts.)

Now why did the emails to these contacts bounce?

When sending marketing emails, you're building a sender reputation over time. The receiving email service providers are looking at that reputation and deciding whether an email of yours should be rejected or not. Like SEO, you'll have to work hard and make sure you're following best practices to avoid this.

An email from your personal inbox might still go through to this contact. As you mentioned, with some of these contacts you were emailing recently. Sending an email through a personal inbox is however very different to sending an email via an email domain which has the aforementioned reputation.

Since this is a list that you built over time, some people might also simply have left their company. Their email inbox is now abandoned or deactivated, hence the bounce.

For an overview of this topic, I can recommend @kaburke's excellent email deliverability listicle, covering a lot of best practices. Most importantly, make sure you have connected your email sending domain and set up email authentification (SPF, DMARC).

Additionally, I'd recommend following these best practices. Doing so should improve your deliverability and decrease the number of bounces:

Only email contacts who for whom you have a legal basis to communicate

Validate emails before sending to avoid hard bounces at all costs (e.g. Neverbounce, Zerobounce)

Remove unengaged contacts from list regularly for higher engagement rates

Avoid and dance around as many spam trigger words as possible

Test the spammyness of your email

@natsumimori also compiled a lot of great resources here. Over time, email service providers should recognize you as a trustworthy sender. The issue could be that in the past, some recipients have already marked your emails as spam.

Best regards!

Re: Cleaning List for Newsletter emails

webdew — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 08:10:48 GMT

Hi @IArtsLtd ,

To clean up list you consider this resource --> https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email/how-to-clean-up-your-contact-lists-to-improve-deliverability

and if any contact has hard bounced you should probably delete them --> https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/how-can-i-delete-contacts-who-have-unsubscribed-or-hard-bounce

You can unbounce contacts that have bounced, I would not recommend to delete all the contacts and re-import.

I would suggest you to look at the existing lists and see which contacts have hard bounced. If you have hard bounced, you should delete the contact. On the other hand if it's a soft bounce, you can unbounce it if they have prior communication.

Hope this helps!

If we were able to answer your query, kindly help the community by marking it as a solution.

Thanks and Regards.

Re: Cleaning List for Newsletter emails

IArtsLtd — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 09:42:34 GMT

Many thanks for your response. I will have a read of the information you sent and try and break it down to try and understanding and see if it helps. This may take me weeks to sort out! Might resort to using my normal email address instead of HubSpot. Thanks again.