topic Import of contacts – Risk for deliverability in Email Deliverability

Import of contacts – Risk for deliverability

sandrojenny — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 17:33:46 GMT

Hey Hubspotters

We host an event platform.

We now have a pretty large contact list (1,825 contacts) from another system, which we have imported into Hubspot.

Most of the contacts came from our Customer Service. Most of these contacts came about because the staff recorded free events for these customers.

Now the question arises, can we send these contacts our newsletter? Or is there too great a danger that too many unsubscriptions and spam reports will worsen the deliverability?

Can we try and simply remove the list if the test was negative?

Greetings
Sandro

Re: Import of contacts – Risk for deliverability

Ben_M — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 18:12:03 GMT

1,800 is not that large of a list. I actually did what you did not too long ago with a slightly larger list of about 40k contacts and have worked with lists up to the millions. Hubspot will typically recommend a service like Kickbox ( http://kickbox.io/ ) to verify that the emails are still good. But if they are recent and they been emailed in the past by your company which it sounds like is the case, then I wouldn't see any harm is sending them a new communication from your new email platform.

Re: Import of contacts – Risk for deliverability

Zakiya — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 15:49:31 GMT

Hi @sandrojenny,

Typically, high unsubscribe rates, bounces, and spam complaints occur when sending to an email list that is old, full of stale/unengaged contacts, and/or those who have not opted-in to receive marketing email from your organization to begin with. Deliverability issues almost always come down to the health of a contact list.

Before sending your newsletter from HubSpot, be sure to import an opt-out list of any contact that has previously hard bounced, unsubscribed, marked as spam or filed a direct complaint about your emails. Sending to these contacts from a new system will give the same result, which negatively impacts your sender reputation and deliverability.

It is also crucial (and required by HubSpot's Acceptable Use Policy) that you have explicit permission from the individuals on your list to send them marketing email. If there are any for whom your org does not have opt-in or perhaps lost track of opt-in, I'd steer clear of emailing them.

Before sending your first email newsletter from HubSpot, I'd also recommend cleaning up the contact list before you hit send. Check out this guide for some help identifying addresses that may need to be removed or opted-out. And as @Ben_M mentioned, Kickbox or another 3rd-party list validation service is super helpful in identifying addresses that are risky to email and no longer valid.

You can find some more information about what you should know about marketing email with HubSpot before your first send in this post!