Bounced leads

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
1

Hello!

We use HubSpot for sales management but send marketing emails through another platform. Recently, we received a list of bounced emails and need help cleaning our HubSpot database.

Could you please advise on best practices for updating or removing these leads?

2

Hi @TVaz,

First of all, you don’t want to import these into HubSpot. If you’re using the free CRM, this might lead to your account being suspended.

If these contacts have bounced, there are a few things you could do:

  1. If you want to validate the bounce, you can use tools like EmailHippo, Neverbounce, Zerobounce, Verifalia etc. These tools check whether an email address exists. That way you can verify whether the email address has bounced just for your marketing tool (this could be a reputation issue) or whether the email is definitely and in fact invalid.
  2. If some contacts come back as good from validation, you would have to work with your email platform provider to better understand how you can avoid bounces and increase deliverability. HubSpot, for example, offers various standards of authentication to avoid false positive bounces: Manage your email authentication
  3. If all contacts come back as invalid or if you skip step 1, you would to come to a conclusion how important these contacts are to you. If these are opportunities and customers, for example, you would want your account managers to find out if these contacts left the company and who their successor is. This means picking up the phone or contacting people on LinkedIn.
  4. If these are early-funnel newsletter subscribers, or generally unqualified contacts, you would probably simply delete these contacts as step 3 is not worth the effort.

Let me know if I understood your query correctly and if you have any follow-up questions!

3

Hi Karsten!

Thank you for replying. I am not using the free CRM. However, the issue is that we just have the Sales Hub but not the Marketing Hub, which means any marketing campaign (like email marketing) does not happen on HubSpot. So I need to find a way to update my HubSpot contacts (like remove the emails that hard bounced from my marketing emails, for example).

4

@TVaz if I understand correctly, you have identified marketing contacts that bounced in another system and want to remove those contacts from your CRM in HubSpot to remove them from your sales activities, correct?

If so, you can import an opt out list

This will allow you to identify them in the CRM without worrying about the implications of importing bounced contacts.