What are the most effective filters to use in an exclusion list to reduce hard bounces from marketing emails?
I have a list that has 2 filters: Email hard bounce reason is any of Other or Unknown user OR Marketing emails bounced is greater than 0 . It is a Active (dynamic) list and I exclude all contacts on this list from marketing emails.
In addition to this, I thought that HubSpot automatically blocked marketing emails from being sent to contacts that bounced in the past?
It seems like with all of these things enabled, the hard bounces should be severely limited. However, the numbers still seem high.
Hi @alexagatiss,
You’re correct, HubSpot will automatically exclude hard bounces that have occurred in HubSpot before - technically you do not have to create an exclusion list. (The preview of recipients in the email editor will show you that previously hard bounced contacts will not be included.)
If you’re still seeing new bounces on new sends, then these are addresses which have been deactivated since your previous sends (person left the company), not going through to senders with strict email policies etc.
There is no native way in HubSpot to prevent these in bulk before the fact. HubSpot will only find out about a bounce when it actually tries to deliver the email.
You would have to look into email validation tools like Kickbox, Zerobounce, Neverbounce, Verifalia. These will tell you if emails can still be reached before you launch a new send. Those coming back as bad from validation should go onto an exclusion list, yes.
Best regards
I would suggest changing your filter for marketing emails bounced to more than 2 or 3 times. Sometimes people have a full inbox, or the filters at their company are wonky- those aren’t hard bounces, so you can be a little more lenient.
I do recommend having an exclusion list, regardless of whether HubSpot will send to them or not. First of all, you won’t know what your actual sendable email list size is if you don’t put them as an exclusion. Depending on client that can be a sizeable chunk of people you thought you had in your list.
I recommend having an exclusion list by email preference type with the following:
- unsubscribed from all
- unsubscribed from the specific email preference this list is for
- email hard bounce reason is known (personal preference there)
- non-marketing contacts (or, put only marketing contacts in your inclusion list)
- anyone who hasn’t engaged more than 90 days ago (I prefer using this to HubSpot’s checkbox because I know all my total list sizes before I even build an email, but also then can put them into a re-engagement automation before marketing them unengaged and moving to a non-marketing contact)
Lastly, bots are growing in number and for some clients, having an email validation tool integrated right off the bat is a good idea- that’s in most of our clients’ exclusion lists also- the validation status. We like Kickbox the most at present.
Hope that helps!
@rebeccatravels I have to disagree on a few points here which - in my opinion - can lead to undesirable outcomes:
I would suggest changing your filter for marketing emails bounced to more than 2 or 3 times.
If a contact is unbounced, this property will still result in an exclusion. Filtering for “Email hard bounce reason is known” is the better option here.
First of all, you won’t know what your actual sendable email list size is if you don’t put them as an exclusion.
The send section will break this down even without an exclusion list:
non-marketing contacts (or, put only marketing contacts in your inclusion list)
Excluding non-marketing contacts in a list means that the sender will not notice if they accidentally forgot to mark certain contacts on the list as marketing contacts. I would always recommend to not add this as a list filter so that it can be fixed at the time of sending, if needed.
Have a great day!
Thanks for the feedback!
A few follow-ups:
- hard bounce is not the same as a marketing email bounced twice- those bounces aren’t all hard bounces. We do both of these criteria (as I recommended) as OR criteria, because we’ve seen repeatedly some bounces will repeat many times regardless of hard bounce criteria. Same segment here showing up to 26 bounces despite hard bounce is UNknown. We don’t keep sending after a few… I haven’t seen those stop bouncing after 3 which is why we exclude after more than 2.
- the send section is as you pointed out when you’ve built an email, which is exactly what I want to avoid. I want to know exactly what my mailable send list is at any given moment for key segments. I can send emails to 30k of xx segment or 40k of yy segment next Wednesday or in 2 weeks to announce a launch. I don’t want to wait until finding out when I build the email, I want clients to know when the plan their emails what that mailable segment is for the month. Building the segments out in advance makes that clear. We always know what our total mailable list size is for any segment, because we build it in.
- our mailable segments are all run through workflows as marketing contacts, so it’s not possible for us to miss someone manually. Any mailable segment criteria is run through as marketing contacts, and unmailable is marked non-marketing (unsub from all, hard bounce is known, marketing emails bounced more than 2) to avoid paying for names we can’t mass-market to…
As you can see, multiple approaches- you can decide what works for you! This is what works best for our team and our clients.
