We have recently sent out our quarterly marketing email for December and Hubspot have stopped it, stipulating a really high hard bounce rate. A lot of these emails are for current staff member’s email addresses, but a few are not as well.
We do not have any issues with out opt-outs, and although we only send marketing emails 3-4 times per year, our contacts aren’t “stale”.
We are concerned that our account is at risk of being permanently suspended, and we’re not entirely sure what physical steps we can take next to ensure this is avoided. We have read all the materials on the knowledge hub pages, which are all great recommendations, but is there an actual number of steps we must take within our account to avoid suspension?
It would be great if someone could take a deeper look at this for us and advise accordingly.
The HubSpot platform will automatically stop a send that exceeds acceptable bounce, unsubscribe or spam complaint limits. Exceeding these limits can also result in susoension of the marketing email tools. High rates of bounces will negataively impact your brand’s ability to reach the primary inbox in the future, and degrade HubSpot’s shared email sending network.
To avoid further high bounce rates, we suggest implementing a 3rd party validation platform like Kickbox. Use of an email validation vendor will help you to identufy which contacts in your database are no longer active so they can be removed or opted out of HubSpot before your next send, which will in turn help to avoid high bounce rates and further exceeding acceptable limits.
We understand that there are parameters in place for high hard bounces (and rightly so), however we’re not sure why we have had so many hard bounces occur. Our list is clean and up to date, everyone is opted in. We think there must be another reason we’ve had so many hard bounces in one sitting, as this has not happened with previous emails to the same list. We wondered if it might be a domain issue as we do have a lot of staff on the list (with the same domain name as that of the sending email address).
So our main questions are;
1. How do we figure out why we have had so many hard bounces on a list that is current and clean.
2. What actual steps do we need to take for Hubspot to not permanently suspend the email marketing tool on the account?
We are concerned that going into the Christmas period, we won’t have time to implement any specific steps Hubspot requires us to take to ensure that the account isn’t suspended, so if you are able to list these below that would be much appreciated.
So far we have been given recommendations and suggestions as well as links to knowledge hub pages that detail ways to avoid the hard bounce issue from happening again, but what we really need to know is what we can do now to ensure HubSpot is satisfied that we have rectified issues moving forward. If it’s automated, how will the system know what we’ve done to rectify future issues?
You can see the codes and details that are returned with each bounce by navigating to Recipients > Bounced from the post send screen of a send that resulted in a high bounce rate. Clicking on a bounced contact from this view will reveal additonal information, and more details on each bounce type can be found here. You can use the bounce codes to understand why contacts bounced and what needs to be addressed to prevent more bounces of that type from occuring.
HubSpot’s platform level protection actions will display warning banner messages and/or suspend an account based on the account’s overall cumulative metrics. Accounts are assessed on a rolling time basis. If future sends are healthy and do not exceed acceptable limits, your account will not be at risk of suspenson. Sending messaages that result in healthy limits for negative enagement will result in the warning banner being removed once the account has returned to a healthy status.
Hi Haileu,
Did you ever find a solution to your question?
One hypothesis: if the campaign that caused a lot of bounces was sent around 15th of December, this could be related to the Gmail / G Suite global outage. All campaigns and email tools experienced high bounce rates around that date, and any “hard bounces” would have needed manual treatment to revoke automatic unsubscribes.