As a Customer Success Manager at HubSpot, I work with a lot of different customers who all share one goal: getting their emails seen and opened. Whether you’re nurturing leads, launching a new product or wanting to drive more engagement, email performance is critical to your success, and it starts with your email health.
This is where the Email Health Dashboard comes in. Trying to figure out how your email-sending reputation is doing or how you can improve open and deliverability rates? This is a great place to start.
What is the Email Health Dashboard?
Think of the Email Health Dashboard as your command centre for email deliverability. It helps you understand how inbox providers, such as Gmail or Outlook, perceive your emails based on how recipients engage with them.
You can find it in your HubSpot account by navigating to:
Marketing > Email > Health
This is where HubSpot evaluates your email performance across multiple categories and gives you an overall health grade:
- 1 - 2: Poor
- 3 - 4: Needs work
- 5 - 6: Okay
- 7 - 8: Good
- 8: Very good
- 9 - 10: Excellent
Here, you can also find a breakdown of your email performance across the following deliverability metrics:
- Open Rate
- Click-through rate
- Bounce rate
- Spam complaint rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
How to interpret insights from the Email Health Dashboard
Now you know where to find your email deliverability metrics, let’s take a look at each metric and how to interpret the insights given.
Open Rate
Although open rates might be less precise due to privacy updates, they still give you a strong signal of how engaged your contacts are. If your open rate is consistently below the benchmark, it could mean your emails are landing in spam or your subject lines aren’t grabbing your subscribers’ attention.
Small changes, such as A/B testing your subject lines or ensuring a good balance between extremely engaged and less engaged contacts, can lead to significant improvements in performance.
Click-Through Rate
Your click-through rate reveals how well your emails are driving action. If your click-through rate is low, even when your open rates are solid, it may be time to take another look at your calls-to-action or your content offer.
Are your CTAs clear, and do they provide enough value or urgency? The dashboard highlights which campaigns are underperforming, so you can test, recap and drive more meaningful engagement amongst your contacts.
Bounce Rate
A bounce rate is the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered. There are a couple of reasons your emails could be bouncing, but generally speaking, a high bounce rate (anything above 2%) usually means you’re sending to invalid or outdated email addresses. This
So, what can you do it fix it? Keeping your database clean is one of the easiest and most effective ways to protect your sender reputation and avoid high bounce rates. Make sure you’re regularly cleaning your contact lists and verifying newly added contacts before sending.
Spam Complaint Rate
If contacts are marking your emails as spam (even if it’s just a few), it’s a warning sign to inbox providers that your content might be unwanted or unexpected. Anything above 0.1% is a cause for concern.
To avoid a high spam complaint rate, make sure you’re only emailing contacts who have explicitly opted in. Use a clear sender name and subject line that matches your subscribers’ expectations, and make sure your “update preferences” button is visible to ensure your contacts can manage their preferences easily instead of hitting spam to avoid receiving your emails.
Unsubscribe Rate
While unsubscribe rates aren’t always bad (or at least, better than a spam complaint), a high rate suggests that your content isn’t resonating with your audience. If you’re seeing an unsubscribe rate of over 0.3%, it might be worth revisiting your content strategy or send frequency.
Take a look at which emails are driving the most unsubscribes and ask yourself: Are you segmenting your lists and tailoring your content to where contacts are in their journey? Make sure your content is personalised and well-targeted.
Turn recommendations into action
The dashboard is only as powerful as the actions you take after reviewing the insights. Here are some general, practical tips you can get started on right away:
- Clean and segment your lists
Start by reviewing your contact list and use filters to identify contacts who haven’t engaged in over 90 days, emails that have bounced or new subscribers with low interaction.
Consider suppressing these groups from broader sends and instead, using a re-engagement campaign to win them back or clear them out.
- Automate your list clean-up
Use workflows to help with cleaning up your remove contacts from static lists after a certain number of bounced emails or if they’ve stayed unengaged for months. Or automate and trigger re-engagement campaigns before unsubscribe rates spike.
Making sure your sending lists are clean over time prevents recurring issues with deliverability and protects your sending reputation.
- Test and optimise
Use A/B testing to experiment with different subject lines, preview texts and your content structure. You’d be surprised how much small changes can improve open and click rates if done consistently.
The Email Health Dashboards help you spot problems early on and take meaningful action. By checking your dashboard consistently and making tweaks accordingly, you’re not just protecting your sender reputation, you’re setting yourself up for better open rates, more engagement and stronger ROI from email as a channel.
If you haven’t checked your dashboard lately, now’s the perfect time to!
If you’d like to dive deeper into email deliverability, here are some resources to check out: