I have set up HubSpot email sequences via Workflows for a list that’s around 600 people.
Until mid-November, things look fairly good and we were constantly optimizing the emails to garner better KPIs - and it was working.
But around mid November, open rates had SUDDENLY started to decline.
And this is the case ONLY with the marketing emails being sent via the Workflows. The open rates for manual emails (sent to each individual contact) are still great and in fact getting better.
To illustrate with an example:
Contact X recieves 5 marketing emails in a week. Opens none. Exactly the same next week.
Contact X gets 2 manual emails the same week. Open boths. Receives two more next week, opens both.
I think this is a clear indication that our marketing emails are landing in spam, whereas the manual ones are making it to their main inbox.
Can someone please help me figure out what’s happening and why?
Sales and marketing emails are sent fundamentally differently in HubSpot, once via a connected personal inbox (authorizing HubSpot to send emails via that individual inbox), the other in bulk via an authenticated email sending domain: Manage your email authentication
Due to this technical difference, it’s not surprising that these emails behave differently. Marketing emails are sent in bulk and carry a higher risk of being promotional or spammy to receiving email service providers than individually sent emails.
Getting bulk email delivery right can be tricky. Can you confirm that you’ve authenticated your email sending domain as described in the article? (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
In general, similar to SEO, you want to try to pass on as many positive signals about your content as possible. The eventual decision what to do with that content rests with the service provider. With that in mind, here is a list of things that I’d recommend reviewing:
[…]
Only email contacts who for whom you have a legal basis to communicate
Validate emails before sending to avoid hard bounces at all costs (e.g. Neverbounce, Zerobounce)
Remove unengaged contacts from list regularly for higher engagement rates
@kaburke wrote an excellent email deliverability listicle and @natsumimori also compiled a lot of great resources here. I highly recommend you check out both. Over time, email service providers should recognize you as a trustworthy sender. The issue could be that in the past, some recipients have already marked your emails as spam or that email service providers noticed high bounce rates from you.