Marketing emails going into Outlook junk folders inconsistently

Hello

In April this year we moved to Hubspot CRM for sending our bulk emails. We are a trade body with c1500 member contacts. We include ourselves (as contacts) in our mailing lists, just so we can see what is being sent out etc. Some of the Hubspot emails are going into our own junk folders in Outlook and judging by the open rates (lower than 5%) we are concerned they are also going into member’s junk folders. Our average open rates are generally 20%+ The emails don’t behave consistently. An email today went into my junk folder, but the same email went into a colleagues main inbox. We use Office 365 and Outlook via the desktop app for our own emails.

Hubspot support are saying it is an Outlook issue. See below from their support chat.

We have done all the authentication checks and they are all good.

Any ideas or advice from other users as to how to get around this?

Thanks in advance.
The internal team shared some feedback, and they shared that if we take a close look at the headers, we see several instances of “received from”.

This means there are multiple “security hops”, handing over the email from HubSpot to Outlook, and Outlook performs its own checks:

xxxxxx

From the above, we can see that Outlook received the email, and the hops may cause authentication and alignment to break, causing the message reported here.

I verified their email sending domain and everything’s in order, and authentication is working from our end.

Hi @AbbyWP
Outlook can junk HubSpot emails even with SPF/DKIM/DMARC set up, which is why yours might land in Junk while a colleague’s hits the Inbox. The “received from” hops are normal, but they sometimes make Outlook stricter, and your low open rate does suggest members are being filtered too. Best bet is to send from your own authenticated domain and ask IT to allowlist HubSpot IPs in Office 365 so your test copies don’t skew the picture.