Marketing Emails Low Open Rate vs. Sequence Emails

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Sales Email
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Why do my marketing emails have a significantly lower open rate than my sequence emails? I contacted HubSpot and they said it’s because HubSpot sends marketing emails through HubSpot and not through your email directly like sequences do.

Anyone know how to fix this? Anyone have this issue too?

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Hi @CKoufaty,

Happy to help here. There are multiple reasons for this:

  • Sales emails are more often seen as sent by a human and usually also have more aggressive subject lines. Marketing emails are considered more unpersonal. Recipients are looking for authentic, true interactions so it’s likely that they interact more with what looks like communication from a human, even if that’s not the case and both is automation.
  • Email service providers are more likely to put a marketing email in the promotion or spam tab than a sales email, simply because one looks like it’s sent in bulk, the other isn’t.
  • Sales emails are sent through the personal connected inbox, marketing emails through a connected marketing email domain which can have a sending reputation that is worse than that of a personal connected inbox. A lower reputation means that deliverability can be worse with fewer emails reaching recipients.

In terms of what you can do to increase deliverability of marketing emails, I’ve compiled this before in other threads.

This is a common problem, unfortunately. Could you confirm that you have connected your email sending domain and set up email authentification (SPF, DMARC)? Both are considered best practice and should help with your email deliverability and would be the first steps towards better deliverability.

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:

Connect your email sending domain

Use a DMARC policy with HubSpot

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

Avoid as many spam trigger words as possible

Test the spammyness of your email

@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.

Before I finish my reply, can you confirm that you’re comparing sales emails and marketing emails with the exact same content? If not, there is a high likelihood that the subject lines and email body content influence the metrics as well, see my initiat bullet points. You could only truly compare the performance of both if you sent the exact same content.

Best regards!