I’m 39, recently graduated from college, and started my first marketing job this year. This is also my first time working professionally with email marketing. I inherited an established HubSpot email program that has struggled with high unsubscribe rates and list health, and improving it has become one of my primary responsibilities.
When I took over the program, there was a legacy newsletter subscription list that had been migrated from the company’s previous system into HubSpot. Over time, natural attrition, suppression, and disengagement had whittled that audience down from five-digit sends to nearly three digits by the time I inherited it.
I rebuilt the send logic using HubSpot’s send eligibility, the consent signals that were available in the CRM, such as prechecked subscription boxes and opt-out options, and recent activity/engagement. That significantly increased send volume again, and engagement has been strong.
The problem is that unsubscribe performance has not improved with it. If anything, unsubscribes are just as bad or worse.
That’s what pushed me to start looking beyond “who can technically receive this email?” and toward whether the underlying contact acquisition and consent model is the real issue.
Based on that, the three CRM data points giving me the most headaches right now are:
- HubSpot Marketing Contact status — because we’re a small company and I’ve learned that Marketing Contact status is required for some Sales-team functions, so I can’t treat it as purely a marketing designation.
- Actual marketing consent / awareness
- Current send eligibility
I think a lot of my current problems come from those three things being related, but not actually meaning the same thing.
And on top of that, attrition is now starting to eat into my send volume. I’m losing usable contacts faster than I’m replacing them, and I’m not sure how to responsibly replenish the audience from a much larger contact base that doesn’t have strong consent signals.
That’s really the point where I’m stuck. I don’t want to loosen my send logic just to make the list bigger, but I also don’t want to keep watching the usable audience shrink while I wait for perfect consent signals that may not exist in the legacy data.
I’ve made some progress trying to separate these concepts in the CRM, but this is the point where I feel like I’m getting beyond my experience level and I want to make sure I’m not solving one problem by creating another.
I’d really like to hear from people who have inherited a mature or messy HubSpot email program and had to rebuild the logic around consent, send eligibility, and Marketing Contact status.
What would you look at next? What would you be careful not to change too quickly? And if you were in my position, what would you prioritize first?