Purchasing a list with a high bounce rate

Marketing & Content Hub Email Marketing Tool
1

The company that I work for will occasionally purchase a list of leads from a third party to send out through HubSpot. I experienced an issue where our bounce rate was too high with a purchased list and the email was stopped.

I contacted the company that we purchase lists through and had this response:

"Thank you for reaching out and the issue is not with the list.

The issue is the platform you’re using. Have you read of the T&C’s regarding your platform and purchased/3rd party lists? Also Hubspot doesn’t rotate IP addresses and it not a proper e-mail marketing platform. I would recommend Clickback or Hot Sol."

Is this issue with the IP address, or with the purchased list?

2

Hi @TStockmaster,

That explanation doesn’t make any sense. Rotating IP addresses wouldn’t prevent a bounce, unless all of the hard bounce reasons you’re seeing are due to policy, see here: Email bounce types

What’s more likely and what I see more often when someone brings in a purchased list is that most bounces are due to the reason “Unknown user”, meaning that your list provider is likely selling you outdated email addresses. These contacts have probably left their company and moved on to another one.

(If you’re seeing other reasons, let me know. Happy to provide some educated guesses as to what might be happening in that case.)

Regarding this…

Hubspot […] it not a proper e-mail marketing platform.

HubSpot is currently the leading marketing automation platform as ranked by the world’s leading software peer-to-peer review site, which includes email marketing: https://www.g2.com/categories/marketing-automation

In other words, the HubSpot assessment of your list seller alone should be a red flag.

Email marketing is not about finding a tool that gives you the best access to inboxes of contacts you haven’t had a prior relationship to. In my opinion, that’s a hit-and-run-mentality which likely won’t get anyone very far. Email service providers like Gmail, Microsoft etc have an interest to protect their customers from anything that has a high likelihood of being irrelevant – which is usually the case for purchased contacts.

Keep in mind that purchasing contacts is generally not considered a good practice. It’s also violating HubSpot acceptable use policy and might lead to the suspension of your portal, see here: Understand email sending in HubSpot

I know that this is probably not what you want to hear but that would be the official answer.

(Let’s assume that these were contacts you had a prior relationship to and you want to avoid bounces, I’d recommend looking into email validation tools to validate the contacts before you email them, for example Neverbounce, EmailHippo, Zerobounce etc. This would theoretically also be a way to verify what a list seller is telling you. If the validation tool comes back saying that a large part of the email list is bad, you know it’s not HubSpot. It’s your list seller.)

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!