School Can't even send one-to-one emails after mass email blocked

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Hi Everyone,

I’m a parent volunteering to do marketing at my kids’ *very small* Montessori school (think less than 40 kids from infant through 8). I get contact lists from teachers after open houses and they *swear* the emails are good.

Apparently they are not. My free account has been locked and the only way to send email is one-to-one --- or so says the pop up. However, the sysetm won’t even allow me to send a one-to-one email via the template I created.

What am I doing wrong? I am not super-excited to send one-to-one emails to potential families, but I will, because it’s imortant and I want the school to keep growing. I also want to use the very nice looking template I set up to do so.

The pop up blocking my useage basically says “purchase” or “one-to-one”. Well, the school is so small they can’t affort even the starter version. The sysetm won’t let me do one-to-one. Are we stuck? Am I moving to Mail Chimp?

Any help is appreciated… Thanks!!

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Hey @CShaw73 what’s the exact error you’re seeing when trying to send mass emails to contacts?

My assumption is you sent to too many bounced contacts so HS would have blocked the email, temporarily.

You said you’re in starter, just to confirm, have you connected the email sending domains to your account?

If you’re starter, I’d honestly recomend reaching out to HS support too, to find out why your account was blocked from sending marketing emails and how to ensure it is no longer blocked.

One-to-one emails (IE sending an email from the contact record) is based around a connected email address and it’s inbox. One thing you want to be sure of is that the contact has not previously bounced, after that if there are issues sending, you should verify the inbox is correctly connected to the HubSpot account and you have access to that inbox. One to one emails are usually user based, so it would need to be the email your user within HS has connected.

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Hi there,

Thanks for the quick reply!

We are *not* on starter, actually. At least that I’m aware of. I am doing this on an ad-hoc, when I get a chance - don’t pay me just teach my kid basis, so sometimes when I login, I’m like, “Oh look! Hubspot changed stuff!”

We are on the free, free, super-free plan. We pay nothing. :slightly_smiling_face: And yes - the bounce/unsubs are high, but I can only work with what the teachers give me.

The exact error is:

Why was my account suspended?

We suspended your marketing email account on August 25, 2024 because your emails unsubscribe rate is 5.22%. When this rate is 2% or higher, your emails are not reaching your audience and your sender reputation may suffer. This also can impact other customers using HubSpot’s shared network. The suspension prevents emails from reaching invalid contacts and causing more hard bounces.

What are my account restrictions?

  • Marketing emails can’t be sent
  • One-to-one emails can be sent

What do I need to do?

You’ll need to review your email marketing contacts and confirm they gave verifiable permission to be sent marketing emails. Any contacts that didn’t give verifiable permission can’t be emailed using the marketing email tools. We will guide you through these steps. A member of our support team will then review and follow up with next steps.

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No one has followed up, probably because “As these steps require access to our support team, you’ll need to upgrade to a Starter account Upgrading does not guarantee that suspension will be lifted.”

So, I very dillegently went through and pulled out all the emails and only left the emails sent in through the HubSpot contact form, not any that the teachers captured at an Open House.

Then I thought I’d try to just send myself (or another family member) a one-to-one as a test email. Nope. No dice. So then my idea was to send an email to the next person who we captured through the “contact us” form which sends us a HubSpot email (“new form collected on Hubspot…”) as they clearly want us to contact them, they just filled out the “contact us” form and gave us their email.

Nope. No dice here either. Can’t send an email (or at least my very nice template email) to them inviting them to schedule a tour of the school. And I did try from going right into the CRM and using said email address that literally was just submitted.

So… I’m sure some of it is User Error on my part, but I do wonder *why* I can’t send a one-to-one from someone who clearly sent in the HubSpot conact form. <Shrug.>

What am I missing? Thanks!

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Interesting! @CShaw73 what are you seeing when you try to send a 1:1 email? Is there a specific error or is the button just greyed out? Were you able to send 1:1 emails prior to the suspension?

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Thanks! Button just grayed out. And TBH, never *tried* to send 1:1 emails. Just 2-3 Open House emails to the teacher’s excel list (usually in coming phone calls) combined with HubSpot “contact us” email addresses per year. <Shrug>

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My hunch is that if it’s greyed out you likely don’t have your personal email connected to HubSpot. This would go through your email inbox and not a shared email sending server so should be fine if your marketing emails have been blocked.

@MiaSrebrnjak do you know if there’s any way for a free user to have their email sending unblocked?

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Huh. We have it set up so I get the emails to my inbox when someone fills out and submitts the contact form. So I would think it’s connected? But I am not marketing tech savvy. In the last century when I was doing all that stuff all the time, we were still on spreadsheets!!

I’ll fish around and see if I can look into that. Thanks for the suggestion.