So I had/have this problem with a client that uses HubSpot for CMS, Sales, and Marketing. I found (as others shared on this thread) that more than 1 of the shared IPs were on the blocklist. I did a few tests with MailChimp and found much better deliverability. They use HubSpot for everything so migrating off HubSpot was a big decision.
We ended up subscribing to a private IP and using MailChimp until it was warmed up. It still isn’t great, but it is MUCH better than the shared IP. We still supplement with MailChimp for contacts that are considered unengaged by HubSpot. We also target those contacts through LinkedIn targeted ads trying to get them to engage.
It is really frustrating and asking the customers to allowlist the IP one-by-one is a non-starter. Hope this helps.
We’re having a similar experience. I got a dedicated HubSpot IP to try and get more of my emails delivered. In Mid-May, the number of unengaged emails shot through the roof! We have put the unengaged lists through MailChimp and had better success. In addition, I use a system called MailShake for cold email outreach (it’s designed for that) and I’m getting as good a response as my opt-in lists. The MailShake system has a bunch of rules for getting into inboxes and out of spam folders such as text only, no images, 2 links max, etc. I think email filters have changed and are blocking emails from MailChimp, HubSpot, etc. and blocking emails with images, too many links, etc.
We’re also retargeting with social media ads and RollWorks ads (B2B arm of AdRoll) which is helping.
We are having the same issue and have been asked to contact our clients IT departments to allowlist the shared hubspot IP address - this is the “solution” we were given (lol).
Other suggested solution was to buy a dedicated IP address from Hubspot.
We are using other platforms for communication with clients and addressed that are bouncing on Hubspot are not bouncing there. It is Hubspot’s problem but somehow they put it on paying customers to resolve.
Our customers are complaining that they are not receiving our emails.
The range of public HubSpot IP addresses that have a ‘bad reputation’ have been flagged as spam and prevent our emails from being received by our actual clients.
The ‘solution’ HubSpot provided us with is to purchase a ‘dedicated fixed IP address’ at a very high cost.
HubSpot is at the origin of a conceivable known issue by using public IPs of low reputation and decides to make clients pay for the solution at such a high price. How is that possible?
Do you know what’s the share of customers affected? If it’s less than 5-10% or only specific domains then this could be considered acceptable. Very few email marketing platforms that use shared email addresses successfully deliver more than 90% of emails (see here for stats).
If this affects only a subset of customers with a particular email domain or email service provider, then emails are being blocked or marked junk due to local settings or IP being blocklisted. But I hear you that asking your customers/prospects to do extra work to receive your emails is a tall order.
Have you tried asking Hubspot to move your account to a different IP (that perhaps won’t be blocked for these accounts)?
Alternatively, there’s the cumbersome setup of using another email tool in parallel for the affected domains/contacts. Many email tools have good integrations to Hubspot CRM, so this wouldn’t be a completely disjointed experience.
Also curious to know what impact they are seeing. A lot of blocklists may publish blocks on shared IPs but aren’t actually used by filtering services so they don’t cause any bounces.
If we notice higher than a 0.1% soft bounce rate for any blocklist then we will take action to delist the IP with that RBL (registered blocklist), and we will also work with the customer that caused them to block us in the first place. If necessary we will suspend them from emailing again to prevent it from happening again in the future.
In general though our overall delivery rate is always around 98% or more.
We have systems in plce to alert if drops occur and we take the same sort of actions to rectify the problem if that happens.
Dedicated Ip is great though, but only if your deliverability is better than our shared. If you do not have better contacts / engagement than the average customer on the shared then you should generally stay on the shared IPs. You also only really get value from a dedicated IP if you send over 20,000 emails per month.
We have had similar issues with email deliverability. The majority of our emails land in the Spam / Junk folder. We spend all this time working on email content, just for it to not be seen. Not cool, especially with HubSpot’s price tag.
@tymau16 if you are finding that your HubSpot marketing emails are going to the Spam folder you should open a support ticket to get some advice to address that. This is atypical for HubSpot users to experience. Our mean open rates for all customers is about 30%. If your portal experiences open rates less than this your domain is at risk for filtering to spam due to graymail.
If your open rate is anywhere from 15% or below I would look to this post for guidance how to address that issue.
In our situation, a large percentage of our emails were going to recipients behind moderately to significantly strict firewalls. Their IT staff’s rules for email filtering seemed to be the issue.
Since moving to a different provider for email campaigns, we’re no longer experiencing this issue.
I’ve been using HubSpot for 2 months and over half my database isn’t “engaged” anymore… One of our new customers wasn’t getting our emails and highlighted that the HubSpot emails weren’t getting through and were ending up in quarantine. Ugh. What provider did you switch to? Has it solved the issue?
The most common reason why emails are filtered is due to a low historical open rate associated with that sender (typically tied to the domain that is sending) for this reason you should stop sending to the group of contacts marked “unengaged”. By sending to these folks continuously over time, it drags your overall open rate downward and increased filtering (to the spam folder or other folders like “quarantine”) will result. For a plan to address this issue check out my other post on Graymail.
Have you checked Hubspot Apps Marketplace for email tools that integrate well with Hubspot? Should be easy to run a 50-50 test campaign, or use another tool for the “unengaged” segment only.