More email deliverability questions and answers from our webinar:
Question: Can you check the health of the emails sent by a particular person? (is there a filter?)
You can review your marketing email performance metrics in a number of places in your HubSpot account: your email dashboard (select ‘manage columns’ at the top of the table if you don’t see the performance metrics you are looking for), in the performance tab of each sent email, in a custom report (though you can currently only report on one metric per report), in reporting dashboards, or in the email health tool. Out of these reporting methods the email dashboard is the place to go to filter your sent emails and associated performance metrics by the HubSpot user that created the marketing email. Select more filters at the top of the dashboard and search for the user or teams you would like to filter by.
Question: If subscribers reply to emails, does this impact future deliverability?
Replies are considered positive engagement with your email so should be a positive factor when Inbox Providers are determining sender reputation for future inbox placement.
Question: How many hyperlinks (for clicking) are too many in an email?
From a deliverability perspective, there is no set number I can give you here, spam filters will vary and don’t tell us how they are configured. Spam filters may filter emails with an excessive number of links (more links than content or more than they see on average), links that are shortened, or links that are misleading (URL shown is not the URL the link points to.) Inbox Providers may also interpret a large number of links in an email as a signal that an email is promotional and therefore divert your email to the Promotional Tab.
From an engagement perspective, you should have as many links as are useful for your reader, but at minimum, I would say most marketing emails would have three, one view in browser link, one unsubscribe link, and one call to action link. In your main content body, some would argue to use only one call to action link to focus your reader on converting or taking the one action you most want them to take, but in practice, we see readers will click on multiple links if the content is trusted, relevant, and valuable to them. I would say put your most compelling call to action link closer to the top of your email and only include more links in your email if they are on topic for your segment of readers and they will add value for your reader. Remember your email isn’t a website so it shouldn’t contain extensive amounts of content or links, provide a summary of your message, the benefit to the reader, and then link to a more comprehensive resource.
Ultimately, keeping an eye on delivery and engagement metrics and A/B testing emails with varying amounts of links will tell you what’s right for your audience.
Question: Is there any impact of inbox clients blocking tracking images, or do you tend to ignore that and focus on click-through anyway?
If Inbox Providers block a tracking pixel image we won’t know if the email is opened, which can mean your open rate metrics don’t capture all actual opens, but this shouldn’t impact tracked links which pass through a redirect to track the link click. There are a number of factors which can make open rate a less reliable metric of overall email performance nowadays so I tend to look at the trend of open rate over time as an indication of improving or worsening performance compared to your own past performance (rather than an absolute indication of whether your emails are being delivered or if your subject lines are compelling.)
If your open rates are far below recommended benchmarks I would still do some further list segmentation and subject line testing to see if you can improve them. But ultimately, if your emails are getting clicked you know they are getting opened so it is a great metric to add some context to your open rates and a great indication that your emails are driving engagement.