AMA on Email Health and Deliverability [CLOSED]

[lalexander]

Want to boost your email open and click rates and reduce unsubscribes and hard bounces? Looking to keep your sending reputation healthy and ensure your emails reach the primary inbox?

On Tuesday, March 31, @DeliveryByJess , the lead of HubSpot's Email Deliverability Success Team, will join us to answer all of your questions on email health and deliverability. 

In her role, Jess works with customers and HubSpot employees around email deliverability best practices and education.

Some things you can ask Jess about:

• Recommendations for keeping your email lists clean
• Reducing hard bounces and unsubscribes
• Ensuring your emails reach your recipients' primary inboxes (not the spam folder)
• Boosting email open and click rates
• Improving a poor sender reputation

Start dropping your questions below now, and Jess will answer them on Tuesday!

[morganmcgee]

I subscribe to our customer emails using my personal Gmail address. When I receive those emails, I typically open them and click, so I am staying engaged. The other day, one of these emails went into my spam folder. Curious if you have any ideas as to why, espeically since I've been opening the others.

[DeliveryByJess]

@morganmcgee Big inbox providers like Google use a complex set of signals to make determinations on how mail is accepted and filtered from any sender.  The actions or inactions of some portion of Gmail contacts can and will impact how mail is placed for other Gmail users - this is why you may see mail filtered to spam even for engaged recipients like yourself.  Seeing a mail message delivered to spam in Gmail for recipients that have recently engaged indicates that the sender may have some negatave reputation history generated by too much negative engagement signal or too little postive engagement signal from other Gmail users.   

[BBVDMA]

Hi Jess,

• what tool(s) do you recommend that would allow us to really dig into our sender reputation, deliverability etc.?  (i.e. mxtoolbox, returnpath) .. but for folks on a budget?!
• Is HubSpot considering adding tools for us such as real-time email validation (i.e. email hippo) or deliverability stats.  It seems you have these for your support team.
• should we be understanding and reviewing DMARC?
• For email content;
  • still recommending only a couple of links? no images (i.e. logos)? etc.

[DeliveryByJess]

@BBVDMA 

what tool(s) do you recommend that would allow us to really dig into our sender reputation, deliverability etc.?  (i.e. mxtoolbox, returnpath) .. but for folks on a budget?!

• Here's the thing about sender reputation tools - they can only ever provide you with insight.  Each inbox provider and private mail server will use their own unique and secret set of criteria to determine how mail is accepted and filtered.  Bigger providers like Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo are using machine learning and their mail filtering systems are ever evoloving  to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape and new threats for email.   No provider will share their mail filtering "secret sauce" as if they did, both well meaning marketers and email bad actors alike would use that data to get around their systems. 
  
  For this reason, no reputation tool can accurately predict how any given provider or private mail server will deem the quality of a sender or their mail messages.  Google Postmater Tools is the only reccomendation I would make as this will provide you with some insight into how you mail sending elements are viewed by Google.  Keep in mind that the data from GPT only applies to Gmail contacts, and the insight provided by GPT is only a small view into the many factors a provider like Google will use when making a mail filtering decision.  
  
  The best place to get insight into how well your mail is performing for all providers is by tracking the engagemet data from your brand's mail sends.  The email analyze dashboard is an easy way to view your brand's overall mail engagement rates for mail sent from the HubSpot marketing tool.  Look for high rates of positive engagement (opens, clicks) and low rates of negataive engagement (unsubscribes, spam complaints, bounces) to get a good baseline on how your mail is performing, which will provide insigt into your brand's overall sender reputation.  Keep in mind that any mail sent across your brand's email sending domain will impact your brand's sender reputation with each inbox provder and private mail server.

Is HubSpot considering adding tools for us such as real-time email validation (i.e. email hippo) or deliverability stats.  It seems you have these for your support team.

• We don't have plans to add email validation services to our product offering.  HubSpot has minimum requirements when it comes to contacts that will be used in the marketing tool, and following these guidelines for all marketing contacts will greatly help to reduce bounces.  If you do need to use a list validation vendor, I would reccomend Kickbox.  Kickbox offers an integration with the HubSpot platform which makes it easy to use, and I have found that Kickbox has provided the best results when compared to other validation vendors.  Keep in mind that validation vendors can only help to determine if a contact is still valid - passing a validation check won't guarentee that a contact will not bounce or that sending mail to a contact won't negatively impact your brand's sender reputation. 

should we be understanding and reviewing DMARC?

• Every sender will have different needs when it comes to how they choose to authenticate their mail.  Not every sender will need to use a DMARC policy.  If your brand wishes to explore implementing a DMARC policy, I highly reccomend you parter with a DMARC focused vendor like Agari, Valimail or Dmarcian to help you to create and roll out a policy correctly and without impacting your current mail acceptance rates.  Note that a DMARC policy will apply to all mail sent using a domain, not just the mail sent from HubSpot.
  
  

For email content;

still recommending only a couple of links? no images (i.e. logos)? etc.

• The content of an email is only one factor in deliverability - but limiting links and messages can help.  This not only help to promote better inbox placement, but also can keep your subscribers engaged and focused on the primary objective of the message.  

[HadarS]

@rtruncale @thesnappingdog @folked @Bryan_Culver @cynthia_dunlop @DSV @ridingforlife You have all mentioned email marketing as a core part of your strategy in HubSpot. Do you have any questions for Jess on email health and deliverability?

[thesnappingdog]

Thanks @HadarS - this might be slightly off-topic BUT. 

Having an automated "quarantine" for hard-bounces would be awesome. Not just in a list that you can generate, but also down to quarantining the contacts out of your counts.

E.g the other week we figured out that out that oure relatively substantial database of people, there is a good % that are always hard bounces. But they still are part of our various lifecycle/segmentation lists, which gives us at first a distorted idea of audience size (we see 10K in a list, but realistically it's sent to 5K) -- It would be fantastic to have a default view in hubspot contacts / lists where the true number of your contacts is represented -- i.e the ones you can actually send smt to

And separately but related - A "quarantine" list that is actionable would be even better. For us, a huge source of business is when a current user leaves the company and goes on to a new place -- and they usually push for our product internally. So if we had a actionable list of hard bounces, we could always let our sales teams know that person X from customer company has left -> go find where they are at now. 

And yes. just realised this isn't even a question 😄

[DeliveryByJess]

Hi @thesnappingdog ,

Thanks for the feedback here!  We are currently investigating how we can better align our software and permissions for contacts, as well as better identifying within HubSpot which contacts are/should be eligable for marketing emails and those that are not that may be better used within the CRM and sales tools.  

A few things to clarify:

• Any contact that hard bounces from a marketing email send will be suppressed from receicing marleting emails moving forward.  So if you try to use a list with with 1000 recipients but 100 of those contacts have already hard bounced, the email will send to 900 recipients and the 100 ineligbale contacts will be dropped from the send and listed in the "not sent" section in the recipent's panel.  I like the idea of highlighting which contacts will be excluded from the send before it occurs, and I'll pass this suggestion along to the relevent teams with our Email Product Group. 
• We use the term and status of quarantine within the HubSpot platform for contact lists that are used for mutiple stopped sends, or lists that greatly exceed acceptable limits for bounces.  In some cases, contacts can also be quarantined at import if the list is highly likely to cause high bounce rates when compared to data across HubSpot's network.  You can read more about list quarantines here.  Since it sounds like you could benefit from a list or contact property that better identifies which contacts will be eligbale for a marketing send while one is being drafted, we'll have to think on another term to use here 🙂

[thesnappingdog]

Awesome @DeliveryByJess .  It's definitely something that comes up - especially since our Salesforce instance is 1-1 in sync with Hubspot, which of course means that we get contacts injected who may have never interacted with our website. So even there having a view / selection of contacts where there's at least one "last seen" field populated would be awesome :') 

This might be once again unrelated to email health but - a bulk creation tool for emails would be amazing. E.g templatising one email, and then populating it via HubDB or a .csv

We used to send out these regional monthly updates to Facebook all around the world, which meant at least 15 different emails per month, each having a slightly different body, sender, reply to address etc. That used to be a nightmare for my colleague - whole day went into it.. So I wrote a script that allows us to create emails by using spreadsheet rows 😄 1 day of work turned into 30 min of spreadsheet editing. Creating the emails took 10 seconds.

Guess what I'm saying here is - please also consider bulk operations and how those could be done within the UI 🙈

[Shane_Janssens]

Hi @thesnappingdog 

Thank you for the ideas and insight into your current process for building bulk email. This is definitely something on our radar and we are our teams are currently exploring what this might look like in the future. I will be sure to reach out as soon as we have something more to share with you. 

Best,

Shane

[HadarS]

@thesnappingdog Jess is mostly focused on email deliverability rather than the Email tool itself so I'll jump in here! One strategic recommendation I give customers is whether it makes sense to have a complete 1-1 of your SFDC-HS databases. Typically because cold-sourced sales leads or old leads get stored in SFDC, it's not the best idea to bring them into HubSpot as they likely will negatively impact email health and aren't technically opted in. In that sense, most customers I work with add new contacts into HubSpot and have the inclusion list sync those into SFDC. Then, they turn off the integration settings that allow new leads & contacts created in SDFC to be created in HubSpot. 

Regarding your idea: "E.g templatising one email, and then populating it via HubDB or a .csv", what might that look like when implemented? 

[thesnappingdog]

> Regarding your idea: "E.g templatising one email, and then populating it via HubDB or a .csv", what might that look like when implemented?

I can do a screencast of our workflow sometime soon. It would more less be a few steps: select template email, upload csv, create emails

[thesnappingdog]

@HadarS 

> Typically because cold-sourced sales leads or old leads get stored in SFDC, it's not the best idea to bring them into HubSpot as they likely will negatively impact email health and aren't technically opted in. 

I totally understand and agree with this. However, i can exclude the 'cold' contacts relatively easily. And by having a 1-1 sync from SF, i am able to progress accounts(with associated contacts) automatically in lifecycle as well as ping the account owners right away.

In an ideal world, our contact database would be as populated as possible under our target accounts/companies, and then whenever any of those people convert / do actions on the website, we don't have to send them as 'leads' to salesforce, instead we just flag the contact and progress the account. 

E.g 

[folked]

"....like the idea of highlighting which contacts will be excluded from the send before it occurs...."

Great idea!! Please include the reason why and a link to those contacts, like:

100 out of 1000 emails will not be sent (Go to contacts😞

- 40 previously hard bounced

- 20 no subscription consent

- 20 previously unsubscribed

etc.

[folked]

What's the best way to clean up hard bounced contacts if the bounce reason is "SPAM" or "Policy"?

[DeliveryByJess]

@folked 

The codes and details returned by a recipient's mail server when a message bounces can provide insight into what caused the bounce, and what may need to be changed or addressed to deliver to that contact on the nest message, if applicable.  Here's some details about what those bounce categories can mean:

SPAM: Something about the message and/or the sender is not seen favorably by the recipient's mail server.  When seeing SPAM bounces, I'd reccomend looking into recent sends to other contacts who share the same email provider or organization to look for clues - were there recent nagative engagement signals to these contacts, like spam complaints or unsubscribes?  Are contacts from the contact group showing low positive engagement?   Use these clues to help make a plan on how you can build positive reputation with the provider/org returning the spam bounces to prevent more from happening. 

POLICY:  POLICY bounces occur when something about the message or the sender does not meet the recipient's mail acceptance polcies.   POLICY bounces are more likely to occur for contacts within an organiztion/B2B addresses and less likely for consumer inboxes.  Every orgnaization will have different guardrails for what they expect to see from a sender when it comes to mail acceptance.  POLICY bounces will often come with details in the bounce, and those details can often point a sender to a webpage that lists the recipient's guidelines for how they expect to receive bulk communications.

When trying to re-send to any contact who has hard bounced (regardless of the reason) be sure to always do what you can to address and fix the root cause of the bounce before sending another messge to bounced contacts. 

[folked]

Hi Jess, what are best practices to hit the GMAIL primary inbox (instead of the promotion folder)?

[DeliveryByJess]

@folked 

There is no way to game the Big G's system.  Goolgle is training its users to use the promotional folder, and they wouldn't continue to levearge this feature within their email offerings if it wasn't being used by Gmail users.  Marketers need to learn to embrace the promotional folder - it's where Google wants to place promotional messages and where Gmail users are or will soon be looking for marketng emails.  Here's an artcile from Litmus that speaks to why the promotional folder isn't a bad thing.  

The quote that resonates with me the most from this artcile:

"The inbox belongs to the user, not to the marketer. So any efforts trying to force your emails to go where you think they should go are a waste of time."

The truth is that inbox provders like Google don't care about marketers and their goals for emails - their only goal is to create a great experince for their users.   One way Google apporachs the mail exeperince for Gmail users is by surfacing personal/1:1 messages by placing them in the primary tab, and moving promotional (ie: bulk marketing) messgaes into the promotional tab.  Instead of trying to get around this categorization, embrace it!

[cynthia_dunlop]

1. We deliver assets via a fulfillment email, so we often get one "junk" submission before they realize that and provide their actual email. Any tips for cleaning out the initial junk efficiently? 

2. Thoughts/experiences on using different subdomains to increase deliverability? 

[DeliveryByJess]

@cynthia_dunlop 

1. I’m not sure what you mean by “junk submission”.  Can you clarify?
2. Using a unique domain can allow a sender to partition their sender reputation for various reasons.  For example, a brand may choose to do their cold sales prospecting emails on a unique domain to shield their marketing sends/marketing domain  from the negative damage that cold prospecting can cause to sender reputation. I’ve also seen subdomains used for this purpose, but there is evidence that bigger providers (think Outlook/Microsoft, Gmail, Verizon/AOL) will transfer reputation from a primary domain to a subdomain.   If you do want to use a separate domain for some of your bulk mail sends, be sure that the domain is warmed up properly, as a domain with no sending reputation history will be seen as riskier than a domain with poor sending reputation history. Also be sure to think about how your contacts will perceive and react to getting mail from multiple domains in use across your brand - this may create a less than unified experience for them.  The best advice I can give is to try and align all of your mail sends to deliverability best practices to ensure each message sent has the best chances of reaching the primary inbox.

[cynthia_dunlop]

The first form submission uses an email like nope@noway.com. Then 1 minute later, they realize they need to provide a working email to receive the white paper / report / whatever they requested, and resubmit with the proper email.