Email Deliverability

ukitservice
Member

Bounce rates

SOLVE

Hi Jenny,

 

Have another question relating to email marketing bounced emails:

 

Looking at one of the Hubspot articals, we found that:

"HubSpot automatically does not send to contacts that have bounced previously for a permanent reason... There is no need to filter or delete these contacts to prevent sending to them."

 

However,  after sending our first email marketing, we now have this message:

"Your average hard bounce rate is high. You'll need to take the actions outlined below to lower your bounce rate.
If you don't take any action, your email account will be locked, and you'll no longer be able to send emails.

1. Import opt-out list

2. Remove stale contacts"

 

This seems to be contridicting...

 

Can you please advise?

 

Thanks

 

0 Upvotes
1 Accepted solution
Zakiya
Solution
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Bounce rates

SOLVE

Hi ukitservice,

 

Happy to chime in here from the HubSpot Email Deliverability team! 

It is good practice to always be cleaning up your contact lists of old, stale, unengaged, or otherwise undeliverable email addresses to prevent hard bounces and other negative impact to your sender reputation and deliverability, as well as that of the HubSpot network. 

 

Our automated abuse prevention system, Deliverability Protection, is always working behind the scenes to help protect deliverability rates. For example, we only send a portion of each email campaign to gauge the hard bounce rate. If the rate exceeds acceptable industry thresholds the send is stopped to prevent further damage. When hard bounces do occur, HubSpot will drop those addresses from future sends as they have been determined to be ineligible to receive email. No sense in allowing you to continue sending to known invalid and ineligible addresses! Learn more about Deliverability Protection here.

 

While we have these protection mechanisms in place, they are not intended to be used to clean up a marketing list by sending to see how many addresses will go through. That is by no means a healthy way of managing your lists and is a fast and easy way to tank your sender reputation. Not to mention email suspension. A better approach is to regularly clean up your contact lists to prevent hard bounces from occurring:

 

  • If you are moving from one email-marketing service provider to HubSpot, be sure to import all previous hard bounces, unsubscribes, or spam complaints from the old system as an opt-out... This will ensure those contacts are not accidently sent mail on HubSpot.
  • All new contacts and the remaining contacts in the database will need to have granted your organization explicit, verifiable permission to send them marketing email. Confirmed opted-in contacts are less likely to hard bounce, unsubscribe, mark your mail as spam, or worse. 
  • Utilize a third-party validation service, like Kickbox, to further identify and remove invalid contacts from your database. Services like this one should only be used for already confirmed opted-in contacts and would be a great addition to your list maintenance strategy. 

Hope this helps!

- Zakiya

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6 Replies 6
Phil_Vallender
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner

Bounce rates

SOLVE

Hi @ukitservice 

 

Rather than being contradictory, these are two sides of the same system. 

 

If you, or any other HubSpot user, imports a list of contacts that have never been seen before by HubSpot and then send them an email, a large number of bounces can adversely affect their sender reputation and, subsequently, your deliverability and that of other uses. If they see this happening with an email send, they have to take quick action.

 

These contacts, and the few others that will invariably bounce every now and then, are then proactively removed from everyone's sends, to further ensure high deliverability for all. 

 

Hope this helps.

Phil Vallender | HubSpot Website Agency
ukitservice
Member

Bounce rates

SOLVE

Hi Phil,

 

Thanks for clarifying that.

 

So do we need to do anything?

But I'm still not sure what to do..

 

Hubspot is asking us to:

1. Import opt-out list

2. Remove stale contacts

 

But where do we import the opt-out list from (if its already in our list?)

And why its asking to remove contacts when its actually doing it automatically?

 
Thanks
0 Upvotes
Zakiya
Solution
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Bounce rates

SOLVE

Hi ukitservice,

 

Happy to chime in here from the HubSpot Email Deliverability team! 

It is good practice to always be cleaning up your contact lists of old, stale, unengaged, or otherwise undeliverable email addresses to prevent hard bounces and other negative impact to your sender reputation and deliverability, as well as that of the HubSpot network. 

 

Our automated abuse prevention system, Deliverability Protection, is always working behind the scenes to help protect deliverability rates. For example, we only send a portion of each email campaign to gauge the hard bounce rate. If the rate exceeds acceptable industry thresholds the send is stopped to prevent further damage. When hard bounces do occur, HubSpot will drop those addresses from future sends as they have been determined to be ineligible to receive email. No sense in allowing you to continue sending to known invalid and ineligible addresses! Learn more about Deliverability Protection here.

 

While we have these protection mechanisms in place, they are not intended to be used to clean up a marketing list by sending to see how many addresses will go through. That is by no means a healthy way of managing your lists and is a fast and easy way to tank your sender reputation. Not to mention email suspension. A better approach is to regularly clean up your contact lists to prevent hard bounces from occurring:

 

  • If you are moving from one email-marketing service provider to HubSpot, be sure to import all previous hard bounces, unsubscribes, or spam complaints from the old system as an opt-out... This will ensure those contacts are not accidently sent mail on HubSpot.
  • All new contacts and the remaining contacts in the database will need to have granted your organization explicit, verifiable permission to send them marketing email. Confirmed opted-in contacts are less likely to hard bounce, unsubscribe, mark your mail as spam, or worse. 
  • Utilize a third-party validation service, like Kickbox, to further identify and remove invalid contacts from your database. Services like this one should only be used for already confirmed opted-in contacts and would be a great addition to your list maintenance strategy. 

Hope this helps!

- Zakiya

MSerenaHotels
Member

Bounce rates

SOLVE

Hi,

 

So we have an email list from all people who actually write down their email for us. Of course sometimes people get fake emails or we enter into our system incorrectly and thus the emails would bounce. I uploaded an email list and sent via Hubspot. The email send was stopped due to high bounce rate. Per Hubspot's reecommnedation, I used Kickbox to cleanse my list. I uploaded the clean list to Hubspot and sent an email to that list. I received the "Your average stopped sends rate is high" message and most of the emails did not go through and are now labeled as Quarantined. The message goes on to say that I need to either 1) Include and opt out list or 2) Remove stale contacts. This was my 1st email send so these are not applicable. These emails were captured with consent. No they have given consent and were deemed valid by Kickbox and I still cannot send. This email send was for the English version. I never sent the Spanish version previously, but the Spanish version with a clean list went through no problem. So it seems like the fact that I sent the first email I sent before cleaning is causing issues with all email addresses in that first send even after they were deemed clean by Kickbox.

 

Can you help?

 

Thanks,

Matt

0 Upvotes
ukitservice
Member

Bounce rates

SOLVE

Hi,

 

Thanks for the detailed info, but again, it does not explaine why Hubspot is asking us to delete stale contacts where in fact it also says that it will delete it automtically..

 

Can you please let me know if we need to go ahead and do this:

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/contacts/how-can-i-delete-contacts-who-have-unsub...

 

Thanks

 

0 Upvotes
Zakiya
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Bounce rates

SOLVE

Hi @ukitservice, happy to clarify!

 

HubSpot does not automatically delete contacts on your behalf. Instead, we systematically suppress hard bounced contacts from future sends so as to prevent additional sends to a known invalid address. Suppression simply means the contacts are disqualified and dropped from marketing email going forward. This happens after a contact hard bounces. Each time a contact hard bounces your sender reputation is negatively impacted, making it that much more difficult to reach the primary inbox of healthy contacts that want to hear from you.

 

Ideally, the goal is to avoid incurring hard bounces by maintaining clean and healthy contact lists. While HubSpot suppresses hard bounces from future sends, strategic database management (i.e., regularly cleaning the contacts database of old, stale, and unengaged contacts) is up to the user. In other words, we cannot predict which contacts are invalid or will hard bounce and automate their removal. Relying on the system to do that work for you may result in excessively high hard bounce rates, which can potentially cause email sending to be suspended in the account.

 

It is not necessary to remove the already hard bounced contacts from your database as they are no longer eligible to receive marketing email. However, I would recommend checking out the minimum criteria to send email using HubSpot and recommendations above to prevent further hard bounces.

 

- Zakiya