Discrepancy between Hubspot and Debounce deliverability data

[bassic]

Hi there, 

We have recently run the emails on our CRM which are according to Hubspot hard bounces through Debounce. 

Almost half of the hard bounced emails according to Hubspot were flagged as deliverable by Debounce (in our case 5k contacts). 

Hard bounce reasons according to HS are varied there are all Spam, Policy, Unknown User, and Mailbox full.

As we cannot mass unbounce, we are quite much struggling with the next steps.

What would the community recommend?

[MiaSrebrnjak · Accepted solution]

Hi @bassic, 

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! We understand your concern that you're not making the most out of your lead base. Because email deliverability is a complex topic there can be differences in how ESPs approach deliverability rate protection and bounce policies. One of the protective measures HubSpot has in place is cross-checking deliverability data across different HubSpot accounts: the software will automatically drop contacts from future emails if an email address bounces across three HubSpot accounts. There are a couple of other reasons why a contact may be marked as bounced in HubSpot, you can read more about different bounce errors in this Knowledge base article. The discrepancy with the Unbounce data may stem from the measures HubSpot has in place to protect deliverability rates.

To be able to pinpoint what causes this difference we would need to check the contacts on a case-by-case basis. Our customers can work with Support to understand why a contact is marked as bounced in HubSpot. I would therefore recommend creating a ticket for our Technical Support, including a list of bounced contacts and also the audit you performed in Unbounce. 

I hope this helps!

Mia

Community Team 

[JStevens1]

This is 100% a thing - I don't trust their automated bounce detection at all - not only is it wrong but there's also no indicator to leverage for segmentation if someone is on the global list. 

[DeliveryByJess · Accepted solution]

Hello @bassic ,

Please note that the HubSpot platform is not boucing contacts and does not have control over is a message can be delivered or if it bounces.  A bounce is a signal from the recipient mail server that the message was rejected within the SMTP exchange.  HubSpot is simply displaying the bounce message received from the recipient email server in the HubSpot app. 

Email validition services can only help to prevent UNKNOWN_USER bounces. A validation service checks to see if an address is valid, but cannot help to predict bounces for other reasons like SPAM or POLICY.  You can review a helpful document on the various bounce reasons that can be received from a recipien...

Even when it comes to UNKNOWN_USER bounces, no email validation vendor is perfect. Contacts marked as deliverabile from a validation vendor may still bounce with an UNKNOWN_USER code attached or for other reasons that cannot be detected by valdiaiton software. 

[bassic]

Thanks for the clarification. This is a valid point. 

It is wrong to compare Spam or Policy related hardbounces. Hubspot has more robust information data for these cases. 

In our case, we also had a fair bit of unknown_user bounces though. 

[bassic]

Hi @JelaniCartfuel & @karstenkoehler 

Thanks for the kind answers.

Our mail domain is not on a blocklist, at least according to the MXToolbox and it is a warmed-up domain.

This situation is affecting a small subset of our CRM. We are constantly sending >200k/mo emails with good open rates (38.47%) and low hard bounce rates (0.07%).

We just want to be sure that we make most of our lead base, I guess as a next step we will reach out to Debounce to understand what might be causing this dicrepancy.

That said it feels like there has been at least one previous thread on the topic: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Email-Marketing-Tool/how-reliable-are-hubspot-s-global-bounces/td-p... 

I would be really glad if someone from the Hubspot team comments on the topic.

[MiaSrebrnjak · Accepted solution]

Hi @bassic, 

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! We understand your concern that you're not making the most out of your lead base. Because email deliverability is a complex topic there can be differences in how ESPs approach deliverability rate protection and bounce policies. One of the protective measures HubSpot has in place is cross-checking deliverability data across different HubSpot accounts: the software will automatically drop contacts from future emails if an email address bounces across three HubSpot accounts. There are a couple of other reasons why a contact may be marked as bounced in HubSpot, you can read more about different bounce errors in this Knowledge base article. The discrepancy with the Unbounce data may stem from the measures HubSpot has in place to protect deliverability rates.

To be able to pinpoint what causes this difference we would need to check the contacts on a case-by-case basis. Our customers can work with Support to understand why a contact is marked as bounced in HubSpot. I would therefore recommend creating a ticket for our Technical Support, including a list of bounced contacts and also the audit you performed in Unbounce. 

I hope this helps!

Mia

Community Team 

[JelaniCartfuel]

Like @karstenkoehler mentioned, was the emails you sent the first emails in a long time? 

How many emails did you send? Was it a new email that wasn't warmed up? 

Most of the time emails aren't delivered because your ESP flagged your address.

This usually happens because the email wasn't warmed up (IE: You sent a bunch of emails from an email address that is new ) 

OR because the type of emails you're sending are spam. 

If it was an older email address (IE: warmed up) and you aren't sending questionable emails, I would reach out to debounce to see what they recommend. 

In extreme cases you may not be able to get unflagged and the solution would be to start over. This has happened to a client of mine before and its no fun. I am sorry this is happening to you. 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @bassic,

First of all, sorry to hear this. Definitely a marketer's nightmare.

Was this the first send to all of these contacts after a long time?

Most email validation tools offer certain degrees of convervatism – if that's the case in Debounce as well, what level did you choose? This could've affected the number of bounces. In any case, I'd recommend reaching out to Debounce support about this as well. After all, it might be a bug.

I'd also recommend checking whether your email sending domain has been put on a blocklist. You can do at MXToolbox: https://mxtoolbox.com/blocklists.aspx

These are the steps I would take before thinking about unbouncing any contact in the tool. You're risking damaging your sending reputation further if email these bounced contacts again.

Best regards!