List Hygeine Issues [HELP!]

[MaxGPT]

Just recently took over an email marketing role at this company and am discovering we have some data hygeine issues that are effecting our deliverability.  We have alot of incorrect email addresses and have been hitting spam traps on SORBS causing a blocklist.  I usually avoid sending to contacts who have not opened the last 11 marketing emails and we remove contacts at the end of the month that have been unengaged for 14+ sends.  What are some hygeine practices/lists or filters that you use that I can implement to help our deliverability/ability to hit inboxes.  It feels like every change I implement content wise makes absolutely no difference. 

[jforte]

Hey @MaxGPT 

I've built a not that symple lifecycle structure that would focus on the moment of each contact on the journey and their engagement with our brand.

1. Build a workflow to define your criteria of engaged contact
i.e: something as "everytime a contact visits your pages, opens an email, reply to a sales email, engages with your social pages" set the date on a date picker property like "activity stamp"

2. Map your customer journey with relevant moments
i.e: for example Leads, MQLs, Opportunities (associated to a deal), Customers

2.1 Define how much time you want to give to each stage to be active
i.e: 
Leads: Need to engage in 2 Months
MQLs: Need to engage in 4 Months
Opportunities: Need to engage in 6 Months
Customers: Don't need to engage

2.2 Build a workflow to set marketing contact status with the rules defined on (2.1) and if the contact complies with your criteria e send them to another workflow that will send him back again to the main one. If they didn't engage you'll set them as non-marketing contact until they get back to live (visiting pages, converting into a form, changing stage on the customer journey, etc).

If you like the idea and want to implement ping me I can share some print of the structure I've built!

[jforte]

Hey champs! @CarolineO just asked to explain how I've made this and since I think it could help everyone on this thread  @MaxGPT @danmoyle @GRajput @Whathcock @jolle  I'll share in here too 🙂

[jforte]

Hey @rciausu here you have 🙂

[kvlschaefer]

Thanks for sharing, @jforte!

[CarolineO]

Thanks for sharing!

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

@MaxGPT in addition to the advice here already, I'd like to go back to your opt-in consideration. Your concern about whether they'd remember to opt-in is interesting. I'm with you, and also I think, "Well if I'm already having issues with engagement, will it really affect anything more negatively to add an opt-in functionality?" So personally, I'd try that. 

I'm glad Neverbounce was mentioned. I'd also look at Insycle to help with data cleanliness.

And I'd think about those filters you're already using. Open rates aren't the best indicator for many reasons, but clicks could work better. And with that, I'm a fan of not deleting contact records, but managing communications through those lists, and turning folks back to non-marketing contacts. That's the beauty of HubSpot in my opinion - keeping all your contacts and their data you've gathered in on spot, so if/when they return, you have it. And only emailing Marketing Contacts.  (The exception would be the wrong or invalid email addresses, of course.)

[GRajput]

Hi @MaxGPT 

I think the best way to not send email to invalid or unsubscribed email, For that we can simply make an active list using "Unsubscribed from all emails field" OR "Marketing emails bounced" OR "Email hard bounce reason" and use this list in suppression while sending email. Other best way is that before sending out the Campaigns you can run the list in email validation tool like "Neverbounce" or "Zerobounce". So, that we can send out the campaigns to only valid emails.

Hope this will helps you out. If you find it helpful, Pleae mark it as Solution.

Thanks!

[Whathcock]

Hey @MaxGPT ,

If you haven't already, I'd check out this KnowledgeBase article from HubSpot on greymail, and if you aren't already, taking advantage of the 'Don't send to unengaged contacts' feature in the email tool (detailed in that article).

Hope this helps,

Whitney

[MaxGPT]

To add-on, I thought about adding in a double-opt in, but that presents a new set of issues like what if they don't open/skip that initial double opt-in email.

[jolle]

Hey @MaxGPT, thanks for reaching out! This is a great question.

This absolutely comes down to the quality of your lists and the expectation of receiving emails from your company. If someone didn't opt into emails from you, it's reasonable to expect that they'll mark your email as spam.

If you haven't already, I strongly recommend scrubbing your entire contact database for email deliverability (NeverBounce is an awesome tool for this). No tool is perfect, but you should be able to weed out most invalid/unknown email addresses and remove those from your CRM.

If you're sending email to spam traps, I would definitely take a deep look into your contact database and vet each contact. There's a good chance you have purchased lists or contacts that haven't engaged in years, so consider cleaning all of those out as well to avoid further damage.

I'd also check out this awesome blog post from HubSpot on words to avoid using in your email subject lines. There are plenty of email subject line spam checker tools out there as well!

Also consider how often you're sending emails to your database to ensure that you're not inundating unengaged contacts. It could be worth defining some additional parameters, like temporarily adding contacts to a suppression list if they haven'e engaged with the last 4-5 emails.

Hope everything goes smoothly with the cleanup!

[MaxGPT]

Thanks Jacob for getting back to me.  We are getting our contacts through filling out forms on landing pages and we are not purchasing our lists.  Clients essentially enter our lists by the forms they fill out on our website/other areas.  I believe alot of the time they put in incorrect email addresses (whether by accident or on purpose). These are people that are requesting to be emailed a copy of a guide we provide. 

I just found NeverBounce and am beginning to use it to clean our system. The estimated bounce rate was 2% and it said that it 'may not require cleaning'.

I have been using spam filters and have been very cognizant about wording.  We have over 300,000 marketing contacts so I guess my question is more: how can I consistently keep up on contacts I should remove.  Like what lists or filters have you seen that are super effective in keeping lists clean? I removed all of the hard bounces today, but as of now, we just remove the unengaged at the end of every month.  What methods are effective for most companies?

I guess I don't understand how we keep hitting spam traps if we aren't purchasing lists and our content isn't spammy also.