New Email Subdomain

[JJordan5]

Hello Email Deliverability Community,

I am a Partner with a HubSpot Marketing Pro client.

They have been sending their marketing emails for 10 years using their root domain. They have been using non-HubSpot services (like ActiveCampaign). Their root domain was verified on those services.

Their email marketing engagement is good: about 40% open rate. 6% click rate. Very few unsubscribes.

Now we are switching to HubSpot and sent the first campaign. Open rate was 20%.

We go to fix it:

1. Their root domain has not been verified as the email domain on HubSpot
2. The root cannot be verified because the root domain DNS has Proxy turned on in Cloudflare (per https://knowledge.hubspot.com/domains-and-urls/connect-your-email-sending-domain)

Ok..so are choices are: 

A. Create a subdomain, i.e. email.domain.com 

B. Continue to use the root domain without verification on HubSpot.

So......my questions are:

1. Will creating a new subdomain reset our sending reputation to 0.
2. Will inboxes be confused if our emails suddenly start coming from a new subdomain.
3. What's the best course of action here? Bite the bullet, establish the subdomain, and start rebuilding the reputation?

I know if we were just starting out, ideally a subdomain would be the way to go. 

But I don't want to tell the client we should go the subdomain route, and then all of a sudden go to 10% open rate. 

So, what would you do?

Leave it unverified on the Root domain

Create the subdomain, verify it, and cross fingers the open rate will improve quickly?

Thanks!

[JoGanter]

Hey @JJordan5 , what was your solution to your problem in the end? Would be good to understand what you went for and what the results were.

Thanks

Johannes

[Ben_M]

Have you reached out to Hubspot support on this one?  I would reach out to them first to confirm about the KB article what the verification means. If it's simply something for their use only but the emails will still be signed properly, having their system not able to verify this may not be a bad thing.  As this is a user-to-user forum we may not be able to give you detailed technical answers like they can.

Also, domain is only part of the equation when it comes to reputation. By moving to Hubspot you have also changed the IP you are sending from so depending on the list size you may need to do some smaller warming campaigns before you send to the entire database at once.

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @JJordan5,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community!

These are excellent questions! 🙂 

I'll add some top contributors from our Community to get their input.

Hi @rlopez, @Ben_M, @Ian_Matt, @Kevin-C, @Jonno_Price, @Phil_Vallender, @Sam62, @DavidDennison - Do you have any thoughts on @JJordan5's questions?

Thanks!

Best,

Kristen