Poor deliverability for a small list of good-quality contacts

[ACunnell]

I am using the Marketing email tools to send service-related mail to a small list (approx 150) of contacts who are active users of our company's products. 

The first mailer had 100% delivery but a very low open rate - by speaking to a couple of the intended recipeints I found that it had never been delivered to their inboxes. Using the HubSpot knowedge base I figured out pretty quicky that the issue was most likely because we hadn't connected our email domain (I was/am a HubSpot newbie), and so was getting blocked at the server level. I worked with our tech team and got that sorted. It now looks good (see below). In the meantime we sent the email to the missed recipients via Outlook.

This was a couple of months ago. I've just tried sending a second mailer to the same list and have run into exactly the same problem again, despite the 'From' domain matching one of our connected domains. The open rate is really low (remember, these are active customers who we have a great relationship with) and all the engagement happened almost immediately, suggesting to me that people either got it and opened it, or haven't received it at all.

I tried using mail-tester.com to shed some light on what was going on. The report shows this in the DKIM section:

That doesn't look right to me? The domains shown are all hubspotstarter.net, not our domain. Shouldn't it be our domain - isn't that the point of connecting our domain to HubSpot - so that mail looks like it has come directly from us, not via HubSpot?

Or is the problem somewhere else? The email scored 10/10 overall with mail-tester so assume nothing is majorly wrong? 

Any help gratefully received.

[DLegalcio]

Hi @ACunnell, 

To prevent your emails from ending up in spam and to be sure that they arrive in the main mailbox, I invite you to first check the emails via a tester such as https://mailtester.ninja/

It's a small job but it will prevent your emails from ending up in spam.

Also pay attention to the testers on the market, many will tell you that the list is reliable but you will be very disappointed with the quality and this will burn a hole in your wallet.

Good day to you 😁

[DeliveryByJess]

Hello @ACunnell ,

It's working as designed for the return path address to use a HubSpot domain, even after connecting your email sending domain.   Use of a HubSpot domain as the return path domain allows HubSpot to receive and process bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints and ensure contacts are suppressed correctly.  The return path domain not matching the friendly from domain (ie yourname@yourcomapany.com) won't have an adverse impact on your overall deliverability. 

Connetcing an email sending domain autheiciates your mail for DKIM, and you can read more about this here.