The Email Deliverability Listicle

kaburke · ‎Apr 30, 2021

A lot of my customers that used other emailing platforms that moved to HubSpot have wanted to know how they can set themselves up for success. There are a lot of resources out there so I wanted to create a listicle to help guide and navigate those that are trying to start afresh and want to have the best practices in place for email deliverability!

Why is email deliverability important?

When I talk to people that are new to HubSpot I always like to boast that HubSpot was ahead of the curve with email deliverability as it fits really well with the Inbound Marketing methodology that HubSpot is built from. Inbound marketing is the idea of attracting customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them...... You need to send them the email that they want to receive, not the email you want to send.

#humblebrag

Emails should add value, not ask for it...

However, this is not just a HubSpot thing even if it ties in perfectly with our ethos. Others think the same....

I am an inbox zero kind of girl so personally, I have two emails, one email address is used for websites that require an email for access but I don't want to receive the emails from (it's where most of my online purchases go....not looking at any apps in particular...😳), and another email that I actually keep clean and let content that I am interested in receiving have. This is something that more and more people are doing. Email providers such as Gmail/Outlook/Apple Mail etc want to be that main account. Especially with the move to pay-to-play, it is so important that you give people the content that they want and are engaging with. Email providers are watching your behaviours in their contact's accounts and decided how best to treat your content moving forward.

1. Investigate how your emails have performed previously

When a customer moves from another provider to HubSpot, I always ask for the email performance stats of their current emails. While you may see a dip or an improvement in your stats initially if you continue with the same email practices, eventually your stats will revert to what they were before.
I like to use the excel matrix below. In this, I take the stats of the email performance that we know and compare against HubSpot standards and the industry benchmarks that I get from MailChimp's excellent resource here. I think it is important to look at HubSpot's standards but also take your industry benchmarks into account. As you can see in the example I have provided one month is below HubSpot standards in click rate but is above the industry standards. The important part of this comparison is looking at any trends and making educated insights into what may be happening.
I have seen some providers promise 100% deliverability/open rates/click-through rates which seems absolutely impossible to me and makes me question what dubious activities are they doing. Are they hacking into my inbox to see where they are getting placed or watching what I am doing or are they getting in and opening my emails?

(I'm not one to believe that I am being watched/listened to and I'm pretty sure this is a lie that they say to get you on board but we don't do that in HubSpot!)

Open Rate: Email is two-fold - acceptance and inbox placement. Open rate can be a good indication of inbox placement. If you have a good open rate then the likelihood is that the emails are landing in people's inboxes rather than SPAM. If you see this figure decreasing then this is an indication that it is not landing in people's inbox.

Click Rate: This is a good indication of whether your content is relevant and interesting to the end-user. Are they engaging with the content? Do you need to reassess your content value or how you position the offer? Or whether you need to do more targetted campaigns to different segments of your customers?

Hard Bounce Rate: As I said above, email deliverability is two-fold, acceptance and inbox placement. When an email is sent from HubSpot we get a response from the server to tell us whether the email was accepted or rejected. There are different email bounce types however if we get a number of hard bounced responses this tells us that these are not contacts that can be emailed. If you see that your hard bounce score is not good then it's important to reassess where these contacts are coming from and whether you should leverage another tool to market to these contacts rather than email. My personal favourite is using HubSpot lists to create Google Ads audiences that you can target. Just because these contacts cant be emailed doesn't mean that they can't be targetted by other digital marketing efforts. I got feedback in the comments that make a great point - make sure you investigate what is the hard bounce reason as dependent on the response - these contacts may not be suitable for retargeting with ads either.
- Determine if it's OK to send marketing emails to a contact list
- I am not a fan of list validation tools for numerous reasons. The main one being that they are not going to catch honey traps which you can learn more about here.

Unsubscribe Rate: this score is an indication that you need to make sure you are sending relevant content to your contacts and the contacts need to be engaged. Segmentation of customers to make sure that the content is relevant to the end-user will help this score.

2. Set up your email authentication

There are different email authentications (SPF, DMARC and SPF Policy). This is something you need to discuss with your IT team.
A must-do is to connect your email sending domain which lets email providers know that HubSpot has the permission to send bulk emails on your behalf.

3. Create a Sunset Policy

This is a must-do - as I have mentioned above, you don't need to delete the contacts you can target them in other digital channels but it is important that your email behaviour changes as you learn more about your contacts. Be proactive rather than reactive. My excellent colleague has written about creating a sunset policy here

4. DO NOT SPAM!

Engagement is not a static number and is constantly changing, it is important that you continue to monitor and keep on top of how your contacts are engaging with your content.

SPAM usually gets dumped in along with phishing emails. Phishing emails are emails that are trying to act as a trustworthy source so to gain your trust and your information. SPAM emails are not just bulk emails or emails that are unwanted it is a mixture of both. What one person sees as a SPAM email is not necessarily SPAM to the next person. It is the marketers' shoulders to make sure they are proactive in identifying those that don't see them as SPAM.

Other helpful resources to check out:

kgerig · ‎Oct 27, 2022

Hello there, thank you for the amazing list. I was a little confused on the suggestion to the email bounces and retarget with Google Ads. Can you explain that a bit more? If these are hard bounces, wouldn't their email be a bad choice to use for an ad? Thank you for clarifiying

kaburke · ‎Dec 13, 2022

Thanks for this input @kgerig and it's a really good point! You can read here about difference types of bounces. Hard bounces "usually indicates a permanent error, but can also be caused by a strict email security filter." In the case that these are legit emails, then you can target them in this way. I hope that helps but thank's for the feedback - great point and I will update the article to reflect this!