Slowly drip to 50k contacts & Suppress contacts

[VLavinBitetti]

Hello, a couple of questions.... Is there a way to make a workflow that only sends emails to a specific amount of contacts per day? For example: We have a list of 50k contacts to whom we have never sent marketing emails to.

They are customers or past customers and the emails are valid, but may not be in use. We don't want to blast out 50k emails at once and hit a bunch of spam traps etc... We would like to slowly drip 10-50/day into a workflow with various emails to get active users re-acquainted and filter out non-openers. 

Also... Is there a way to suppress contacts that have not opened a certain amount of emails from our hubspot marketing contacts? We do not want to get rid of them completely, but most other email platforms have the ability to suppress contacts so they don't count toward your contact total. 

thank you 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @VLavinBitetti,

Regarding your first question of limiting enrollment to a daily total, this is currently not possible. You would have to create smaller lists and manually enroll these lists into your workflow.

If you want to randomize this, you could export all contacts, in Excel assign each contact a random number between 1 and 100, reimport the Email colum and the column with the random number (mapping the number to a newly created custom number property) and then create lists based on number ranges. That's how I would approach it if I wanted to address smaller bits of a larger list.

Another option, especially if you want to avoid spam traps, could be validating your email addresses with a tool like Neverbounce, Verifalia, Kickbox etc. If you only send emails to verifiable email addresses, that should solve the issue entirely. The percentage of emails that can be verified is going to be a bit disappointing but you would be on the safe side.

Regarding contacts that have not engaged with marketing emails in a while, you can leverage the Sends since last engagement contact property. This is also explained here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email/what-is-graymail-and-how-can-i-avoid-sending-my-email-to-unengag...

You can use this contact property to create your own exclusion list or exclusion criteria in workflows. This of course only works if you have emailed these contacts from HubSpot before. If you haven't, this number will be 0 for those contacts.

Keep in mind that Sends since last engagement looks at email opens (and clicks) and email open tracking has become increasingly unreliable, also due to changes in iOS 15: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Email-Marketing-Tool/iOS-15-let-s-talk-about-it/m-p/499877

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

[VLavinBitetti]

These do not help me, unfortunately. 

1. We use Neverbounce and these are all verified. But that has nothing to do with spam traps. Google and others often take old emails that are not in use and create spam traps out of them. Very common for business addresses. So they will be delivered with no opens and hurt deliverability on the entire list. Also, some of these emails are 2+ years old. 
2. These emails have never been emailed via hubspot, we do not want to damage the domain. 

How about my question with suppression from our marketing contacts total? Is this possible in Hubspot? To recap: We do not want to get rid of them completely, but most other email platforms have the ability to suppress contacts so they don't count toward your contact total. 

This is not an exclusion list. We want to actually suppress them from our marketing contact total without deleting them. 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @VLavinBitetti,

Yes, you can set contacts as non-marketing / non-billable by following these steps: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/set-contacts-as-non-marketing

Best regards!