Why are contacts who opt out of my marketing not automatically removed from my newsletter list?

[KMarsden]

Generally I'm a big HS fan but their email list system is incomprehensible.

Normally you would have a bunch of names on a list, send them emails, and if they opted out those names would be removed from the list.

I was happily thinking that I had 6000 people on my mailing list. Only when I dug a bit deeper I found out only half of them were actually receiving it. Some of them had opted out, and some of them HS had unilaterally decided to stop sending the email to because they were 'unengaged'. Of course they're unengaged if they're not receiving the email. 
Despite numerous calls with HS the only solution seems to be to create endless other lists of 'optouts' and 'unengaged's and a few others (quarantined etc) and exclude these from the monthly send.
Meanwhile my whole list continues to grow, bloated with this collection of people who aren't receiving it.
AND the objectives I gave my marketing team to 'grow the list' it turns out are meaningless due to the fiddliness of reporting on actual recipients.
What to do? Very tempted to move to a better email provider - but is there a better, SIMPLE, approach I can take to handle this?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @KMarsden,

HubSpot automatically excludes certain contacts from receiving emails. These guiding quetions should help:

Are you using the marketing contacts functionality? If yes, are all recipients marked as marketing contacts? (HubSpot will not send emails to non-marketing contacts.)

Do you have the double opt-in enabled? If so, unconfirmed contacts are automatically excluded.

Are you suppressing unengaged contacts in the Recipients tab of the email? If yes, you could uncheck the box. Otherwise HubSpot will exclude these contacts.

Are you using an exclusion / suppression list in the Recipients tab of the email? (Do not send to dropdown)

Do you have the GDPR settings enabled? If yes, you might have restricted email sends to contacts who have a legal basis for communication only. In that case, you would have to update your contact subscriptions.

Have some of the contacts previously bounced? You can check by filtering your recipient list by "Email hard bounce reason is known".

Did you already hit your monthly email send limit? (5X marketing contact tier)

Have some of the contacts previously unsubscribed? You can check by filtering your recipient list by "Unsubscribed from all email is equal to True"

As you can see, some of these features are safeguards, protecting you from legal risks, some are delivery related, some are concerning billing.

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@KMarsden wrote:

some of them HS had unilaterally decided to stop sending the email to because they were 'unengaged'.

This is due to a checkbox you selected in the Recipients tab of a marketing email. You can select or deselect it. I've linked the in-depth explanation of this above.

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@KMarsden wrote:

Despite numerous calls with HS the only solution seems to be to create endless other lists of 'optouts' and 'unengaged's and a few others (quarantined etc) and exclude these from the monthly send.

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There seems to be a misunderstanding about emails and lists. Lists are not just meant to be collections of recipients. They are filters you apply to your database that can also be used to build recipient lists. For example, if you're filtering for contacts opted into your newsletter subscription type, you might want to do that to find out how many opt-ins you have, regardless of whether they have bounced or whether they're ungengaged. If HubSpot automatically removed all of the contact groups above, you wouldn't get the number you're asking for. HubSpot is returning exactly what you're asking for.

Lists also have various purposes beyond email sending. HubSpot automatically cleansing these lists would not be beneficial behavior for all these use cases.

So yes, if you want a cleaned up recipient list, you would filter out contacts by the criteria mentioned above. In that sense, HubSpot gives you more control but requires a bit more fine-tuning if you want an exact number of emailable contacts.

If you need more help, let me know.

Best regards!