HubSpot Ideas

Compuware

Reliable tracking of opt-outs and hard-bounces

Need a repeatable & reliable way to capture all opt-outs and hard-bounces. There is currently no clear filter critieria that can be used to identify those who previously may have bounced or opted-out vs. those that are currently opted-out and hard-bounced outside of exporting the bounces and unsubscribes data from the Email section to create a Static List which is not substainable. There should be a way to pull this into a smart list and/or a contact setting that can be referenced. Would like to know when sending my email I have the cleanest list possible prior to hitting send.

54 Replies
KeyWestScott
Key Advisor

I really believe that the "difficulty" in getting HubSpot to do this, is their "pay per contact" model.  If it were easy for us to remove bounced/invalid address's, they would have less contacts to charge for.

pgonzalez
Participant

Being able to filter for hard bounces (Contact has Bounced) should be part of a data hygene process. Sadly HS just doesn't want to make this field accessable or does it think its a priority in smart lists.

marketingman83
Member

Following up on this thread. I just had a bad experience with exporting/importing bounces to create a bounce list and wanted to warn others about this issue. The Opt-Out and Bounce list that you can export will contain Contacts previously deleted from your HubSpot portal. If you don't clean the list to remove previously deleted records (involves comparing your current Contact list to the Opt-Out/Bounce list), like I didn't, before re-importing them to create a bounce list, you will end up re-creating the deleted Contacts in HubSpot. No big deal, right? You can just create a list in HS to locate those new Contact records and then delete them... Except if you have integrations or workflows that trigger when new HS Contacts are created, like we do with Salesforce and other services. This can create issues that extend beyond HubSpot.

 

In my experience, this ended up creating hundreds of of new Leads in Salesforce that were assigned to our Biz-Dev reps. Luckily I caught this early, and thankfully our automation processes didn't involve email notifications to the reps or other processes that would be hard to back out - that could have been very distracting for our reps and time-consuming to undo. In this case I was able to simply delete the newly created SF records (after exporting and confirming they were generated by the bounce list) and I was able to quickly delete the newly created HS Contacts in HS.

 

This could have been worse. But I'm irritated that it could have been avoided if HubSpot provided the bounce data in a Contact Property, rather than requiring me to export/import the Opt-Out/Bounce list manually. Alternatively if we had a way to upload a CSV to create a static list and ignore Emails not already in HubSpot (Mailchimp has this feature and I miss it dearly), then we could avoid the issue of potentially creating new Contacts when all we want to do is segment existing HS Contacts via a CSV list.

 

 

paxton
HubSpot Product Team

@marketingman83, my sincerest apologies for that UX. I want you and the others on this thread to know that we hear you. We understand it is important to understand the segment of active contacts within your database that will end up in the Not Sent category through HubSpot, and this will be easier sometime in the near future.

 

Thank you for your patience.

Compuware
Top Contributor

@marketingman83 it's great to hear that a fix is in the future. Thanks for the support!

JimA
Contributor

@marketingman83 - Thank you for posting your heads up. I confess I couldn't believe that could really happen until it happened to me! Fortunately, having just read your post I understood what was going on and quickly deleted all of our "previously deleted created today" records. Thank you!!!

MikeWW
Member

As a first time Hubspot user and longtime Marketo user I am totally baffled that something this basic is not available. Please implement asap. 

EMSAdmin
Participant

Well it has been one year since HubSpot last updated this idea (5/16/18). This seems like such an easy fix!! Create a field that is triggered when an email has bounced. We need this field in order to automatically identify which leads are bad or can try to rectify.

paxton
HubSpot Product Team

The export now has options to include deleted contacts or not; and allows the user to specify any combination of unsubbed, hard bounced and spam reports.

 

There will no longer be a need to filter this export outside of hubspot. Simply check the group of contacts you want to isolate and open the CSV sent to your inbox.

 

Screen Shot 2019-05-28 at 10.36.33 AM.png

EMSAdmin
Participant

Thank you Paxton - this will help but it does not solve the issue. Need a filter so we can add to smart list for easier reporting of hard bounces.

eComEngine_Suz
Participant

When you export hard bounces, please allow to customize the data columns included. For example, I would like to include a secondary email address column so identify who has a primary email hard bounce, yet a valid secondary email to try.

 

It is not viable to do this manually.

paxton
HubSpot Product Team

You can now create a list of hard bounced contacts directly from the Email Dashboard:

 

create-hb-list.png

 

This should help customers working though active clean ups and provide greater visibility into permanently bounced contacts.

GmidD
Member

That is fantastic news! Been waiting on this feature for years! Thank you!!!

KeyWestScott
Key Advisor

How about unsubscribes.  If they don't want to hear from us, I dont want them to be clogging up my database, either.

 

Scott

marketingman83
Member

Excellent! This will definitely help, thank you for your efforts on this.

 

Slight note, I see this can be generated as a static list. It would be ideal to have this capability as a smart list but one step at a time 🙂

marketingman83
Member

@KeyWestScott  You can create a Contacts smart list where "Opted out of all email" = "Yes".

 

Smart list - opted out of all email.PNG

EMSAdmin
Participant

Really need a "hard bounce" field on the contact record. Then we would not have to export it everytime we create a dynamic list.

KeyWestScott
Key Advisor

Well, I'll be....  Must be another new feature.  Been asking for this, forever.

 

Thanks for the update!!

 

Scott

Compuware
Top Contributor

For the new dashboard feature does this rely on the hardbounce field? As, from past experience, when a person's hardbounced is removed (verified correct email,etc.) the hardbounce field is not reset or cleared so that field remains as Hardbounced "1", "2" etc. When we initiated our Hubspot instance there was an issue with IP warming and caused many of our valid records to be marked as bounced and since then we have no true reliable way to identify those that are truly bounced vs. those that are not.

KeyWestScott
Key Advisor

@marketingman83 What filter is it under?  I'm not finding it.....  Thanks.