Protect Your Email Reputation by Nurturing an Engaged Database
Stopping emails from going out to people who have shown disinterest or are irrelevant to your business tends to result in better marketing efforts. Focusing on good fit, interested contacts will enable a healthy, scalable, and long-term email marketing program.
Why a decent-sized engaged database is better than a huge, disengaged one
Your domain’s sender reputation score is always at risk - ISPs track this. If you repeatedly send to bad email addresses that hard bounce or disengaged contacts that report you as spam, you have a higher chance of them preventing you from doing email marketing in the future. If email’s a channel you rely on, reassessing outreach to disengaged contacts should be one of the first things to consider.
It will result in stronger email engagement - This is a byproduct of following the practices that are required to optimize and maintain important email marketing metrics. Getting open rates and click-through rates as high as possible and hard bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and spam report rates as low as possible tends to result in stronger fans of your email content. Focusing on contacts interested in what your business can offer and sending them relevant, high-quality content is often the right thing to do.
Pursuing disinterested and bad fit contacts leads to negative outcomes. Doing so hurts your sender score because contacts ignore your emails or contacts unsubscribe and report your emails as spam. But this isn’t the only negative thing. It also shows the Marketing team unrealistic numbers. It’s exhausting to market and sell to disinterested and/or bad fit people. Very few will convert anyway, and those that do, you probably don’t want. The list goes on. At the end of the day, I’m convinced that focusing on finding people who are interested and a good fit is a better use of energy than collecting as many email addresses as possible.
1 - Review your email health metrics
Hubspot has an Email Health Tool that gives you an overall score and shares your scores on key email health metrics.
1.1 - Take a look at your email health score, over time. How has it changed?
If you’re not “On track” there’s work to be done, and it’s probably related to the engagement levels of the people you’re emailing
1.1 - Review the components that drive the overall email health score. Which scores are labeled as “action needed”? Look at the reasons why and keep in mind that when you build an engaged database and send them relevant, specific content, all of these metrics should naturally improve.
Open rate - the percentage of recipients who opened your email out of those who were delivered your email. Getting this higher than 25% is a good goal.
Click-through rate - the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of those who opened your email. Getting this higher than 10% is a good goal.
Hard bounce rate - the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered because the email address was invalid or no longer in use, or your email was marked as spam by the recipient’s email server. Getting this lower than 0.3% is a good goal.
Unsubscribe rate - the percentage of people who unsubscribed out of those who were delivered your email. Getting this lower than 0.4% is a good goal.
Spam report rate - the percentage of people who marked an email as spam out of those who were delivered your email. Getting this lower than 0% is a good goal.
Clicking “see details” will give you insight into specifics that are causing the score and suggest targeted recommendations for improving the score
2 - Create lists for “engaged” contacts and “disengaged” contacts
At first, it’s fine to rely on Hubspot’s default tools to avoid sending to disengaged contacts, but these won’t be tailored to your business (e.g. the “don’t send to unengaged contacts” email setting).
2.1 - Create an engaged contacts list. Below are an example of useful filters to consider when building out a list of “engaged contacts”. You can pick a period of time (say the past six months), and say a contact is engaged if they’ve done any of these things in the past six months:
They were created in Hubspot OR
They’re a current customer or recent former customer OR
They visited your website OR
They logged into your app OR
They opened, clicked, or replied to a marketing email OR
They opened, clicked, or replied to a sales email OR
They had a meeting or call with the team OR
They have an open deal OR
Any other action a contact could take that you’d consider them “engaged”
2.2 - Create a disengaged contacts list. Create this after making sure your engaged contacts list is fully thought through and accounts for all engaged contacts. If they’re not on the engaged contacts list, you can put them on a disengaged contacts list by using a simple list membership filter.
They aren’t on the engaged contacts list
3. Create a “Do Not Market” list
This accounts for the demographic factors that aren’t accounted for in the more behaviorally-focused engaged contacts list.
3.1 - Consider what other factors cause you not to market to someone. Figure out the ways you can identify these using list filters.
They have an invalid email address. All email addresses that come into your system can be scanned at “point of capture”. This will prevent a significant amount of hard bounces from happening, thus improving your sender score. The NeverBounce integration will allow you to accomplish this at a very low cost.
They are located in a country you don’t do business in. This is easily filtered for via Hubspot’s contact location properties.
You know they’re a competitor and want to avoid them getting your marketing emails.
Any other people you don’t want to market to
4. Get intimate with Hubspot’s “Non-Marketing Contacts" feature
Setting contacts to “non-marketing” via automation will prevent you from sending emails to disengaged and bad fit contacts. Here are the things to know about non-marketing contacts.
4.1 - It’s good to understand the baseline sender score protection tools. Hubspot won’t send to contacts who have unsubscribed or hard bounced, so you don’t have to worry about sending to these contacts. However, you may want to mark them as non-marketing so you they don’t count against your contact limit.
4.2. There are a few quirks to be aware of with non-marketing contacts - Below are the big takeaways. Hubspot’s article on non-marketing contacts is a good resource. Turning a contact into non-marketing means:
The contact’s “Marketing contact status” property is set to “Non-marketing contact”. This property can be changed on the contact record or from an automated workflow.
Non-marketing contacts won’t be counted against your contact limit, so you won’t pay for them.
You can’t send marketing emails (mass emails) to them or target them as ads audiences in Hubspot.
You can, however, still do sales outreach (one to one emails), so your sales teams should have no trouble reaching contacts labeled as non-marketing.
Setting a contact to become a Marketing contact will happen immediately, right after the Marketing contact status property is changed to "Marketing Contact”.
Setting a contact to become a Non-marketing contact will happen at the end of the month. This won’t happen immediately after the property is changed. For example, if you changed a contact’s Marketing contact status to Non-marketing on the 15th of the month, you’d still be able to send them mass emails until the end of the month.
This change to Non-marketing (whether done manually on the record or by automation), will be slated for action at the end of the month. Contacts will not immediately turn into non-marketing contacts.
5. Automatically set contacts to non-marketing via a workflow
Automatically label all your current and future unsubscribed, bounced, disengaged, and bad fit contacts as “Non-marketing contacts” at the end of each month.
5.1 - Create a workflow that sets contacts as non-marketing. Whenever a contact meets the enrollment criteria, they will be turned into a non-marketing at the end of the month. Here are some suggestions on when someone should turn into a non-marketing contact:
Unsubscribed contacts - Unsubscribed from all email = True. If they unusbuscribed, they are telling you they don’t want to be marketed to.
Bounced contacts - Email hard bounce reason = Known. If they hard bounced, there’s a high likelihood you won’t be able to get in touch with them in the future via that email address.
The “Do Not Market” list - List membership = Do not market. These are the contacts that have invalid emails, are not good fits due to demographic factors, etc.
The “Disengaged Contacts” list - List membership = Disengaged contacts. These are contacts who haven’t engaged with your business in a long time. You might periodically send them emails to try and re-engage, but after that, they’d be good candidates for deletion.
Takeaways on maintaining an engaged database
Understand the reasons why a medium-sized, but highly engaged audience may be better for your business vs. a gigantic, but disinterested audience. Having a good sender score so that helps you consistently reach inboxes is the main one. But encouraging the marketing and sales teams to focus on interested, good fit contacts is often a healthier, more effective approach for the business.
Review your email health metrics to see what about your database or marketing emails needs to be improved. Hubspot makes this extremely clear with their built-in tool. Improving these will likely require a mix of database pruning and creative testing with marketing content.
Create lists for “engaged”, “disengaged” and “do not market” contacts. Engaged contacts have shown a recent, active interest in the business. Disengaged contacts are simply everyone who hasn’t met the criteria for engaged. Do not market contacts include invalid email addresses and people you don’t want receiving your marketing content (e.g. specific countries, competitors, etc.)
Get familiar with what it means to be a “Non-marketing contact” and how that all works. Essentially, a contact labeled as Non-marketing won’t get marketing emails and won’t be counted against your contact limit. It’s very useful for database cleanup, but the approach must be planned and tightly managed.
Automatically set contacts to Non-marketing when they meet the criteria for being disengaged or a bad fit. It’s also generally a good practice to set unsubscribes and hard bounces as non-marketing, too. This can be accomplished via a simple workflow.
