The following is a conversation with a HubSpot colleague about one of her recent projects with a professional services company that conducts surveys for large enterprise organizations. Their emails had low deliverability and consistently ended up in spam folders. Learn how she’s improving their stats within just 3 months.
Carrie Gallagher
Can you tell me a little bit about your HubSpot client?
HubSpot Consultant
Yes. So this particular client they are a professional services company. They conduct surveys for large enterprises. Things like trust surveys, exit surveys, 180/360, etc.
It’s a team of about 20 to 30 people total. They have many content specialists who work with customers, but it’s a team of one for marketing and one for sales. They were on HubSpot for two to three years before we met, and they had Marketing Starter and Sales Professional, but they have since upgraded to Marketing Professional because they were really struggling to manage a database of 12k without automation.
Carrie Gallagher
What was the conversation like when they reached out to you?
HubSpot Consultant
They came to me struggling with email deliverability. They have really strong, valuable content and good leads, but their emails were going to spam, and their website wasn’t converting leads at all, so they were in a rough spot to start. They even had customers who wanted to receive their emails and ebooks, but those were going to spam, so they didn’t know what to do. Someone else told them they needed to start over with a new email domain, but luckily, we nipped that in the bud.
Carrie Gallagher
Were they using other HubSpot tools besides email campaigns, or not yet?
HubSpot Consultant
They were barely using the marketing emails (no automation at that point), and even though they had Sales Pro, it wasn’t set up for them, so the salesperson kept using Excel and Gmail because he didn’t even know what he had in HubSpot.
That is where it started, but it didn’t take long to uncover that Sales was a big focus as well because they completely lacked the ability to attribute sales meetings or revenue to any marketing activities and had planned on expanding the sales team in 2024, but didn’t have a process built out, so they were in just as rough a spot as marketing. But since deliverability was the big issue and that affected the whole company, we needed to be sure to get aligned with what content was going out, when, and to whom, because even the sales emails were landing in spam at that point, so we had to get marketing and sales aligned to one team to aid in this effort.
Carrie Gallagher
How were individual users within HubSpot being impacted at all by the challenges they were having?
HubSpot Consultant
The marketing director couldn’t prove she was doing a good job, Sales didn’t have any warm leads coming from marketing activities, and the CEO wasn’t happy that even he was getting their own emails in spam, so it was a lot of pressure on one marketing person, who in reality was doing a great job creating powerful content. They were also on WordPress at the time, so updating the website was an absolute nightmare. It took days for a simple request to be completed by their website agency, and they didn’t have any attribution set up or clear conversion paths to guide customers through to sales.
Carrie Gallagher
Often, the marketing department will get pushback from management, such as “Do you really need this HubSpot tool?”
HubSpot Consultant
Yeah exactly. There was a lot of that, and that made it more of an uphill battle convincing them that even though it seemed counterintuitive to invest more into a tool that clearly wasn’t working, that it was actually the best solution for them to upgrade to Marketing Pro and migrate their site to CMS Pro so we could leverage automation, nurture their audience properly and improve deliverability, and get more control over their website to make quick changes and improve conversions.
So the sales process with us was key to earning their trust, taking things slowly, and really digging into the strategy to help them get out of spam. We spent a lot of time discussing how to manage larger databases, how workflows support marketing efforts, and how they could help solve their deliverability issues without starting over with a brand-new email-sending domain (which someone else had recommended). But once they understood how the workflows could help manage subscription types, manage ongoing segmentation, and improve engagement by resending valuable content until it’s opened, they were more amenable to the upgrade.
Carrie Gallagher
Once you got into their HubSpot portal, what did you see? What was the landscape like?
HubSpot Consultant
Well, the first thing I noticed was that their email sending domain (DKIM) was never configured! So that explained why they were having so many deliverability issues to begin with, and it was caught just in time to avoid extra penalties from the upcoming Google/Yahoo updates in February, which are making DKIM, SPF, and DMARC required.
So understandably, their email health score was abysmal. They had about 5-7% open rates on most emails, but they never really did any segmentation, so all 12k of their contacts received the same content with no real rhyme or reason. They also never removed nearly 2k in bounced contacts they had collected over the years, so those didn’t help their engagement scores either.
Carrie Gallagher
What steps did you take to start fixing these issues?
HubSpot Consultant
We broke down our strategy into 3 main areas: email deliverability, website conversion rate optimization, and sales process design.
First, we tackled the email lists.
Once we had their email-sending domain connected and were ready to start digging our way out of spam, we created some safe email lists to work from. The general rule of thumb to get out of greylist status (the dreaded list of email domains that go right to spam) is to maintain open rates of at least 20%, so we started by only emailing people who had opened an email in the last 2 weeks, which was only a few hundred people. Immediately, our open rates jumped to over 40% and click-through rates to 4-8%, which was a great start, but we had to maintain these stats as we expanded the list. So slow and steady was the name of the game to avoid setbacks as we were starting to improve our performance.
So for the next couple of weeks, we’re going through the following list: email opens from the last month, then the last 2 months, then 3, and now we’re up to 6 months. We’re up to over 1000 emails per send, and open rates are staying above 30%, so we’re definitely on the right track. We have also been leveraging A/B testing and workflows to continue improving email engagement, which has been a significant benefit of upgrading to Marketing Pro.
Meanwhile, we also started including our personal and husbands’ emails to continue testing whether we were landing in primary inboxes more and more. If an email landed in spam, we marked it as not spam. As soon as an email was marked as not spam once, the next email came into the inbox, which was a big step in the right direction.
Next, we tackled the website.
We worked with HubSpot’s migration team to move the site from WordPress to HubSpot, which made it infinitely easier for us to make changes as needed without going through the dev team each time.
Once it was on HubSpot, one of the first changes we made to the website was to change how we delivered the gated resources. Previously, they had simple gates on their eBooks, where the page redirected directly to the eBook upon form submission. But since we were working on improving email deliverability and trying to get more opt-ins, we changed the delivery method to automated email after the form was filled. We also included a Thank You message in the form itself, which mentioned please check spam if you don’t see this resource in your inbox in the next few minutes.
We also started leveraging slide-in CTAs to draw attention to their eBooks and Webinars, which are their most valuable pieces of content, and have seen pretty good engagement on those so far.
The next big thing we’re tackling is revamping their conversion paths, starting with their blogs and resources. As it stood when we started, none of the blogs led anywhere, included no CTAs, and didn’t tie back to any other resources. It’s a big lift to organize 150-200 pieces of content, but we’re making good progress on aligning everything with a buyer’s journey following the Awareness, Consideration, Decision framework. We are leveraging Smart CTAs to surface similar resources after a resource is consumed, implementing mid-post CTAs to connect related blogs, and relying on automations to route more engaged leads directly to sales for personal outreach.
And the last piece of the puzzle is to build predictable, scalable journeys based on industry, job title, and company size, using targeted content and automations. Historically, they didn’t really segment their audiences at all, which, in part, led to poor engagement with otherwise great content. To improve engagement and sales conversions, we knew we had to be more intentional about how we shared information. To do this effectively, we had to build many more landing pages, each geared toward a specific persona, industry, or company size. These landing pages, which functioned more like pillar pages, highlighted specific challenges people might recognize, used familiar, persona-specific messaging, and shared valuable resources to help them diagnose their situations. Of course, we also included scheduling pages to book an intro call with sales, and included more of those links in more of the Decision stage blogs. Once we had better segments built within our email lists, we built automations that surfaced valuable content until it was opened and engaged with, ensuring people didn’t miss new content that could help them.
And so the strategy we are now really starting to push is that they never segmented their audiences.
So everybody, all 10,000 people, no matter the industry, no matter their job title, no matter anything, we’re getting the same content.
And so, of course, there’s going to be different preferences that people have. People really like webinars and ebooks.
There’s a lot of power in having different messaging for different job titles, industries, and company sizes. So, having targeted landing pages and organizing customer journeys, none of that was in place.
So we did a very in-depth blog audit and went through all 200 of their blogs and basically looked at what the category of this blog is, what the
value proposition is, and what the CTA is. What is the call to action at the end of this? Most of them didn’t have a call to action, so we’re building one out and saying this matches this ebook and this offer.
So we’re building out those customer journeys, and we’re grouping those blogs into related content categories, or what’s the content clusters, that’s the one.
And so the next step in how we’re going to start, you know, moving into the thousand contacts and two thousand contacts and beyond, is really to look at which of their content has the highest engagement and to do better segmentation based on past engagements.
Know that anyone who’s ever attended a webinar will get all the webinar stuff. Anyone who’s ever downloaded an ebook will receive every ebook communication.
And so, getting really specific and building out better conversion journeys from an awareness stage. blog, for example, that says, “Hey, maybe you’re experiencing a lot of turnover, and you don’t know why, right?”
And so, for a survey company that does, you know, employee satisfaction services and all that, that’s a great awareness-stage blog.
And then from there, it’s, you know, helping to diagnose and understand, you know, why running surveys is going to be a great solution to have, you know, better employee retention and all this other, you know, benefits for scale.
And so linking those blogs together and sending in related, you know, putting in the breadcrumbs across the website so they can go from one to the next and then have some kind of a conversion point as well is really where, you know, we’re going to be attacking more of the thousands of people and building the better segments to guide them down those journeys.
And so we’re going to make sure he has all the content offers he needs. So, if you are talking to a large enterprise like PepsiCo, this is the content most valuable to them.
So he has a resource folder he can easily share, and he knows which content is most effective for the large companies he’s targeting.
So none of that was ever done. They never had any real reason for the madness, or how to send content, or know which content to create, or anything else.
So getting everything organized, building those relationships, and building the campaigns to then see, hey, if this is good content for you, did you open it or not?
So, we are resending an email at least once to a highly qualified lead who has engaged in the past. If they didn’t open it, we’ll send it again.
And so, making sure we resurface things like that to continuously reuse all the great content and resources they have.
Carrie Gallagher
Wow, you’ve accomplished so much! How long has this project been going, and how long do you expect it to last?
HubSpot Consultant
We’re about 3 months in and expect to go another 2 months at least, so we can continue iterating and improving our conversion paths based on where and how people engage most. The hardest part of email deliverability is that we could be doing everything right, but there’s no guarantee we’re landing in primary inboxes for 100% of our audience, and there’s no way to know for sure unless people tell us.
We connected the email sending domain. We set up the DKIM. Other deliverability changes are coming in February and will be huge.
So, you know, setting up SPF and all that is really important. But we’re hoping that by the end of March, if we’re consistently staying above 40-50 percent open rates and over 6-7 percent click-through rates, our spam issues will drop, and then little by little we’ll be able to increase our list size substantially.
There is a chance we’ll have to wait until halfway through the year to fully get off the gray list for all 12k+ people on our list.
Carrie Gallagher
And make sure the first thing you do is set up your email sending domain before sending from HubSpot. Right, OK. And what about dedicated IP’s? Is that something that you recommend if a company has totally destroyed its IP reputation?
HubSpot Consultant
That’s a great question. And I don’t know that I have the best answer for that one, but there are a few things to consider.
If you’re on HubSpot and don’t have a dedicated IP and are just using HubSpot as is, then technically, you’re getting the benefit of HubSpot’s trusted IP.
But HubSpot will quarantine you if you mess with that and start getting really bad engagement, high bounce rates, or too many spam reports. Because so many customers rely on HubSpot’s good deliverability, if someone comes in and starts messing with that, HubSpot will quarantine you and require a dedicated IP.
That said, dedicated IP’s need to be warmed up. So, generally speaking, you need to start slowly with that as well. It’s nothing that you can just throw 10,000 contacts at right away. It would still have to be intentionally, meaningfully, slowly warmed up so that you’re teaching the email providers that you are, again, legitimate, that you have good content, and that you’re not just trying to spam everybody.
And oh, by the way, forgot to mention, there are AI tools in HubSpot now that can help with things like generating good subject lines and better content overall, so leverage plenty of A/B testing until you find what works for you.
Test in small groups to see what is getting engagement and what is not. Use the tools HubSpot provides so you’re not just throwing spaghetti; you are collecting as much data as possible to make a better decision for the next campaign.
Carrie Gallagher
I’ve noticed that HubSpot’s AI-suggested subject lines are actually getting pretty good.
HubSpot Consultant
They weren’t so great at first, but they’ve gotten better and better the more I’ve used them. The really cool thing about the HubSpot AI is that it learns from your own CRM. So it’s the same brain as ChatGPT—it has many of the same capabilities—but it learns from your CRM data, your content, and everything in your portal.
Carrie Gallagher
So it gets better and better over time. Good point. And last question: as a HubSpot consultant, what have you enjoyed most about working on this project?
HubSpot Consultant
I like seeing the improvement in engagement rates—little wins every day that show we’re on the right path. And it’s been a really great team to work with, which is always a win in my book. It’s been an absolute pleasure helping them get their content delivered, get more eyes on it, increase engagement, and set them up for future success.
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