Whether you're sending marketing emails for the first time or migrating from another email service provider (ESP), you should follow a number of prerequisite steps to protect your sending reputation and get the most out of your marketing email efforts.
This guide will help you configure your email sending settings, provide best practices for migrating your existing contacts and ensuring they're engaged with your emails, and recommend how to analyze your email sending performance.
Set up allowlisting and configure your DNS records
If your business has implemented security settings that prevent emails from unknown IPs from being delivered, you should coordinate with your IT team to discuss whether HubSpot's IPs and email addresses need to be added to your company's allowlist. You can also work with your IT team to connect your email sending domain and add HubSpot to your SPF record.
Migrate your contacts from another CRM or ESP
If you are migrating contacts from an existing CRM or ESP, it's important to identify the contacts that have proper consent to receive marketing emails. If the contacts have met all consent and permission requirements for receiving your emails, they're more likely to engage with your content and less likely to unsubscribe and negatively impact your sending reputation. You should also ensure that contacts who needed to allowlist sending IPs from your previous ESP also allowlist the HubSpot IPs associated with your account.
Acquire and manage new subscribers
Using forms on your website to drive conversions is one of the best ways to increase subscribers. You can also ensure that your subscribers are legitimate and highly engaged by enabling CAPTCHA on your forms, and setting up double opt-in for your new contacts.
Drive engagement with your emails
One of the best ways to ensure a positive engagement rate and maintain a healthy sending reputation is to tailor the content and delivery of your emails to each of your recipients. By personalizing your emails to individual recipients, sending at the right time, and making sure you don't overwhelm them with emails, your contacts are more likely to open and convert on your content.
Review and action post-send email data
As you continue to send marketing emails to your contacts, you can analyze your emails' performance and engagement data. You can use this data to gain insight into bounce reasons, identify which emails have been more successful, and discover recommendations for improvement. If email open rates fall below critical thresholds for an extended period of time, your brand's emails may be going to spam and you should consider implementing a reputation repair plan.
Maintain your contact lists
You should regularly review your contact lists as your subscriber base grows. Emailing unengaged contacts is a common reason for reputation and inbox placement issues. To be proactive, you should build a plan for addressing unengaged contacts that you and your team can commit to and revisit often.
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