HubSpot email deliverability refers to the rate at which your emails actually land in recipients’ inboxes rather than their spam folders or promotions tabs. Poor deliverability means your campaigns reach fewer people even when your contact list looks healthy on paper. The good news is that HubSpot includes built-in tools and settings that give you real leverage over your sending reputation.
Add SPF and DKIM records via your domain provider, along with a DMARC policy. Confirm each is verified in HubSpot’s Email Sending Domains settings.
Start with smaller sends to your most engaged contacts before scaling volume to avoid triggering spam filters early on.
Create an active list of contacts who have not opened any email in 6 months and suppress them from future sends.
After each send, check your open rate and bounce rate. If the spam report count rises, investigate before the next campaign goes out.
Make sure each email is assigned to the right subscription type so recipients receive only the content they opted in for.
What does email deliverability actually mean in HubSpot?
Deliverability is not just about whether HubSpot successfully sends your message. It covers whether your message passes spam filter checks at the recipient’s mail provider and reaches the inbox rather than being silently filtered. HubSpot handles the technical sending infrastructure, but your domain reputation and list quality both shape what happens after the email leaves HubSpot’s servers.
HubSpot provides a Health tab inside the Email tool that shows your recent sending performance. This is your first reference point. If open rates are unusually low or bounce rates are climbing, those are signals worth investigating before the next campaign goes out.
What affects your HubSpot email deliverability?
Several factors influence whether your emails reach the inbox consistently.
Domain authentication. SPF and DKIM records tell mail providers that HubSpot is authorised to send on behalf of your domain. DMARC adds a policy layer that specifies what to do if either check fails. Without these records in place, your emails are more likely to be treated as suspicious. HubSpot’s Email Sending Domains section walks you through the setup and confirms when each record is correctly configured.
Bounce rate. Hard bounces (permanent delivery failures) damage your sender reputation. HubSpot automatically suppresses hard-bounced contacts. Even so, a list that has not been cleaned in a long time will accumulate hard bounces quickly the moment you run a campaign against it.
Spam complaints. When recipients mark your email as spam, that signal feeds back to mail providers and reduces your future inbox placement rate. A high complaint rate can also result in HubSpot restricting your sending account.
Engagement signals. Mail providers track whether recipients open or click your messages. Consistently low engagement from a large portion of your list is a signal that your emails may not be wanted, which affects inbox placement over time.
Content and links. Certain patterns in email content and the use of domains with poor reputations in your links can trigger spam filters. Avoiding link shorteners and checking that any domains you link to are not blacklisted helps here.
How do you check your deliverability performance in HubSpot?
Start with the Email Health page inside Marketing > Email. This page shows your open rate along with click rate and spam report rate from recent campaigns. HubSpot benchmarks these against similar senders, which gives you a rough sense of where your account stands.
For individual campaigns, the performance report inside each email shows delivery status broken down by what succeeded and what bounced. The bounce breakdown tells you whether issues are hard bounces (bad addresses) or soft bounces (temporary failures like a full inbox).
If you are connected to Google Postmaster Tools through your domain, that is another source of reputation data. While it focuses on Gmail delivery specifically, Gmail is the dominant provider for many contact lists in Southeast Asia.
What HubSpot settings improve deliverability?
A few settings have a direct impact on how well your emails reach inboxes.
Email sending domain. Connecting a dedicated subdomain (such as email.yourcompany.com) to HubSpot separates your email sending reputation from your main website domain. Changes in one do not drag down the other.
Subscription types. HubSpot’s subscription types let contacts opt in or out of specific email categories. Using them correctly means that someone who unsubscribes from marketing newsletters stays on your list for transactional messages if they have separately opted in. This keeps your list structure clean and reduces complaints from contacts who feel they are receiving emails they did not ask for.
Double opt-in. Enabling double opt-in on your HubSpot forms adds a confirmation step before a contact is subscribed. This filters out mistyped addresses and reduces the chance of adding spam trap addresses to your list.
Contact suppression lists. Using active lists to suppress contacts who have not engaged over a set period reduces the volume of emails going to people who are likely to ignore or report them.
How does list hygiene affect deliverability?
List hygiene is one of the most practical levers available. A contact database that has grown over several years without regular maintenance often includes invalid addresses alongside disengaged contacts, plus duplicates that can skew your reporting.
A useful starting point is to build an active list in HubSpot that filters for contacts who have received at least five emails in the past six months and opened zero of them. Removing these contacts from your regular send audience reduces the engagement drag on your sender score. You do not need to delete these contacts entirely. Suppressing them from marketing sends while keeping them in your CRM for other workflows is a reasonable approach.
Running periodic re-engagement campaigns before suppressing contacts is also worth considering. A short campaign that gives unengaged contacts a reason to update their preferences or confirm interest tends to recover a portion of those contacts before they are removed from the active list.
What is the CAN-SPAM requirement and how does HubSpot handle it?
CAN-SPAM (the US regulation that covers commercial email) requires marketing emails to include a physical mailing address and a working unsubscribe mechanism, along with accurate sender information. GDPR imposes its own consent requirements for recipients in the EU. HubSpot builds compliance features into the email editor: unsubscribe links are included by default and the footer address pulls from your account’s company settings.
For teams in Southeast Asia, PDPA (Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act) is the more relevant regulation. HubSpot’s consent management tools and subscription types support the practical side of maintaining documented consent, though specific legal requirements around consent are worth reviewing with a local adviser rather than relying on platform configuration alone.
The practical takeaway is that HubSpot’s default setup addresses most of the technical compliance requirements, but the business is responsible for ensuring the consent that sits behind the contact records is properly documented.
Frequently asked questions
What is a healthy open rate for HubSpot emails?
This varies considerably by industry and how well-segmented your list is. Rather than chasing a specific number, the more useful approach is to track your own open rate over time and investigate drops rather than comparing to published averages that may not reflect your sector.
Will switching to a dedicated sending domain improve deliverability immediately?
Not immediately. A new subdomain starts with no reputation, which is why warming it up gradually with smaller sends to engaged contacts matters. Reputation builds over weeks of consistent, low-complaint sending.
Can I improve deliverability if my open rates have been low for a long time?
Yes, though it takes time. Cleaning your list and setting up proper authentication both contribute here. A temporary reduction in send frequency while focusing on engaged segments tends to show results over several send cycles.
Does HubSpot’s spam score tool check my emails before sending?
HubSpot includes a basic spam analysis in the email editor that flags common content issues. It is a useful pre-send check but not a guarantee of inbox placement, since actual delivery depends on your domain reputation and the recipient’s mail provider filters.
This is an independent informational resource produced by a HubSpot Platinum Partner. HubSpot is a trademark of HubSpot, Inc.
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