Deliverability Crisis at a Consulting Firm
A consulting firm sends a monthly newsletter through HubSpot to 24,000 contacts. Most addresses were scraped from LinkedIn or collected at conferences without an opt-in checkbox. The email is built as one large image with the unsubscribe link and physical address rendered inside the image footer. The from address is newsletter@ and replies go to an unmonitored inbox. Last month's send had a 9% hard bounce rate and 0.8% spam complaint rate; Gmail and Microsoft placed it in spam for many recipients. The firm has no SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records for its sending domain. A partner asks whether to buy a verification service and re-send to the bounced addresses, and whether adding 'unsubscribe' as text is enough.
1. Prioritize the deliverability and compliance problems in this program. What would you fix first, and why?
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The foundational problem is consent and list source, not subject lines. Scraped LinkedIn and conference addresses without an opt-in checkbox likely lack a valid legal basis, and HubSpot prohibits purchased or scraped lists. The first fix is to stop sending to contacts whose consent cannot be evidenced, and to suppress hard bounces immediately; resending to a 9% hard-bounce list will further damage reputation. Next, implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for the sending domain, because major mailbox providers use authentication as a filter. The image-only email is both an accessibility failure and a spam signal; add live text, a clear unsubscribe link, and a physical postal address in the footer. Set a monitored reply-to address. A verification service can clean remaining addresses, but it cannot create consent. Only after these fixes should the firm consider a low-volume re-permission campaign. Fixing the template without fixing consent would leave the core compliance and reputation risk untouched.
2. Outline a 30-day remediation plan to rebuild list quality and sender reputation.
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Days 1-7: inventory the list by source and consent status; suppress scraped, purchased, and hard-bounced contacts; publish SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records; update the template with text unsubscribe, physical address, and a plain-text version. Days 8-14: send a re-permission email only to contacts with a defensible basis-recent conference opt-ins, customers, and engaged newsletter readers-with a preference center; do not email the co-registration or scraped cohorts again. Days 15-30: resume with segmented, low-volume sends to engaged contacts, monitor bounce and complaint rates daily, and pause if complaints exceed 0.1%. Use double opt-in for new signups. Warm the domain gradually rather than blasting the full list. Track reputation through Google Postmaster Tools and HubSpot's deliverability reports; success is a falling bounce/complaint rate, not a one-time open-rate spike. The plan deliberately sacrifices list size for a permissioned, measurable audience.