How to Use HubSpot's Email Health Dashboard Before Your Deliverability Drops
A falling open rate is a late symptom. Here is how to read HubSpot's Email Health dashboard, what each number is telling you about your list, and what to fix first.
Check your email health before you touch the copy.
A falling open rate is a late symptom. Mailbox providers made that call weeks ago, based on how your last few sends behaved. HubSpot's Email Health tool is where their verdict becomes visible, and it is the dashboard most teams open only after something has gone wrong.
What the dashboard actually shows
It reports your account's sending reputation as four numbers: hard bounces, spam reports, unsubscribes, and how your opens and clicks compare with your own sending history. HubSpot flags a metric when it moves outside the range it considers healthy, and it can restrict your sending if the numbers stay there. HubSpot's guide to the tool covers where to find it.
Three of those four numbers are about your list. One is about your writing. Most teams spend all their time on the writing.
Read it as three triggers
Hard bounces climbing. A hard bounce is an address that does not exist, and HubSpot blocks that contact from future marketing email automatically. The trend is the finding: a rising rate tells you where your addresses came from. A list bought or scraped, a form with no validation, or years of typos nobody has looked at. Fix the intake before the list. One Format Data action in Operations Hub catches gmail.con and its neighbours: cleaning up your email data with an Ops Hub workflow.
Watching your open rates slide with no explanation?
Deliverability usually breaks quietly, months before anyone notices.
Spam reports and unsubscribes climbing together. Usually a consent problem in a content costume. Someone is getting mail they do not remember agreeing to, and the unsubscribe link sits one row further down the email than the report button.
Opens and clicks falling while bounces and complaints stay flat. The only one of the three that is genuinely about the email: subject lines, send times, the offer. Work on it once the other two are clean, because a great subject line sent to a poisoned list still gets filtered.
Consent is the metric underneath the metrics
Under the Spam Act 2003, which ACMA enforces, a commercial electronic message sent in Australia needs consent, clear identification of who is sending it, and a working unsubscribe. Consent comes in two forms, and the difference between them is what wrecks email health scores.
Express consent is someone actively agreeing to hear from you: a ticked box, a form submission, a reply that says yes. Inferred consent rests on an existing business relationship, or a work address published without a no-spam statement. It is narrower than most lists assume.
The part that catches people out: the burden of proof sits with the sender. If a complaint reaches ACMA, "they must have signed up at some point" is not an answer. You have to produce the consent.
A bad Email Health dashboard and a Spam Act exposure are usually the same problem seen from two directions. If you cannot evidence consent for a segment, ask them once, properly, and keep the receipt: keeping your list Spam Act safe.
What to fix, in order
- Verify your sending domain. The cheapest deliverability problem to have and the fastest to fix.
- Stop re-importing what you suppressed. HubSpot blocks hard bounced contacts, then a spreadsheet import puts them back. Find out who imports lists and how often.
- Turn on double opt-in. It costs you a few subscribers and gives you a timestamped record of express consent for the ones who stay. Worth the trade.
- Slow the volume down. Ten thousand emails in one hit looks like exactly what spammers do. HubSpot has no native staggered send, but Segments and a workflow build one: staggering sends to protect deliverability.
- Send to fewer people. Cutting the disengaged out of a send lifts every number on the dashboard, including the ones that decide whether the engaged ever see you.
Ten minutes a week, in front of whoever owns the sending. Has anything moved into a flagged state? What did we send that could explain it? Did anyone import a list?
One question for your next marketing meeting. If a contact complained to ACMA about your last newsletter, could someone produce the consent inside a minute? That answer and your email health score are usually the same answer.
Ran the health tool and hit a wall on the fixes?
Half the fixes sit in DNS, which marketing rarely controls.
If you would rather it was just handled, that is our RevOps and HubSpot work.