Why did Hubspot intentionally unsubscribe 250 thousand people from its mailing list?

A few weeks ago, the company Hubspot deliberately unsubscribed from its mailing 250 thousand people who previously subscribed to the newsletter on the company's Blog.

Thus, the number of blog subscribers dropped from 550 thousand to 300.
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They are crazy! - This is the first thing we thought.

They really acted very strange at first glance. Especially considering the fact that in parallel with this, they posted an article on the blog about how important it is to increase the subscriber base in order to increase blog traffic.

The reason for this act are the so-called "gray mailing" (from the English. Graymail).

These are the mailing lists to which you formally subscribed, but in fact they are absolutely not interesting for you and not needed.

In fact, graymail teetered on the brink of a foul. That is, potentially, this is precisely the list that risks becoming spam, while it is completely legal, since the visitor has given his consent to receive it.

How could this happen? Sounds weird. True?

In fact, everything is very simple and each of you, for sure, also encountered this.

For example:

You have subscribed to the online store newsletter, because for this you could get a 15% discount on the purchase of a fishing rod. This fishing rod you bought your brother for his birthday.


It turns out that you are not a fan of fishing and did it only to get a discount for a one-time purchase, while you will receive letters from the store with offers of new products, promotions and other information related to fishing.

These are classic gray mailings. They are not considered spam, since you voluntarily subscribed to receive them, BUT you absolutely do not need them and are not interested.

Why is gray mailing a marketing headache?

Despite the fact that such mailings are not considered spam, they strongly influence the deliverability of letters.

Since these mailings often show a low% of discoveries and are almost always immediately deleted, mail services begin to regard such a sender as unreliable and send all of his letters to the Spam folder.

Moreover, not only these “not reading” subscribers, but also all new ones who have just added to your mailing list.

It turns out that your letters seem to have been sent and delivered, but the recipients do not see them.

Not very nice, right?

Hubspot marketers noticed a growing problem with these “gray mailings” and decided to act.

That's what they did ...

1. Created an automatic unsubscribe from the list for non-active subscribers.

They set up a business process, the logic of which was to automatically remove from the database those subscribers who do not show any activity.

In the “do not show any activity” segment they included those who for the last 6 months have never followed the link in the letter.

They chose exactly the rate of clicks, not discoveries, since it is more reliable and can be monitored 100%.

The customized business process also included a trigger (automatic) letter that was sent to these people before unsubscribing.

First , to notify them that they are going to unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Secondly , for the last time to try to reanimate them.

As you already know, according to this method, they immediately unsubscribed 250 thousand people from their newsletters. And they continue to do this every day, as soon as the client enters the “inactive” segment.

But what happened next ...

If it seemed to you that it was easy for Hubspot and they absolutely did not worry about it - you are mistaken.

But after the state of the initial shock and the thought “why we did it,” passed, an understanding came that no tragedy happened and everything was as it should be.

550 thousand subscribers is certainly an excellent base, but if almost half of them are not interested in your mailing, then why waste time and resources on it.

Since these people did not react to the received letters for 6 months, did not go to the blog to read new articles, it means that removing them from the database will not affect attendance.

2. Limit the number of notifications to email about the release of a new article on the blog.

Immediately after the launch of the automatic unsubscribe from the distribution of inactive subscribers, the idea came to reduce the number of notifications about the release of a new article.

Previously, Hubspot sent notifications to its subscribers about the release of each new article on the blog. These articles could be 5-10 per day, respectively, and there were as many mail notifications.

Instead, they began to send just 1 email per day with a selection of the most popular new articles on the blog. The goal is to significantly free the mailbox of your subscribers.

Before introducing this new notification system, they notified all subscribers that I would now send only 1 email with the so-called “digest”.

Hubspot had many different reasons to change the format of the mailing to its subscribers, but in the letter that they sent, they identified 2 main ones.

The first one is the problem with gray mailings. Given the frequency of new posts on the blog, Hubspot sent 4+ letters per day to its subscribers.

The second reason is connected just with the number of letters sent. Not every subscriber is happy to receive 4+ emails per day from just one sender.

And if the company decides to increase the number of publications on the blog? - It will turn out even more letters sent to 1 person per day.

Thus, to collect all notifications about new articles in one email was a very logical and correct solution.

What happened in the end ...

Reducing the number of letters from 4+ per day to 1 digest letter was a very risky step for two reasons:

1. There was a huge risk of a decrease in blog traffic, as subscribers switched to a blog from received letters and generated traffic.
2. I didn’t want to upset subscribers who got used to receiving a large number of letters from us and who liked to choose which articles to read and which did not, by filtering them in their inbox.

With attendance everything was fine. In practice, it turned out that even if sending only 1 email per day, instead of 4+, the number of referrals from the email to the site did not decrease.

With that lucky.

As for the reaction of subscribers, with her, too, was lucky. Much to my surprise, people began to send their feedback in response to changes where they wrote:

• “Thank you for freeing my inbox a bit. Now there is a place for other newsletters "
• "Thank. In truth, I was about to unsubscribe, but now for nothing :) "
• “Excellent decision, I am very pleased. Thank you for trying to make your newsletters with the care of subscribers. ”

But, of course, there were those who were not satisfied with the changes. Of all the reasons that they called, there are 2 main ones:

People love to control what is happening in their mailbox. They are accustomed to decide which letter to open and read with which article and which one to delete immediately.
Some people read absolutely all the articles we sent, so getting them 4+ emails per day was not a problem.

IT'S TIME FOR CHANGES ...

At that time, as the majority of subscribers to “cheers” perceived the innovation with 1 letter instead of 4+, there were those who did not like such changes.

And this fact suggests that it is impossible to use the same email marketing scheme for all of its subscribers.

They are all different, they have different needs and interests, and corresponding to each is the main goal of proper email marketing.

In other words, it is important to give subscribers exactly what they want, and not just throw their mailbox with letters.

Now, to receive notifications about new publications on blogs of different companies, there is a subscription to newsletters or RSS.

But what if it were possible to automatically tweet every blog subscriber that a new article was posted.

Why no one has yet invented such a service?

In this context, only personalization can be a solution. It is necessary to enable subscribers to independently choose what content and how often they would like to receive.

Now it is implemented only for mass mailings that make online stores, but what if we introduce the same scheme on the company's blog ...

- What do you think about this?