The client
A privately held entertainment media company with roughly 100 employees that had grown through a series of acquisitions. Each acquisition brought a new brand, a new audience, and a new email list — all eventually consolidated into a single HubSpot portal.
That consolidation made operational sense. What it did to email health was a different story.
The problem
The company was experiencing abnormal bounce rates and poor engagement across all five brands simultaneously. Email health had deteriorated badly enough that their sending IP had landed on a blacklist — meaning a significant portion of their emails were not reaching inboxes at all.
The immediate cause was clear. The root cause was not.
Each brand had built its own list over years of independent operation before being acquired. Nobody had audited those lists after the consolidation. Nobody had segmented contacts by engagement level. Nobody had adjusted the sending cadence to match how different contacts were actually behaving.
The result was predictable in hindsight. Emails were going out to everyone at the same frequency regardless of whether anyone was paying attention. Hundreds of thousands of sends per week to contacts who had long since stopped engaging — quietly generating bounces and spam reports that poisoned the sending reputation across all five brands at once.
What we found
We audited all five lists inside the HubSpot portal, built active segmentation lists to measure contact-level engagement, and tiered every list into three groups based on actual behavior.
- Combined list size across all five brands: 591,312 contacts
- Confirmed bounces removed: 18,981
- Usable contacts varied from 49% to 74% depending on the brand — the healthiest list had nearly three quarters of contacts worth sending to, the worst had less than half
- Up to 50% of contacts in the worst-performing lists had no meaningful engagement history and were generating negative signals every time an email went out
Overall email health at the time of audit: Poor to Fair. There was a path forward — but only if sending behavior changed immediately.
What we did
We started by getting the infrastructure right before touching a single send. The sending IP was removed from the blacklist. That created a window. What happened in that window would determine whether the problem came back.
We established a three-tier engagement framework applied consistently across all five brands, segmenting every contact based on their actual behavior history rather than how long they had been on the list. Each tier received a sending cadence matched to their level of engagement — active contacts heard from the brand more frequently, disengaged contacts less so.
Any contact that re-engaged moved up automatically. Any contact that continued to ignore sends stayed where they were or was suppressed over time. The goal was not to send less — it was to send smarter.
We also built a master bounce and spam suppression list excluded from all sends across all five brands. Anyone who had previously generated a bounce or spam report would no longer receive email from any property in the portfolio.
Personalization guidance was built into the cadence recommendations as well — giving disengaged contacts a real reason to re-engage rather than just another email in their inbox.
The outcome
Email health improved from Poor to Fair with a clear trajectory toward Good as the new cadence took hold. The sending IP stayed off the blacklist. Bounce rates dropped as confirmed bad contacts were suppressed. Engagement rates began to normalize as sends were concentrated on contacts who were actually paying attention.
The company went from sending to everyone at the same frequency to sending to the right people at the right rate — which is the only thing that actually moves the needle on email reputation over time.
What this means for you
Most email problems are not content problems. They are list problems.
If you have been sending to the same list for more than a year without a formal audit, the odds are high that a meaningful percentage of your contacts are hurting your deliverability rather than helping it. The damage compounds quietly — lower open rates, higher bounce rates, spam flags — until the day you find out you are on a blacklist and nobody can tell you exactly when it happened.
Cleaning a list is not a one-time fix. It is an ongoing discipline. But it starts with knowing what you actually have.
That is where we start.