How can HubSpot improve email deliverability for growing IT companies?

If your IT company has scaled fast, there's a good chance your HubSpot deliverability has quietly scaled in the wrong direction alongside it. Growing send volume without matching list hygiene is one of the most common ways fast-growing tech companies damage their domain reputation - and it usually shows up as a soft pipeline number long before anyone thinks to check bounce rates.

Automating bounce flagging, running a standing database clean-up rule for dormant contacts, and verifying new contacts at the point of entry keeps bounce rates comfortably under the 2% threshold most inbox providers treat as a warning line. This hack walks through how to build that safety net.

Top tip: treat this as maintenance, not a project. A clean-up gets you back under the 2% bounce threshold once - only an always-on workflow keeps you there.

1. Automatically flag bounced contacts as non-marketing and pull them from active sequences

- Build a workflow that enrols any contact the moment they hard bounce.

- Set the contact to non-marketing status and remove them from any live sequence or nurture workflow in the same automation, so they stop counting against send volume immediately.

- For the enrolment trigger and branching logic itself, BabelQuest's bounced contact sequence hack and non-marketing workflow hack cover the exact steps - use those as your build reference rather than starting from scratch.

2. Run a standing database clean-up rule for dormant contacts

- Set a rule that moves any contact untouched for two years, with no website activity, to non-marketing status automatically.

- Run this as a scheduled, recurring workflow rather than a manual quarterly review — the moment it becomes a task someone has to remember, it stops happening.

- Review the rule's output monthly rather than assuming it's working silently in the background.

3. Verify new contacts at the point of entry

- Use HubSpot's native enrichment alongside a third-party bounce verification tool to check data quality as soon as a contact is created, not after the first send.

- This catches a meaningful share of bad addresses before they ever reach a bounce-handling workflow - a particular risk for IT companies bringing in high volumes of referral or partner-programme leads at once.

4. Replace blast-style sends with targeted, segmented nurture

- Move away from emailing your full list as one undifferentiated block.

- Segment by engagement level, lifecycle stage or another relevant property, so you're not sending at the same volume and cadence to your most and least engaged contacts alike.

None of this is complicated to build. What trips growing IT companies up specifically is scaling send volume faster than list hygiene - treating deliverability as a one-off fix rather than ongoing housekeeping, the same way you'd treat server monitoring.