The Challenge
Many marketing and sales teams struggle with email deliverability because their contact data is incomplete or contains risky addresses. Sending campaigns or sequences to these contacts can result in hard bounces, damage sender reputation and waste valuable time chasing leads that aren’t reachable. The challenge is how to proactively identify and manage these risky contacts before they impact campaigns, without adding extra manual work for the team.
Enrich contacts & protect deliverability — HubSpot workflow hack
Keeping your email deliverability healthy starts with the data in your CRM. This simple HubSpot workflow enriches contact records, flags potential bounces, and stops risky emails before they’re sent — protecting sender reputation and saving sales time.
Why this helps
Automatic enrichment fills missing contact details so your records are more useful. Detecting potential bounces before emails are sent prevents wasted sequences, reduces hard bounces and keeps your sending reputation intact. Use the output as a suppression (exclusion) list when you send marketing campaigns.
Step 1 — Create the workflow
Go to Automation > Workflows and Create workflow from scratch.
Name it clearly, for example “Enrich + Bounce protection — form imports / historic scan”.
Step 2 — Set the enrolment trigger
Choose the trigger: this can be a form submission, contact import, property update or a scheduled list scan (for backfill). If you’re scanning historical data, build a static list first and trigger the workflow on list membership. For cleaning net new data going forwards use ‘Create date’ is known.
Step 3 — Enrich the contact (fill in the gaps)
Add an enrichment action. Configure it to fill missing fields only by default so you don’t overwrite trusted values — overwrite is optional depending on your confidence, for this I set to no, just fill missing values on the Enrolled contact.
Step 4 — Branch on bounce risk
Add an If/then branch that checks the enrichment result for a bounce indicator (the free hidden HubSpot property that flags a potential bounced email via its database and partners). If a bounce risk is detected, route contacts down the “Potential bounce” path.
Step 5 — Notify the contact owner
In the “Potential bounce” branch, notify the contact owner via email and/or HubSpot notification (or Slack/MS Teams if you prefer). Include key properties in the notification: contact name, email, recent conversion or form, and a short note on the recommendation (for example: “A contact you own has been flagged as a potential email bounce”).
Step 7 — Optional: block sales sequences
If the bounce risk is high you can unenroll from Prospecting Agent and Sales email sequences.
Step 8 — Backfill historic contacts
Run enrichment using the Data Enrichment tool (Data Management) > Data Enrichment and add a list or segment of contacts (maybe all created this year for example).
Build an active ‘block’ or suppression list or Segment. We like to use the groups
Marketing emails bounces is greater than or equal to 1
Or
Email hard bounce reason is any of Other, Mailbox full, Content, Spam, or Unknown user
Or Enriched Email Bounce Detected is equal to True.
You can then use this active list/segment as a negative exclusion or exclusion list for email marketing campaigns.
Top tips
- Use the suppression list as an exclusion when sending any marketing broadcast.
- Consider periodic scans (monthly or quarterly) to catch new issues in older records.
- Track results: monitor hard bounce rates and email deliverability rates to monitor impact.
Summary
Enrich contact records, detect potential bounces, alert owners and suppress risky addresses. It’s a straightforward HubSpot workflow that reduces admin, protects deliverability and stops sales and marketing wasting effort on “dead” data.