Your emails might be beautifully written and perfectly timed—but none of that matters if they never reach the inbox. A faltering sender reputation often flies under the radar until open rates dry up and campaign results flatline.
If you’ve been seeing declining engagement and aren’t sure why, chances are your sender reputation is slipping. This can happen when you send to outdated lists, neglect bounce metrics, or overlook early warning signs in deliverability data. Unfortunately, by the time you notice, you’ve already lost momentum.
HubSpot’s Email Health tool helps you regain control. It offers a clear, data-driven view of your sender reputation so you can stop guessing and start fixing the real issues. In this guide, you’ll learn how to use the tool effectively, dig into the right metrics, and turn insights into improvements—plus how INSIDEA’s HubSpot experts can keep your email performance on track.
Email Health vs. Email Performance: Mastering HubSpot’s Internal Grading
The Email Health tool in HubSpot is your mission control center for monitoring email deliverability. It lives within your HubSpot portal at Marketing > Email > Health, and it gives you at-a-glance insights into your overall email reputation.
The tool compiles recent data from your marketing emails and calculates a health score. This score reflects how well your emails are performing, based on metrics such as bounce rates, unsubscribes, spam complaints, and engagement. HubSpot classifies your status into one of four categories: “Poor,” “Needs Improvement,” “Good,” or “Excellent.”
If you’re using Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, you have full access. The tool tracks real sending data tied to your connected domains, so what you see isn’t generic—it’s specific, current, and actionable.
How It Works Under the Hood
At its core, the Email Health tool monitors email quality based on your sending habits over a rolling 30-day window. While it displays a single health score, it’s built from layers of key metrics that tell a much bigger story about your email hygiene and contact engagement.
Here’s what the tool evaluates:
- Deliverability: It flags hard bounces, soft bounces, and server blocks to show how many of your emails actually reach inboxes.
- Engagement: Opens, clicks, and unsubscribes show how your audience responds to your content.
- Spam feedback: Complaints from recipients signal wider trust issues with your domain.
- List health: It looks at who you’re emailing—regularly engaged contacts or stale, unresponsive lists that drag down performance.
Behind the scenes, HubSpot analyzes your send volume and checks the validity of your contacts. The tool returns both a summarized health score and detailed breakdowns for each metric. You can also shift the reporting window or filter by domain to get clarity on exactly where problems originate.
Let’s say your hard bounce rate spikes. Instead of combing through every email manually, the tool alerts you and suggests reviewing your list quality or domain setup. That kind of insight dramatically reduces issue resolution time.
Main Uses Inside HubSpot
Tracking Sender Reputation Trends
With the Email Health tool, you’re able to spot reputation shifts early. Monitoring ongoing trends helps you understand what triggered performance drops—and more importantly, what reversed them. Imagine your newsletter open rates dive by 20%. Rather than guessing, you check the Email Health tool and find soft bounces jumped after importing a large contact list. By trimming those unresponsive contacts, your performance recovers, and you’ve stopped a longer-term decline before it takes root.
Detecting Engagement Drop-offs
Engagement is one of the strongest signals tied to deliverability. A sudden rise in unsubscribes or a slide in click rates typically means your emails are missing the mark—whether in frequency, targeting, or content relevance.
Say you recently launched a big product campaign. If the Email Health report shows rising unsubscribes tied to specific workflows, adjust the sending cadence and tweak your segmentation. Often, dialing back targeting just slightly can rescue your engagement curve in a matter of weeks.
Domain Reputation Monitoring for Multi-Domain Sends
If you manage more than one sending domain, the Email Health tool is essential. It lets you zoom in by domain and compare how each one performs.
Maybe your marketing domain has solid engagement but a high bounce rate. You can isolate the domain in the report and notice that authentication records need updating. Once SPF and DKIM checks are fixed, delivery improves, and you avoid damaging domain-wide trust.
Common Setup Errors and Wrong Assumptions
Even seasoned HubSpot users run into common pitfalls that quietly impact email performance. Here are the most damaging mistakes—and how to solve them:
Mistake: Overlooking low-volume sends
Small sends still play into your sender reputation. If a batch of just 500 emails bounces or earns spam complaints, it can lower your score.
Fix: Monitor every campaign, no matter the size. Remove non-engaged contacts after two or three failed sends.
Mistake: Thinking a “Good” score means you’re safe
A “Good” rating doesn’t guarantee high engagement. You could still see rising unsubscribe rates or flat click rates.
Fix: Dig into the individual metrics behind the score. Use trends, not labels, to guide your next steps.
Mistake: Skipping domain verification
Sending from an unverified or partially configured domain hurts deliverability—even if your content is clean.
Fix: Complete your domain setup in Settings > Domains & URLs, and make sure DKIM and SPF authentication are active.
Mistake: Viewing metrics without acting on them
Seeing bounce and unsubscribe metrics isn’t helpful unless you’re adjusting how or when you send.
Fix: Set internal thresholds—for instance, if spam rates hit 0.1% or hard bounces exceed 2%, pause and reassess your list or frequency.
Step-by-Step Setup or Use Guide
To use the Email Health tool effectively, ensure you have the required permissions and that your email domain is verified.
Here’s how to get started:
Step 1: Open the Email Health dashboard
Head to Marketing > Email and click the Health tab.
Step 2: Review your current score
You’ll see a color-coded status along with quick stats on volume, bounces, and spam feedback. Hover to view additional details.
Step 3: Change the reporting window
Use the date picker to switch between 7-, 30-, or 90-day views. This helps detect if underperformance is isolated or ongoing.
Step 4: Dive into individual metrics
Scroll through the chart to see hard bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints side by side.
Step 5: Filter by campaign or domain
Managing multiple brands or services? Use filters to zero in on specific domains or folders.
Step 6: Resolve problem areas
If you see alerts like “High Bounce Rate,” click for more detail. HubSpot often identifies the contact lists or recent imports causing trouble.
Step 7: Adjust your audience and cadence
Remove unengaged contacts from affected lists. Shift to smaller, high-quality segments for cleaner performance.
Step 8: Track your progress
Build a custom report under Reports > Custom Reports to monitor metrics like “Email Health Over Time.” Use it to see whether changes are paying off.
This routine helps create a tighter loop between campaign planning and sender reputation maintenance—so your emails reach the inbox and get results.
Measuring Results in HubSpot
Once you’ve addressed the underlying issues hurting your sender health, it’s vital to track whether your actions are delivering real results.
Here’s what to monitor:
- Bounce rate: Focus especially on hard bounces. A healthy list will typically stay under 2%.
- Opens and clicks: Are your open and click rates starting to climb back up after list cleaning or domain fixes? If yes, your domain is regaining trust.
- Unsubscribes: These should hold steady or decline as engagement improves.
- Spam complaints: Keep this below 0.1%. Higher rates suggest serious reputation issues.
- Score trend: Aim to hold a “Good” or better rating for at least six weeks before scaling up email volume.
Set up a custom dashboard with these widgets:
- Email Health Score (from your Marketing Email overview)
- Bounce Rate Over Time (line chart)
- Click-Through Rate Trend (bar or line)
- Spam Complaints Summary (table or KPI)
This setup gives you and your leadership team a real-time, reliable snapshot of how each campaign impacts long-term trust in your domain.
Short Example That Ties It Together
Picture this: you’re managing marketing ops at a mid-size SaaS company. A few months back, your email delivery rate slipped from 98% to 91%. Open rates followed.
You check HubSpot’s Email Health tab and see you’re now in the “Needs Improvement” zone. Bounces are up, and engagement is tapering off fast. After filtering by domain, you spot the problem: a batch of newly imported leads from a webinar campaign is responsible for most of the bounces.
You remove those contacts, clean up your active lists, and verify domain authentication under Settings > Domains & URLs. Within 48 hours of resending, your Email Health score updates: bounce rate drops below 1.5%, open rates jump 8%, and you’re back in action. A weekly dashboard report logs the gains for leadership—and sets a benchmark for future campaigns.
That’s how strategic monitoring connects to real, measurable wins.
How INSIDEA Helps
At INSIDEA, we help you keep your email engine humming with practical, forward-looking support. Our team works behind the scenes to align your HubSpot setup with the best deliverability practices—so your campaigns land, get seen, and drive action.
Our services include:
- HubSpot onboarding: Set up your portal correctly with verified domains and optimized email tools
- List and data hygiene: Remove bounces proactively and keep your contact database clean and segmented
- Workflow automation: Build responsive email flows that adjust frequency based on engagement levels
- Reporting support: Link Email Health data to business outcomes through custom dashboards
Want your emails to hit harder, land smarter, and convert faster? Check out INSIDEA’s HubSpot consulting services or connect with one of our specialists.
