Bounce Your Way to Fresher Data Now

3 minute read

Upland Admin

So you’ve been growing your data for a while now, collecting sign-ups from your website, forward to a friend forms and share links. After launching your campaign you’re now eagerly awaiting the opens and clicks to come in, however sometimes the percentages are not as high as we’d like them to be. “Why hasn’t it launched to everyone in my list” and “why are some records bouncing” this is a question I get asked a lot so here’s a breakdown of the reporting tab within MessageFocus and how you can get the most out of it.

What does it all mean?

  • Attempted: the recipients MessageFocus has tried to send to.
  • Not Attempted: the recipients that were not sent to. These records will be a combination of previously bounced, previously unsubscribed or undeliverable records. I will talk more about these records shortly.
  • Delivered: successfully landed in the inbox, this is the total number of contacts that MessageFocus attempted to send to, minus the bounced records.
  • Bounced: failed to reach the inbox, this is the total number of recipients who were unable to receive an email campaign. MessageFocus has received an error message from the recipients’ mail server stating that the email could not be delivered. This can be due to any of the following hard bounces.

The hard bounces in MessageFocus are:

  • Invalid Domain: the domain is after the @, e.g. example@adestra.com.
  • Invalid User: the user is before the @ and could be someone who has left the company.
  • Over Quota: this is when the recipient’s mailbox is full.
  • Other Bounce: this is when the server has rejected an email it but hasn’t told us why.

So once these records have bounced what happens next time they’re sent to?

This is another question that comes up a lot and it can be quite confusing if you’re not familiar with the bounce system. If a record returns a hard bounce three times in a fifteen day period it will be added to the known bounce list and suppressed across the whole of MessageFocus.

OK, now I know what a hard bounce is, what’s a soft bounce?

A soft bounce is when an email is received by a mail server and the address is valid, however the message isn’t delivered due to an error that has occurred. This can be due to an Address Change, an Out of Office reply, the message being blocked by their spam filter or a Temporary Notice reply. You can see these reply messages as well as the hard bounced messages in the Inbound Tab within the reporting in MessageFocus.

So how does the bounce system benefit me?

To keep your data as clean as possible and have the most up to date set of records you need to know which records are bouncing and why. Once these records have been added to the known bounce list they won’t be sent to again and will be suppressed across the whole of MessageFocus. Thankfully you get all the information you need to react to hard bounces with the system report. Identifying the problem behind why an email address has bounced is the first step to correcting it and after all, you ideally want your subscribers to be receiving your emails, not getting added to a known bounce list.

Hopefully this will make things a bit clearer if you were a little unsure of the bounce system within MessageFocus.

Please feel free to ask your Account Manager for more information about inbound replies and bounces.

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