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email marketing – handling bounced email addresses

When you send emails out to a subscriber list it’s inevitable that a percentage of them will not reach their destination.  Now, there can be a number of reasons behind this – for example your email content trips a filter – but for now we will look at a less discussed area; the email bounce.

Bounce is the simple description of an email message that has been returned to the sender as it has not reached its destination. This can be due to the email address itself not being correct, or perhaps the address is no longer used, or there is a problem in delivering the message – for example, the recipients Inbox is temporarily unavailable.

The number of bounces you will experience in a subscriber list depends on its overall condition and it is common sense to keep a subscriber list as hygienically clean as possible.  Bouncing addresses can harm your sender reputation, which will have an impact on future email activities, so it is essential they are investigated.

Handling bouncing addresses is a relatively straightforward process, but you should have a method to deal with them.  For the majority of email bounces the reason behind it will be quite straightforward and simple to find, so you should approach this task from looking for the simplest reasons first and then working to the more complex or time/resource hungry processes for the list as it steadily shrinks. There is an added complication in the source of the subscriber information; if it your customer list then the steps is pretty easy to follow, but if it a list created from a marketing exercise then resolving all the bounces can be a little more problematic. Here’s a standard approach for you:

Step one: Remove them from your active list

Whenever you are investigating a bouncing email address it is important to quarantine the record. This allows you to continue using the good addresses and not worry about the bouncing addresses once again filling up your Inbox.

This does not mean you should delete the address.  In fact this is very bad practice (see below).  Instead, remove the records to a parked area for investigation.

Step two: Split the addresses

Put the bounced addresses into two camps – hard and soft bounce.  Hard is where the domain does not exist, and soft is where the person is not recognised or the message cannot be delivered, perhaps due to the mailserver being busy.

Step three: Look at the hard bounces

Hard bounces can normally be sorted out quite quickly.  In practice they tend to be invalid due to a typo or a missing character, so take a look at the list through and make sure the domains are set out correctly, including the domain name and the suffix.

It’s a good idea to split the cleanup work down amongst the sales team – after all, they like to claim they own their accounts, and any errors do tend to be down to their use of the CRM system where the address was pulled from in the first place!  So, get them to correct the mistakes and set a deadline to have the results returned to you.

If you don’t have a sales team then this task is down to you to be completed.  I always suggest either dedicating a set amount of time to doing this, or break the task down to small chunks to help prevent you feeling overwhelmed.  Hopefully the number of bounces you are experiencing is low in any case, and so the task won’t be too hard.

A clean up method is really just a case of making basic checks on the addresses. Is the domain name correct?  Is the name of the contact spelt correctly? Does the person still exist at the organisation or have they left or changed their address?  Some of the steps may involve calling the company in question, which is a good opportunity to get talking to prospects.

Where you have subscriber information gained from a marketing exercise (for example a fields on a website asking people to subscribe to a newsletter) then the manual process of checking each domain becomes the primary way to looking for errors.  This of course would not occur where you use a double opt-in process as they would have to give a correct email address in order to receive a confirmation note.

Ultimately, after checking each record, you will be left with a small number that are not resolvable.  These have to be taken forward to the next step.

Step four: suppress any addresses not sorted

If you cannot determine the reason why an address is bouncing then don’t allow it to be used.  Make sure it is in a suppressed list that the send engine checks against before sending to prevent it popping up and wasting your time in the future.

It is highly important to suppress these addresses and to not delete them.  If you wipe them off your systems then there is a risk they will come back at a later data – meaning you will have to go through the entire process all over again and risking ISPs blacklisting you for continually sending emails to addresses that do not exist.

Remember, the hygiene of your subscriber list is paramount.  Spend a little time each month checking it and you will be saving yourself a lot of hassle at some point later on.

About the Author

Peter Crane is an email marketing specialist with over 15 years experience in devising strategic plans in enterprises. He advises domestic and international organisations on introducing and enhancing their email marketing strategies, with a unique blend of experience in both technical and commercial aspects to enhance content, deliverabilty, reputation and conversion.

You can find out more from visiting his company ArrowPoint Mail

Bounce – The Cab