Managing Significant Soft Bounces

michellechopin · ‎10-06-2020

I've been working on an overview of my company's email marketing since starting use of Marketo and also to compare pre- and post-COVID activities. In doing so, I noticed that all of a sudden (after March), we ended up with significant numbers of soft bounces on our email sends - 13-30% on our larger sends (we used to have a delivery rate of around 98-99%).

The following screenshots show the difference in delivery rates before this issue appeared (ignore emails with smaller numbers - those are tests and the filtering in the report doesn't work properly and/or crashes the page):

January - March 2020 (most recent at top)

April - October 2020 (most recent at top)

I'm having a hard time figuring out what could have made these changes happen so abruptly at such a volume. I've taken a look at the Smart Lists for campaigns before and after the change but there's very little difference - if anything, we've added a few more filters to remove people already speaking with Sales or having made a booking (purchase):

Before Change

After Change

Note: When we have regionally specific emails, we add a Country filter here also

I've set up Smart Lists using the Bounce Category Numbers (amazing guide for anyone that wants it!) to identify Contacts with Hard vs Soft Bounces. I am going to use that to remove the Hard Bounces permanently so we stop sending to them but I'm not sure how best to deal with the Soft Bounces and would love any suggestions/insight.

The soft bounces seem to be around the same number each time we send an email to the same sized list - should I remove them from future email sends? If so, can I bring them back in at some point? Is there anything I can do to clean that up generally? On the email sends of 70,000+ people, we're not reaching ~20,000 people so I'd love to fix this in whatever way is appropriate.

Thanks in advance for any help and if there's any other information I can include to help solve this, please let me know!

Michelle

PS. I found this discussion that talks about a Soft Bounce Control but I can't find it in the Community. If this is something I can do, and someone has the original post or even the solution, that would be great!

michellechopin · ‎10-28-2020

I reached out to our Customer Success Manager for some insight into this and he was able to pull a detailed delivery report for me.

This highlighted the soft bounces (as well as the few hard bounces) we had last email send and gave details as to why they had bounced (more than just the category information). This confirmed what the person before me had suspected when these bounces first appeared - that our repermissioning email had connected with a lot of contacts who hadn't been engaged with our emails in a while and almost all of them registered user complaints.

With that information, I've moved 21,000+ people into a Marketing Suspended status and as they are mostly Yahoo.com and AOL.com accounts, I am going to do a little digging to see if there is anything we can do to fix this (but if they see us as junk/spam), they're likely to just stay in the suspended status until we hear from them on their own terms.

Appreciate the questions and guidance provided throughout the thread too 😊

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