Marketo Issue? Email Deliverability & Soft Bounces

[Anonymous]

I'm having a problem with email deliverability and soft bounce rates - is anyone experiencing a similar issue?

We were having a deliverability issue with our house list. In the middle of July, we did a list scrub to remove a large volume of emails from our database that we deemed to be unemailable.

Deliverability in month before DB scrub project: 88.4%
Deliverability in month after DB scrub project: 92.0%, with most of these being emails that delivered in the high 90%s, with some outliers in mid August.

I've noticed deliverability drop in the past few weeks (since mid-August). I also have access to another Marketo instance where one of our email sends had a 44% deliverability due to an issue on Marketo's end on August 8th. But the deliverability rates never fully stabilized since then in that instance.

For that issue, this was Marketo's response:
[Marketo] looked at the logs for these soft bounces and in fact [57%] of them were delivered. That is both a delivered and a soft bounce activity was logged. While this can technically can happen on our back-end I don't believe you should be seeing the soft-bounce but only the final delivered activity with this.

So, essentially many emails are being double counted as delivered and soft bounced. Has anyone seen anything similar? This seems to be an ongoing issue for me in multiple instances so I wanted to open this up to the community.

In the past few weeks our email deliverability has dropped to 87%. I suspect this is a false drop due to the issue above.

[Anonymous]

Our soft bounces have been increasingly high since mid June. with highest bounce rates in september.  We got a similar response from Marketo that it can happen; and to "just resend the soft bounces". our soft bounces have been ranging from from *%... up to regularly 19% - 27% soft bounces. we have built a soft bounce step send into our campaigns. i.e. send newsletter. wait 2 days. create smart list for soft bounces... after 2 days send soft bounce smart list.

seems to work; however; need to do it a few times; because we get soft bounces on a regular basis.

i too see that the analytics still maintain the originating "soft bounce" number; however, the opened and clicked rates are increasing, so "assume" that they are the soft bounce resends opening. and the "delivered" count doesn't decrease as resends occur.

[Josh_Hill13]

You may also want to monitor the number of emails you are sending and the targets for list exhaustion.

Support should fix the issue you mentioned and if they don't, tell them to so you have accurate data.

[Anonymous]

I recently received an update from Marketo:

"The changes that have occurred are a result of improvements in our servers ability to process and report "Out of Band Bounces". The majority of receiving email servers will immediately let the sending server know whether they will accept a message or not (success or failure). About 10% of receiving servers will not send their failure immediately but will rather return a "delivered" status and only later send us a bounce notification. These emails in which the bounce notification is sent at a later time are known as "Out of band bounces" (you see them as [oob] in the bounce detail on your lead). Some servers do this to reduce their processing time but in the past we simply processed and reported on the initial "delivered" status that they sent and did not process and report if those servers later sent us a Out of band bounce.

Our servers now have the ability to report on those Out of band bounces. So if a lead gets an out of band bounce you will see both a "delivered" and then later a "soft bounce" with the [oob] in the bounce details and Marketo will now accurately report on these as bounces rather than delivered.

Since OOB bounces account for about 10% of all email servers, this is causing some Marketo users to see increased soft bounces and a bit of a lower delivery. The good news is that the reporting is now more accurate and reflects your true delivery rate."

How can we compare delivery rates from before this update to after this update?
Will this affect our sender score in any way?

It would have been nice to have been alerted to this update prior to its implementation.