Multiple Soft Bounces

[Anonymous]

Hi All, 
This month we are doing weekly email blasts. First week we had 2.65% Hard Bounces and 3.86% Soft Bounce. It's higher than desired, but expected for our first broad email send.

How I understand it, Marketo should prevent emails going to most of the Hard Bounces, so the next send should have lower hard bounces. But Marketo will continue to send to Soft Bounces, so the Soft bounce should be about the same or lower. 

The second week we did another send to the same list, resulting in over 5% Hard Bounces and 1.84% soft bounces, which is the opposite of what I anticipated. Our list did not change so dramatically as to double our bad addresses. Upon examination, the previously marked Email Invlids are NOT being mailed to again as expected, so how are there more?

Are some of the previous Soft Bounces now Hard Bouncing? Is this a normal occurance?
Does Marketo automatically consider the Xth Soft Bounce as a Hard Bounce? At what point does Marketo not mail due to email bounces?

[Anonymous]

Hi Manisha,
Soft Bounce -> Blocked for Mailings for next 24 hours. (In detail, Email Suspended will be set to true and Email Suspended Timestamp will be set to the time where the soft bounce occured)
Hard Bounce -> No more E-Mails (In detail, Email Invalid is set to true)

If you are wondering I would take a look who hard/soft bounced in your mailings. Maybe you will find the reason.

Best regards

Steffen

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

Please see this document for details on how to do what Steffen suggests:
http://www.slideshare.net/jdavidhill/marketo-email-reputation-management

[Anonymous]

Awesome! Thanks for such an awesome resource. I'll be going over this. 

So just the clarify - Marketo only automatically marks "Email Invalid" for Hard Bounces that are marked as "Email does not exist", correct? Marketo does NOT ever automatically mark "Email Invalid" for multiple soft bounces?

[Anonymous]

Hi Manisha, 
multiple Soft Bounces don't get set as "Email invalid". Correct.

Best regards

Steffen

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hi Manisha, the other thing that Marketo doesn't make very clear is that there are three types of hard bounces -- but only when the reason is "Email does not exist" does Marketo mark as Email Invalid. So there are other types of hard bounces which won't be marked.

This thread from a while back contains a lot more information, and was very helpful to me even though it was like finding a needle in a haystack! There is a link to a PDF in there that goes to an employee's dropbox account that seems to no longer be valid... If you would be interested in the PDF let me know and I can email it over to you since I saved it when I was doing some research a while back 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hi Dory, 
I came across that thread, but was sad to find the pdf unavailable. I'd love it if you can email it over. I'm at mkumar@aag.com.

Thanks to all three of you for your help!

[Jep_Castelein2]

I fixed the link: email deliverability analysis and optimization