Soft Bounce Fail?

[Anonymous]

On a recent lead, the auto-responder email was labeled as a Soft Bounce. However, my sales team was able to communicate directly with the person via email. Why would Marketo soft bounce when the email works? And it doesnt look like it ever tries again. Isnt a softbounce supposed to make more than 1 attempt?

[Anonymous]

Soft bounces do not necessarily mean the email isn't valid. It means something has gone wrong with the delivery of the email and Marketo is still trying to get it through. It could be that at the time the email was sent, the mail server was unavailable or overloaded, the recipient's inbox was full, the message is too big or any number of issues. Marketo keeps trying.

Try to see what the soft bounce code was - that would help you identify why it soft bounced. See the Marketo article:   https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000Ph6TAAS 

Hope this helps!

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Christina, we also experience that some of our clients block Marketo's IPs. This isn't necessarily specific to Marketo, they also block Listrak, Mailgun, etc. So you might be able to communicate with people one minute using your company's IP, and then the next minute an email from Marketo will soft-bounce.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there is a very good solution for this, other than asking customer to whitelist the Marketo IPs where your sends originate from.

[Anonymous]

Adding on hyperlink of "click here to add to your address book" helped us increase deliverability. By having us whitelisted by a handful of domains, our soft bounce rate went down. 

[Anonymous]

Kristen, where did the 'add to address book' link you set up go? Isn't the whitelist process slightly different depending on the recipient's ISP? Just curious how you implemented this as I'd like to give it a try if it isn't terribly time consuming.

thx!