Bounce messages really aren’t much fun, but they are an important aspect of email marketing. It’s important you review your bounce counts to ensure you‘re not having issues with your list or messages. So in my review today I figured I’d try to make it a little more interesting - let’s look at bounces in light of a summer favorite, ice cream.
We’ll start with some common ground. There are two types of bounces, and, similar to ice cream, they are hard or soft; also like ice cream, soft is usually better for you. Of course it’s not as simple as that - there are many different flavors of bounce. You can get an Invalid User, Mailbox Full, Server Busy, Mailbox Currently Suspended, and many more.
Are you getting hungry yet? Well, making your flavor choice just got harder. Each Internet Service Provider, or ISP, has their own way of returning a bounce message, like variations in ice cream flavors. So just as Moose Tracks may vary slightly from one shop to the next, AOL and Yahoo! don’t return identical Invalid Account messages.
So where does this leave you? You just wanted a sweet treat on a hot August afternoon. There’s no need to worry; we’ve gone through and classified the variations for you. In Bronto’s upcoming update to the Message Tracking Report, we break down both hard and soft bounces into three types: Account, Connection, and Spam issues. This will show you if the bounce message is due to your contacts, a connection issue, or your message.
If you find that you are receiving a large number of contact issues then you have a lot of invalid contact e-mail messages and need to assess your registration gathering methods. For those of you with lofty Spam Identification numbers, you should take a long, hard look at your messages, because they are looking spam-like to a lot of ISPs. You shouldn’t see too much in terms of connection issues; those are due to target mail servers being busy or not accessible, and there isn’t much you can do about it. But, if you were to see connection issues, you’d at least know it wasn’t your messages or your subscribers at fault.
You can see how breaking bounce messages into something more granular than Hard and Soft can really help to demystify them. I hope you now understand bounce messages a bit better and that you appreciated the sprinkles I added as well.
Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I think adding some classification is a great idea!
However, it’s important to note as well that not all ISP’s will reveal to senders that their message was blocked because it was deemed “spam”. A significant rise in “connection”-based bounce messages (particularly from a single ISP) may also indicate that ISP’s are treating your messages as spam.
In the end, senders still have to be diligent to insure they are sending relevant messages to recipients who have chosen to receive them.
This is very true; thanks for the comment Nick. I agree and can’t stress enough that all the tools we provide are really there to help augment a marketing program that constantly strives to provide quality, *relevant* content to recipients.