What do you do with constituents who are getting hard bounces?

Ryan Wenzel

Hi all,

This probably seems like a very simple question, but what do you do with e-mail constituents who are getting hard bounces? I've run reports on them, and we have thousands on our lists who are still marked as "active" users. Should I be removing them? Leaving them there? How would I go about removing them from lists?

Thanks for your input,

Ryan

Paul McFate 2

It's not true for everyone, but for us, constituents are too valuable to throw away.  We never delete them. The problem in Convio is that everything is connected to an email address.  One possibility is to create an opt-out group called "Hard bounce".  That way you won't get caught in spam traps for mailing to bogus addresses.

If email is the only way you communicate with constituents, then you could remove them.  If you mail or call them, you can ask for an updated email address.  Hope this helps.

Sally Heaven

Hi Ryan,

You shouldn't need to worry about hard bouncing constituents on your list from an email or spam perspective, because Convio automatically filters out undeliverables due to hard bounce when sending messages.

This means that you're free to leave them there if you want to - especially if these people have transaction or interaction history and you want to be able to look that up later.

So the answer is - you CAN remove them, but you don't HAVE to.

Hope this helps!

--Sally

walterwinfield

Sally Heaven:

Hi Ryan,

You shouldn't need to worry about hard bouncing constituents on your list from an email or spam perspective, because Convio automatically filters out undeliverables due to hard bounce when sending messages.

This means that you're free to leave them there if you want to - especially if these people have transaction or interaction history and you want to be able to look that up later.

So the answer is - you CAN remove them, but you don't HAVE to.

Hope this helps!

--Sally

I periodically run reports to review the bounce records and look for patterns that might be causing the bounce (e.g., yahooo.com, etc).  I created a query that looks for those patterns and periodically run it and manually correct the records.

I also run the duplicate task and then run a query that looks for members of the duplicate group who are bouncing.  Many times those folks have changed email addresses and simply created a new record.  They are prime candidates for merging.

Yes, these are labor-intensive tasks, I admit, so you will have to decide whether it's worthwhile for your organization.

Walter

AlisonBerry

Sally Heaven:

Hi Ryan,

You shouldn't need to worry about hard bouncing constituents on your list from an email or spam perspective, because Convio automatically filters out undeliverables due to hard bounce when sending messages.

This means that you're free to leave them there if you want to - especially if these people have transaction or interaction history and you want to be able to look that up later.

So the answer is - you CAN remove them, but you don't HAVE to.

Hope this helps!

--Sally

Hi Sally,

We have about 1,500 hard bounces, I also have just left them in for now figuring they don't hurt anything.  But as I am going through them now, I see that many of them are emails we had uploaded from our offline database, and they have been hard bounces from the beginning.  So no transaction, no interactions, no emails sent or no opened emails, etc.  In these cases, is it ok to remove them?  I am just trying to figure out the best practices for handling these.  Thanks so much!

-Alison