Hard Bounces

Matthew Andrade

What is a normal amount for hard bounces (% of total house file)? I feel like every week we have more hard bounces than we had new people who are newly registered. Our email file is organically grown so I don't see how this is possible and its also a little discouraging in how we will ever really grow our file. ----- Is a spam report of 1.3 too high? Could that be why I have such a high hard bounce number every week? ----- I'll try to address both of your concerns from what I've experienced. Over the period of nearly 3 years, I have seen our weekly newsletter email list shrink from 800,000 to 300,000 recipients. We have identified and addressed a number of suspected problems during this time through guidance (and sometimes arguments with Convio staff) and through our research with other non-profit companies and email blasting companies. I attended the Marketing Sherpa conferences and sat through the keynote speakers presentations and I have been informed that as a non-profit organization, our email lists should be growing by 3% a year at the very least just by viral growth. So I was left to wonder why our list was still shrinking, while other company lists have been growing. We hired a consultant to perform a company audit and I have been in communication with them as they sifted through all our stats, interviewed every one of our employees and analyzed all our technological systems. He identified some issues with our site security and email content that were easily fixable and in addressing them we were able to increase our site traffic by 50% in one month. However, our email list is still shrinking to Hard Bounces. The next thing we did was export 11,000 email addresses from Convio that were flagged as Hard Bounce status but were still set as active accounts and checked as accepting email. We sent a very short email to all of these people simply stating that we noticed we weren't sending to them anymore and wondered if they could help us figure out why. We found that almost 3,000 of the emails marked as Hard Bounce status in Convio were delivered and we received an overwhelming response from these people saying they didn't know why they weren't getting our emails anymore and wished to be put back on our list. So we sent our initial findings to Convio staff and they're currently analyzing these email addresses and we have a call with them two days from now to discuss what we can do from this point. So, no, it's not really 'normal' for your hard bounces to outnumber your new registrations. You may want to do some hunting around to find out how many of those hard bounces are genuine hard bounces. As for the spam report tool. It says on there that anything above 5.0 is considered spam but that's an old reporting tool that I'm sure is far out of date now. I've been finding that anything above 0.5 on that report tool is suspicious but won't generally get reported as a hard bounce. Most Spam filters at ISPs these days just dump your email without telling you or the recipient that they have dumped the emails. We have had a number of people call our member services center asking why we stopped sending them our emails. When we look at their profiles, we can find no problems with their email status, subscriptions or opt-in status. We can see that Convio is reporting our email as being sent to them but does not show that they've opened their emails. In short, their emails are getting 'lost in space'. However, by addressing the spam report issues and bringing the report score down to 0.2 based on Convio's spam report system, a lot of these people that have called us have started to receive our emails again and are showing opens in their email interaction. There's a couple things you can look into... I hope it's helpful and I hope you're able to start recovering your organic growth. ----- That's depressing. What you described is exactly what I was suspicious of. I notice people registering and then re registering for emails. I checked it out and they re-register b/c they are not getting the emails even though their email status is good and my Convio reports say that they are getting them. Then I start doubting my reports. And if you doubt a report it isn't much good to you. This sounds tough to get around. Also A .2 spam report? That seems hard to achieve unless it is mostly plain text. What do your emails look like? But you say most people get them at .2? ----- I've been thinking of mailing our Hard Bounces like you did, and am glad to hear that it had a measure of success. I may undertake this project this week! This document was generated from the following thread: