Monitoring Soft Bounce Count

Daryl Bunker

Does anyone know how to track or have procedures for monitoring the soft bounces of a constituent's email?


In our instance, we have a query running that checks for all active accounts with an email status of "Bad (Soft Bounce)" and we place them into a group. However, I'd like to look more specifically at these accounts, such as seeing how many times their email has soft bounced. If I go to each individual profile, I can see the count listed under the email section, but this could take a long time going from one profile to the next. I'd much rather create a query by adding something like "And Soft Bounce Count > 1" or something along those lines. Or a Report Writer where I could download a spreadsheet to break out the data would be helpful too. Does anyone have any experience with this? Sorry if it's super obvious and I'm just missing the option.


Thanks!

Brian Mucha

You could do a MailMerge of members of that group. Email/Soft-Bounce Count in a selection.


 

Daryl Bunker

Exactly what I was looking for!


While I was still looking, I found a Soft Bounce report under the Email tab, but we'd have to run that per campaign, not on our overall file. This makes things much easier, thank you!

Gwendolyn Chambers

Wondering if you got this to work. There is no email/soft bounce count in mail merge, only hard bounce count. I've been talking to tech support for help on this. I'd love to get an accurate report on email addresses that are continually soft bouncing but have not yet been moved to Email status=bad.

Daryl Bunker

Yes, Brian's answer was able to work for us. If I make a new Mail Merge and scroll down to the email section, I just pick out "Email/Email" and then another 5 options below that is "Email/Soft Bounce Count". If it's not there, then hopefully support will be able to fix the problem for you.

Gwendolyn Chambers

Thanks, I'll take a look at that!

Grace Rose Khalsa

Daryl Bunker:

Yes, Brian's answer was able to work for us. If I make a new Mail Merge and scroll down to the email section, I just pick out "Email/Email" and then another 5 options below that is "Email/Soft Bounce Count". If it's not there, then hopefully support will be able to fix the problem for you.

Thanks Daryl for bringing this up. I ran the query and then created the mail merge using your suggestions of fields. One thing that I find - horrifying? fascinating?? - something, for sure! is that we have contituent records with as many as FOUR HUNDRED! (yes, 400) soft bounces. Which brings up two questions for me: Are they or have they become, spam traps? and, how long does it take for a record to show soft bounces before the system (Luminate Online) suppresses them from emails entirely? Or does it NEVER do that? Hmmm!!

Daryl Bunker

I've done some research on spam traps in the past, but I'm not entirely sure when an email is actually converted to one. It may depend on the email domain's rules as well (Gmail might convert sooner than, say, a Yahoo account or something like that). As for suppressing soft bounces, I don't think Luminate will do that. I can only recall seeing emails with a status of Hard Bounce suppressed from sending.


We were pretty shocked to run a report and see just how many emails had a soft bounce count between 100-250. We tightened our "inactives" suppression group a bit based on this, but it would be nice if we could make a "Do not email" group based on soft bounce count. One thing you might consider is looking at the domains of your accounts with high soft bounces. For us, a lot of those emails were from 2 or 3 domains, so we eventually just said if someone was a part of that domain and hadn't donated before, we would stop emailing them.

Brian Mucha

> "...but I'm not entirely sure when an email is actually converted to one"


I just ran into this data, credited to Litmus blog by the poster. Not sure how old it is though.


AOL: 90 days

Yahoo: 180 (+60 extra days per year as a customer)

Gmail: 270

Outlook.com: 270

Brian Mucha

Wow, Soft Bounces don't work at all like I thought they did. Actually, they don't really seem to do very much at all besides the label.


I think a mail merge, sort in Excel, and group import is the only answer for a suppression group based on SBs. And even that is just total SBs, not consecutive SB count, which I really wanted.


We too are tightening up suppressing inactives, which will presumably knock down the soft bounce mailing.


\\ Our record holder is 319 soft bounces. 

\\\\ Funny this subject is suddenly hot in two separate threads.