Hard Bounces

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 It says on there that anything above 5.0 is considered spam but that's an old reporting tool that I'm sure is far out of date now.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.

louis :

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.

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 is a very interesting situation as we to are in the same boat... this is something that I think we might try.

Hard bounce management is technically complex and involves tough tradeoffs. If an email service provider follows strict bounce management practices, this results in better inbox delivery into most ISPs, because repeat sending to previously bounced or invalid addresses is treated as a spam signature. However, strict bounce management practices result in addresses being marked as undeliverable and being suppressed from client mailings, and therefore contribute to list churn. The higher the rate of list churn, the more new recruits an organization needs to register in order to keep their email list size growing.

List churn is the number of subscribers who leave your list over a certain period, usually measured monthly or annually. In the commercial email world, annual churn rates of 30% (monthly rates of 2.5%) are typical, especially on mailing lists with high percentages of free email accounts such as Hotmail and Yahoo! (http://www.emaillabs.com/email_marketing_articles/email_list_churn_html.html). The three main causes of list churn in order of their typical importance are spam complaint removals, losses due to hard bounces, and unsubscribe from your list. Hard bounce losses typically are responsible for 20-30% of total churn, and are caused by email address changes and "fake" or spam-policy related hard bounce messages sent by some ISPs.

Here is an overview of how Convio manages hard bounces:

a) Convio marks a constituent's primary email address as "bad" if it receives two "legitimate" hard bounce messages without any intervening indication that the constituent has interacted with an email message (e.g., a message open or click-through). If the system has recorded one legitimate hard bounce against an address, and then registers an interaction, that record's hard bounce count is reset to zero.

b) Convio parses the bounce messages it receives to separate them into three categories: legitimate hard bounces, spam-policy related hard bounces, and soft bounces. We use a pattern-matching filter that is regularly updated to distinguish apparently legitimate hard bounces (e.g., 550 - unknown address error) from spam-policy bounces (e.g., 550 - sending IP blocked for abuse). This parsing is necessary because some recipient domains do not follow internet standards for mail status codes (RFC 1893) and send misleading or incorrect error codes as part of their anti-spam efforts. Hard bounces that are characterized as spam-policy related and soft bounces do NOT influence the system's determination of whether a constituent's email address is bad.

c) When the Convio system sends email, it will not attempt to send email to any constituent with a "bad" email address. This is essential to maintain good deliverability into recipient domains, because most ISPs raise delivery barriers against email publishers who attempt to send email to large numbers of invalid addresses

There are a variety of steps clients can take to help manage list churn:

a) Follow list building and messaging practices that keep your spam complaint and unsubscribe rates low. This reduces both direct sources of churn (spam complaint removals and unsubscribes) and indirect sources, because the lower your complaint rate, the lower the probability an ISP will send spam-policy related bounces in response to one of your campaigns.

b) Report examples of hard bounce surges to us to investigate: ISPs are constantly revising their spam control procedures, and we regularly update our bounce processing to address new types of "fake" hard bounce messages. Note that there is no gold standard for correctly characterizing the hard bounce messages that ISPs send as legitimate or fake.

c) Work with our email list hygiene partners (Fresh Address and Tower Data) to restore addresses that your organization has lost due to churn. These firms offer email change of address services that use constituent data you provide to obtain current, deliverable addresses for records in your house file.

shelley :

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?

Sorry for the delayed response. I haven't been on the community for a bit and I forgot to turn on notifications for this discussion.

Just as an update on our progress, we had our call with Convio staff that day and actually Bill Pease (posted above) was a part of that call. The information he posted here was pretty much the same as what he was communicating to us in our call. Basically what we got out of it is that Convio must take extreme cautionary measures when dealing with bounceback messages so that they're better able to maintain a better company wide reputation with various ISPs, without having to put too many man hours into maintaining those relationships. It makes sense for them to take that approach considering the number of clients they send emails for and from the research our consultant was doing, we've been assured that Convio still is the top email blasting company in this field. This does, however, put list maintenance more on our end and requires us to periodically pay for 'list scrub' services (recommended by Convio) in order to restore Hard Bounced accounts that aren't necessarily bad. Fresh Address is one of the two companie Convio is referring us to in order to have this service done. Obviously, this wasn't the answer we were looking for from them considering we don't have a choice over how the bounceback messages are handled.

To answer your two questions Shelley...

1. Our regular weekly Newsletters and our eAppeal mailings are generally fairly rich in HTML. However we have had to trim back a little with that, as the hardest concern to alleviate is the percentage of HTML code in our emails. I'll attach a sample of one of our Newsletters here. The biggest success I have found is by changing wording. It seems the simplest words or word combinations can send up red flags and by paying specific attention to the content of the email as well as the wording in our footer, I was able to knock down that report score quite a bit.

The advice given to me by the consultant we hired was simply:

• Use the words "news" or "newsletter" instead of "Update" in the subject line

• Use the words "weekly" or "monthly"

• Do keep the date of the newsletter in the subject

• Make sure that you don't use the word "Opt" or "Remove" or "Take Me Off" in the URL or any text.

2. I will gladly share the content of the separate email we sent to that group of users flagged as hard bounce. We sent it as an HTML email so that we could track opens and forwards etc. with a tracking pixel. The details of the email are as follows:

Outbound address:

Subject Line: We're not reaching you. May we have 15 seconds to ask why?

Dear , (if we have it)

May we have 15 seconds of your time to ask a question?

We've noticed that the Presidential Prayer Team is no longer able to send the Prayer Updates to you by email.

Please help us understand why by clicking one the following reasons:

__ I've stopped getting the Prayer Updates and I don't know why.

__ I've updated my email software or added a spam/junk filter that may be blocking your emails.

__ I've indicated I do not want to receive anymore Presidential Prayer Team's prayer updates.

If your browser does not allow the above links, please consider replying to this email Please copy and paste the right answer in the Subject Line.

Thank You! This will help the Presidential Prayer Team understand the communication status of your account.

• • • footer ***

This email was sent to (EMAIL ADDRESS), because you've asked to receive the Presidential Prayer Team's weekly Prayer Updates.

© 2008 Presidential Prayer Team - All rights reserved. Presidential Prayer Team contact address is PO Box 15040 Scottsdale Arizona 85267-5040 Phone: 866-433-PRAY

I hope this is helpful for you.

~ Louis

The median hard bounce rate experienced by Convio client is about 1% of the total audience sent email in a month. Note that a single hard bounce does not result in a constituent's record being marked undeliverable (i.e., bad due to hard bounce). Convio only marks an address as "bad" if it receives two sequential, legitimate hard bounces without any intervening indication that the constituent has interacted with an email message (e.g., a message open or click-through). If the system has recorded one hard bounce against an address, and then registers a successful send or an interaction, that record's hard bounce count is reset to zero.

The percent of a client's total email house file that is marked "bad" varies based on the client's list building practices and their length of time on the Convio platform. Clients that rely heavily on offline list building practices or clients that do not utilize list hygiene best practices will have a higher percentage of bad addresses on their housefile. Since the Convio product preserves constituent records regardless of email delivery status, the total number of records with "bad" emails will increase over time. If this increase is not offset by new list growth, the percent of a client's total email housefile that is marked "bad" will also increase over time. As a rule of thmb, about 0.5% of records on a client's house file are likely to be marked "bad" per month. These losses from your house file are primarily caused by email address changes, and can often be reversed via use of email change of address and hygiene services. Some hard bounce losses are attributable to "fake" hard bounces sent by ISPs to discourage bulk mailers.

shelley :

Is there an easy report I can run to find out what % of our house file is being marked bad per month?

Not currently - the Convio product does not time-stamp when an email address is marked bad or undeliverable, so reporting on how many addresses went bad within a time period is not possible. This is a product enhancement that is currently under consideration for a future release.

shelley :

Do you know what the average % is for Hard Bounces in an email message?

The median hard bounce rate experienced by Convio client is about 1% of the total audience sent email in a month. The hard bounce rate for a specific messaging campaign exhibits a wide range - from < 0.5% for an established opt-in list that is mailed regularly to >5% for a newly uploaded list that has not been subject to good address cleaning practices.

dupBob dupDuVall:

We send a weekly email to about 56K and a monthly email to about 66K. Typically, we see hard bounce numbers of about 200 each time we send an email. However, this past Monday when we sent our weekly email, we had 942 hard bounces. When I ran a hard bounce report for this email and then looked at the results in Excel, I quickly noticed that an overwhelming majority of them had an Earthlink.net or Peoplepc.com domain. Have they suddenly changed their rules as to what type of email they will accept? Has anyone else recently had a problem with these domains?

For a period between 3/30/09 - 4/01/09, Earthlink blocklisted several Convio mail IPs due to spam concerns. This resulted in hard bounce messages being sent back to our system. We submitted a blocklisting lift request to Earthlink, and delivery appears to be returning to normal. PeoplePC is an Earhtlink company, and uses the same spam filtering system.

shelley :

On 4/23/2009 I got another big number of hard bounces, all from Earthlink and PeoplePC.   This was four times our normal number of hard bounces for an email so I knew something was fishy.  Is there anyway to reset all these emails back to good after they have hardbounced?

has there been an answer to this?