Email quality

It is very important to have email quality activated on an Audience list. Email quality unsubscribes the user for the following reasons:

If the email address in the MAIL field is not correct (syntax error or non-existing domain)

If hard or soft bounces come back from email service providers such as Outlook, Gmail, etc.):

  • Hard bounce — Indicates a permanent reason an email cannot be delivered, such as the email address does not exist, delivery is blocked, syntax errors, etc.
  • Soft bounce — Indicates a temporary delivery failure, such as a full mailbox or oversized email.

Ignoring bounces will decrease your sending "reputation". This is based on the sending IP addresses. If you send emails that do not bounce and the content is good, the email provider allows you to send more emails, and your reputation is good. If you ignore bounces sent back or the email content is bad, the email provider allows you to send fewer emails, and your IP address reputation falls lower. A provider may "blacklist" an IP address, meaning the IP address cannot send to the email provider at all. This, of course, would affect your business directly. If half of your audience list contains Hotmail addresses and you are not allowed to send to them, half of your potential profit goes down the drain.

With email quality, you can define the number of times an email address bounces before a contact will be opted out. The default value for the OPTOUT field is 10 and is modifiable). Automatically opting out invalid contact email addresses ensures the Audience list sending quality and therefore produces the following improvements:

  • Better campaign results: journeys will only send to valid email addresses, even if invalid (opted out) contacts are in the journeys selection
  • Better reputation with email providers, because you are sending emails that do not bounce
  • Increased email broadcasting speed, because the reputation is better

In the list properties:

The slider automatically sets the threshold for each setting from "defensive" to "aggressive". "Normal" will opt out (OPTOUT=10) the contact if:

  • There is a syntax error in the email address (badly formulated address, e.g. no @-sign)
  • The domain does not exist
  • Two hard bounces were received
  • Three soft bounces were received

For the bounces, this means that you can target the contact twice for hard bounces or three times for soft bounces in different journeys. With hard bounce, this means:

  • The first journey sends an email, but is hard bounced
  • The second journey send an email, but is hard bounced. The contact is unsubscribed from further mailings.

NOTE: The maximum allowed value is 9. But ignoring a soft or hard bounce 9 times is not recommended.

Under Actions, you can see the default value for OPTOUT=10. You can add (+), edit (pencil icon) or delete actions. You could also set another field in the Audience list or execute a Stored Procedure to update or store values in a different table.

NOTE: It is recommended that you at least write a value in the OPTOUT field, because when it is not empty and not zero, the contact will be excluded from sending. If you use another field, you will manually have to exclude contacts, based on that field, in each selection (dynamic segment, journey, etc.). Enter a value (default 10) unique for email quality. In other words, don't use this value also for your newsletter opt-out in a journey, but use '1' instead.

Technical Note: Under 'Update field' you can only select fields from the audience list. If you need to update another table, let's say a profile extension to the audience list, you can use a Stored Procedure for this. The Stored Procedure has to be 'registered' in Selligent Campaign.  The procedure is executed on the fly, whenever a contact unsubscribes as a result of a bounce. Following parameters are passed to the Stored Procedure:
INT ListID,
INT UserID,
STRING eMailStr
STRING BOUNCE_THRESHOLD_REASON
INT INQUEUEID
STRING STATE
This Stored Procedure can do anything: fill out a profile extension with the optouts, trigger an action, update other records in the database, whatever you need to be done when the contact unsubscribes.

Activating email quality adds two new fields to the audience list:

  • BOUNCEDT — The last bounce date
  • BOUNCECNT — Bounces counter

Those fields are used to manage bounce information. The BOUNCEDT field is the last time the contact bounced. The BOUNCECNT field is filled with a number where each digit is a number from 0 to 9 representing the amount of bounces per type. From back to front:

  • A (xxxxxxA) — Reserved position for future changes
  • B (xxxxxBx) — Number of soft bounces
  • C (xxxxCxx)— Number of hard bounces
  • D (xxxDxxx) —  Number of domain failures
  • E (xxExxxx) — Number of syntax failures
  • F (xFxxxxx) — Number of complaints (Contacts clicking the spam button)
  • G (Gxxxxxx) — Number of asynchronous bounces. In this case the outgoing email was initially accepted by the server but later a bounce email is sent by the server. Asynchronous bounces can occur up to one week after sending the email.

In a fictional example, the value 5612340 can be divided into:

Position Value Meaning
A 0 reserved position
B 4 four soft bounces
C 3 three hard bounces
D 2 two domain failures
E 1 one syntax failure
F 6 6 complaints
G 5 5 asynchronous bounces

Technical Note: Resetting the bounce counter:
Delivery of an email after an indicated number of bounces, depends on the value of G i.e. the number of asynchronous bounces. If G equals 0, the bounce counter is reset to 0000000. If G is > 0, the counter is not reset but G is decreased with 1 (eg: 3000120 becomes 2000120). This procedure continues until the asynchronous counter G equals 0 , which results in a reset of the complete counter.

You can store the fields BOUNCECNT and BOUNCEDT on a profile extensions instead the audience list if needed. From the drop-down "Store bounce counters on this list" select the profile extension (1:1 linked list)

 

Details about all the different message states, with descriptions and codes can be found in this dedicated topic.

Note that the message bounce information available in Campaign reporting corresponds to these message states.