Managing Soft and Spam Bounces in Email Communications
Soft and spam bounces are temporary delivery failures, meaning future sends to these recipients may still be successful.
To prevent ongoing deliverability issues, Force24 automatically updates a recipient’s email status to bounced if they experience six consecutive soft or spam bounces within six months.
Spam bounces often increase due to mailbox providers blocking emails in response to high hard bounce rates. These blocks are usually temporary and resolve themselves as hard bounces decrease.
Best Practice
To protect deliverability, it’s best to reduce sending to recipients who have spam bounced and apply the same approach to soft bounces.
Temporarily removing these contacts from email sends helps prevent them from reaching the bounce threshold, ensuring better long-term deliverability.
Identifying the Spam/Soft Bounces
In order to temporarily suppress these contacts, they first need to be identified and housed somewhere to be monitored. Using Automated Lists ensures we’re able to monitor these, and will act as the suppression list.
First you’ll want to create your marketing list, ensuring a consistent naming convention such as ‘Suppression - Soft Spam Bounce’. This allows you to always easily identify any suppression lists you have if more are created.
Next select ‘Start using this list’ below the ‘List Syn (In & Out)’ option.
Select Edit on the right-hand side.
From the drop-down type in ‘spam’ and the options shown in the screenshot will appear. Select the option ‘Activities-Spam Bounced Email Campaign Date – Relative’.
Next, select the drop down that says ‘is yesterday’, and update this with ‘after or equal to’. You’ll then want to update the following options to be the number of days or months in the past that best suits your requirements. A good starting point is 21 days, but if we’re still seeing repeat soft/spam bounces, this can be extended further.
This will need to be repeated for soft bounces, by repeating the steps mentioned above, but searching for soft, then selecting ‘Activities-Soft Bounced Email Campaign Date – Relative’. You’ll then need to update the ‘And’ operator to ‘Or’. Then hit the refresh button in the bottom right-hand corner to see the ‘Found Contacts’. This will display the number of contacts that meet the requirement for the rule you’ve set.
Once this has been applied, select save. You’ll now have the option to ‘Activate’ the list using the ‘Activate’ button outlined below. Ensure that the tick box for the query sync is selected which is also highlighted in the screenshot.
Ensuring these contacts are suppressed
Now the marketing list with the contacts that have recently spam/soft bounced this will need to be suppressed when setting up single send or journeys. Methods to ensure this is correctly carried out for both are shown below:
Journey Manager
Within the start audience ensure the contacts you want to send to are identified using the rule. In this example, a marketing list (Test 060824) is being used to identify the contacts to go through the journey. Select ‘+ Add group’ in the top right hand corner, and include the suppression list. Next select ‘Not’. This will ensure that no contacts are added that exist within that list, and this method can be used regardless of the complexity of the start audience. Ensure that the top level operator is always ‘And’ and no other option is selected.
Within the journey, use a make decision as the component before any email send after the first email, to ensure this is checked just before the campaign send. You can have the contacts removed from the journey if they are within the list.
With single send campaigns, you’ll want to run the same query shown in the start audience, but carry this out within the contact search. From there you can select the Marketing list option from the bottom of the contact search results, and have the contacts added to a new marketing list which will be used for the send,