Bounce Management in Salesforce: Enhancing Data Quality
Table of Contents
Introduction
What is Bounce Management?
Definition
Reasons for Bounces
Types of Bounces
Why is Bounce Management
Important?
Improves Deliverability
Saves Time and Money
Provides Insights
How to Set Up Bounce
Management in Salesforce
Enable Bounce Management
Configure Bounce Rules
Set Up Bounce Notifications
Bounce Management Best
Practices
Analyze Bounce Patterns
Segment Your List
Update Contact Data
Adjust Content Frequency
Advanced Bounce Management
Strategies
List Hygiene
Feedback Loops
ISP Relationship Building
Bounce Management Challenges
Identifying Hard Bounces
Temporary Bounces
Duplicate Contacts
op Bounce Management Tools
Native Salesforce
3rd Party Apps
Email Append Services
Conclusion
FAQs
Introduction
Bounce management 🏀
is an indispensable component of maximizing email deliverability and
efficiency. When an email bounces rather than reaching the intended recipient,
it signals issues that need to be addressed. Neglecting bounces leads to
damaged sender reputation, lower inbox placement, wasted marketing spend, and
frustrated customers. That's why implementing robust bounce management
practices is a must for any organization using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for
email campaigns and communications.
This comprehensive guide covers
everything related to understanding bounce management in Salesforce - from core
concepts to configuration steps to advanced strategies. Read on to learn best
practices for setting up bounce monitoring, categorizing and analyzing bounces,
updating contact data, and choosing the right tools. With the right bounce
management approach, you can dramatically improve deliverability and return on
email investment. Let's bounce into it! 🤸♂️
What is Bounce Management?
Bounce management is the process
of properly handling email bounces within an email service provider (ESP)
platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud. But to deploy effective bounce
management, you first need to understand the related core concepts.
Definition
Bounce management refers to the
tools, techniques, and procedures for processing and analyzing bounced emails
within a marketing platform. More specifically, key aspects include:
- Automatically capturing email
bounceback messages
- Accurately categorizing bounces
by type
- Parsing bounce codes to
understand root causes
- Taking action based on bounce
details, such as removing hard bounces from lists
- Monitoring bounce rates at both
overall and segmented levels
- Leveraging insights from bounce
analysis to guide optimization
With mature bounce management,
brands can minimize bounces, maintain clean contact data, and ensure maximum
deliverability.
Reasons for Bounces
There are a variety of reasons an
email can bounce or get rejected instead of reaching the intended recipient's
inbox. Some common causes include:
- **Invalid email address** -
This occurs when the email address is formatted incorrectly or does not
actually exist. These result in permanent hard bounces.
- **Full inbox** - If the
recipient's mailbox is over quota or they have not deleted emails for a long
time, new incoming messages may get rejected. These are temporary soft bounces.
- **Spam filters** - Overly
aggressive spam filters may block emails incorrectly, leading to soft bounces.
- **Domain does not exist** - If
the domain name that comes after the @ sign is not valid, messages sent to it
will hard bounce.
- **Server down** - Sometimes
temporary technical issues like network outages or mail server downtime
prevents delivery and causes soft bounces.
- **Inactive account** - If the
email address belonged to a user who no longer has that account, emails to it
will hard bounce.
- **Typos** - Even simple typos
in email addresses lead to the message bouncing rather than sending
successfully.
Types of Bounces
Broadly speaking, bounces can be
divided into two primary categories:
- **Hard bounces** - These are
permanent delivery failures that occur when the recipient address is invalid or
inactive. The email address should be removed from your lists.
- **Soft bounces** - These are
temporary bounces caused by conditions like a full inbox, inactive account, or
server problem. The address usually remains on your lists.
Some platforms like Salesforce
Marketing Cloud provide granular bounce sub-types and codes for more precise
reason analysis. But distinguishing hard vs soft bounces is the critical
starting point.
Now that the key bounce
management concepts are clear, let's explore why bounce management matters.
Why is Bounce Management Important?
Employing rigorous bounce
management brings some major benefits:
Improves Deliverability
Keeping lists clean by removing
hard bounces and inactive addresses improves your sender reputation with ISPs
and increases future deliverability.
Saves Time and Money
Automated bounce handling through
Salesforce rules and workflows saves manual time and effort. It also minimizes
wasted marketing spend on undeliverable emails.
Provides Insights
Analyzing bounce rates, reasons,
and trends provides actionable insights for optimizing sender reputation,
content strategy, list segmentation, and engagement campaigns.
In summary, excellent bounce
management is a must for maximizing email program ROI and keeping customers
happy. Now let's go over how to set it up within Salesforce.
How to Set Up Bounce Management in Salesforce
The building blocks of effective
bounce management in Salesforce include:
Enable Bounce Management
The first step is enabling bounce
management at the account level within Salesforce Marketing Cloud email studio.
Under Administration > Account Settings, check the box for "Enable
bounce management". This allows you to automatically retrieve bouncebacks
instead of missing them.
Configure Bounce Rules
Once enabled, you can create
customized bounce rules to categorize different bounce types and define actions
based on that categorization. For example, you may set rules so hard bounces
automatically update a "Bad Email" field on the related contact.
Granular bounce types in Salesforce like "Mailbox Full" can be used
to trigger specific automation workflows.
Set Up Bounce Notifications
Complementary to rules, set up
email notifications for bounce alerts when certain thresholds are exceeded.
This allows you to get proactively flagged on deliverability issues versus
manual checking. For example, get notified if your hard bounce rate rises above
2% for a campaign. Act quickly on any red flags.
With those core components
activated, you have the infrastructure in place to start benefiting from
automated bounce management. Now let's explore specific strategies and best
practices.
Bounce Management Best Practices
Managing bounces well requires
implementing some essential discipline:
Analyze Bounce Patterns
Make bounce analysis an ongoing
priority rather than just setting up basic rules and forgetting it. Routinely
review your overall bounce rates, monitor for spikes, and segment data by
campaigns, contact groups, content types, and other relevant dimensions. Look
for patterns and actionable insights.
Segment Your List
Dividing your master contact list
into segments such as engaged subscribers, lapsed contacts, hard bounces, soft
bounces, etc allows you to customize engagement approaches based on subscriber
lifecycle and activity. List segmentation is a bounce management best practice.
Update Contact Data
When postal mail gets returned as
undeliverable, remember to update the related contact records in Salesforce.
This ensures data accuracy across channels throughout the entire customer
lifecycle, not just email.
Adjust Content Frequency
If particular campaigns or email
content types result in higher soft bounce rates, it may be a sign to reduce
send frequency to those segments. Give overwhelmed recipients more breathing
room in between your emails.
Advanced Bounce Management Strategies
More advanced bounce management
involves tactics like:
List Hygiene
Using a dedicated email list
hygiene service to run validation on email addresses is an excellent way to
clean your contact database proactively. It identifies bad emails before you
even send to them.
Feedback Loops
Establishing feedback loops with
major ISPs provides visibility into reputation issues that may be suppressing
your email deliverability. This two-way communication allows you to course
correct.
ISP Relationship Building
Maintaining strong working
relationships with key ISPs through communication and compliance with their
guidelines helps avoid problems. If issues arise, you have a trusted contact to
resolve quickly.
Bounce Management Challenges
Despite best efforts, effective
bounce management presents some inherent challenges:
Identifying Hard Bounces
Not all bounces are clear cut.
Some have generic bounce codes that require manual analysis to determine if
it's truly a hard or soft bounce. This introduces risk of false positives.
Temporary Bounces
If a soft bounce resolves itself
before generating an alert, you may miss it and the related contact remains in
your list with a delivery issue. Ongoing list audits help catch these.
Duplicate Contacts
Lack of a unique identifier like
verified email address can result in the same contact getting unintentionally
duplicated in your database with minor variations in their address. This skews
bounce rates and wastes marketing spend. Maintaining clean, deduped data is
critical but difficult.
Top Bounce Management Tools
The right supporting tools are
invaluable for bounce management:
Native Salesforce
Leverage built-in Salesforce
functionality for foundational bounce classification, routing, and
notifications. Establish rules, alerts, reports, and automation workflows.
3rd Party Apps
Robust apps like Cirrus Insight
and MailCheck Pro integrate with Salesforce to provide richer bounce analysis,
list management capabilities, and email hygiene features.
Email Append Services
Services like NeverBounce can
append verified, deliverable email addresses to contacts in your Salesforce
database to minimize bounces.
Conclusion
Salesforce provides a strong
starting point, but a true 360-degree bounce management program requires combining
the native platform capabilities with specialized apps and services. When
executed well, bounce management acts like preventative medicine - identifying
issues early and allowing optimization of email programs for metrics like
deliverability, open and clickthrough rates.
This guide provided a
comprehensive overview of bounce management concepts, configuration, best
practices, advanced tactics, challenges, and tools. The time investment
required to manage bounces well delivers exponential benefits. Your customers
and bottom line will thank you! 🙏
FAQs
What are some key benefits of bounce management?
Major benefits include improving
sender reputation and email deliverability, saving time with automation,
minimizing wasted marketing spend, and gaining data insights to guide strategy.
How frequently should you clean your email contact list?
As a best practice, conduct a
thorough email list cleaning at least quarterly. Scrub for invalid addresses,
remove hard bounces, and append missing or updated data.
What is an acceptable overall bounce rate?
For most email programs, a bounce
rate under 2% is considered excellent, under 5% is good, and under 10% is
average. Over 10% indicates major issues needing improvement.
Is it possible to recover or rehabilitate hard bounced email addresses?
Unfortunately, no - hard bounces
mean that email address is permanently invalid. The only recourse is trying to
obtain updated contact information for the same recipient.
What potential issues can arise from ignoring email bounces?
Neglecting bounces leads to
reduced deliverability and sender reputation, higher spam complaints, wasted
marketing spend on undelivered emails, and diminished customer experiences.
Should you continue emailing contacts that soft bounce?
Yes, since soft bounces are
temporary, continue marketing to those contacts after allowing some time for
the problem to resolve. Consider reducing send frequency.
How can you minimize false positives in classifying bounce types?
Carefully configure bounce
handling time windows and customized categorization rules. Manual review of
borderline cases helps minimize false positives.
What tools integrate well with Salesforce for bounce management?
Salesforce integrates nicely with
specialized apps like Cirrus Insight and MailCheck Pro for bounce processing
and hygiene. Services like NeverBounce help append clean data.
Is it possible to set up automated Salesforce workflows for list cleaning?
Absolutely - you can build
processes and triggers in Salesforce that automatically update records when
emails hard bounce or contacts become inactive, for example.
What contact data fields are most important for bounce management?
Critical fields are email
address, bounce category and reason, bounce date, subscriber status, and
contact info like name, physical address, and phone number in case emails need
updating.
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