Understanding the e-Marketing Report:
What does Blocked mean?
This occurs when a bounced email becomes a hard bounce (i.e. we have tried many attempts to deliver the email but it cannot get through for the reasons described in the bounced section below).
After 90 days a bounce if not delivered becomes marked as blocked.
What does Bounced mean?
We were unable to deliver the email for a number of reasons i.e. the recipients mailbox was full at the time (we will continue to try to deliver the email until the box is empty we re-try for 90 days). After this time the email is then regarded as blocked.
There are two types of bounces which are handled differently as explained below:
Soft Bounce: This is a temporary issue such as the recipient’s inbox is full, the email message is too large, or a connection timeout. We will automatically attempt to resend the email. If it cannot be delivered after a certain number of attempts, the recipient will be “Blocked” for 90 days. After the 90 days, the email address will be active again.
Hard Bounce: This is a permanent delivery error caused by an invalid email address (e.g. a mistyped email, the email no longer exists - i.e. the person has left the company or a non-existent destination server - it is not a valid email or domain name).
Hard bounces negatively impact your sender reputations and are automatically blocked.
Why do emails bounce?
It could be that the email address is invalid i.e. misspelt in correctly or the email address no longer exists (this can happen when people leave a company).
What to do if the email bounced?
- Go into the contact record for the person the email address relates to and edit the email address if it has been typed incorrectly and then you can resend the email to that contact again (the e-Marketing has a built in de-dupe so it will recognise this as a new email address and you will see this on the left hand side listed so you will know it is just going out to the one contact before you send it).
- Check with the company that the person is still working there if not find out who their replacement is and make contact to get permission from them to send out future emails – you must have permission otherwise this will be classed as SPAM. We only allow permission based email marketing, please read our policy on e-Marketing and Anti-Spam.
What is an acceptable bounce rate?
8% or below is an acceptable bounce rate - any higher than this would indicate that your data is old with email addresses on longer being current.
What does Failed mean?
When an email has been unsubscribed, marked as spam or blocked previously it will then show up as Failed on your report stats as we can no longer deliver emails to this email address.
Some Failed emails are sometimes what we call soft failures – which are automatically being retried a while later and delivery is taking place.
What does UNSUB mean?
Please note once someone has unsubscribed this means we cannot email to them again directly through the e-Marketing system.
You will still be able to stay in touch with the contact via your own email provider i.e. Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail etc but they have opted out of receiving any e-Marketing campaigns from you directly.
We will automatically remove any unsubscribes them from the email send system so you do not need to do anything.
What is an acceptable unsubscribe rate?
We deem anything under 1.4% or below to be an acceptable unsubscribe rate - anything higher than this and this could indicate that your email is spam.
What does SPAM mean?
It means the recipient has clicked on the SPAM button in their email provider and classed the email that you have sent to them as SPAM.
We get a report back to say it has been marked as SPAM – this email address will automatically be removed in the same way an unsubscribe email is so you will not be able to send another email to them via the e-Marketing service again.