The numbers presented in the Domain Overview will help you get a better and deeper understanding regarding the reasons for soft and hard bounces for your email send-outs.

To see these details, choose Action and then Domain overview in the statistics for a specific email send-out.

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This will display detailed delivery data per domain and the listing is as following:

Domain
Description: The domain you have sent the email to. Ex: Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com etc.

Number of recipients
Description: The number of recipients that have hard bounced, soft bounced, or are unknown for a specific domain for this send-out.

Share of domain
Description: The percentage of bounces vs sent for a specific domain.

Ex: 10,000 emails are sent to Gmail.com. 50 are soft bounces, 20 are hard bounces. If you look at the Delivery Report for Soft Bounces, you will see Share of domain = 0.5 % ((50/10,000)100). Similarly, you will see Share of domain = 0.2 % ((20/10,000)100).

Anonymized data
Description: The domains that cannot be disclosed due to GDPR-regulations.

Here's how to use this information.

Share of domain

Gives you an understanding in how deliverability is for each domain. If you have a high ratio here, you may need to address this and try to understand why your emails are bouncing and what you can do to mitigate that. A high ratio that is left unattended may affect your deliverability. Remember—the better the list quality and user activity, the better the deliverability. Depending on the reasons for the bounces, the domain may gradually consider you as a poor sender as the list management is left unattended over time.

At the same time, you may have cases with 100 % Share of domain and the total amount of recipients for that domain is no more than four email addresses. This can be at a small private domain or a company domain. In this case, this may not even matter for your overall marketing as far as you're concerned.

There's no exact answer to what a "high ratio" is. A rule of thumb though: 99 % and above is good. Subsequently a good bounce rate is lower than 1 %. We encourage you to investigate your delivery rates regularly to improve your reach and list quality.

The unknowns are unknowns, making it hard to define them. The Unknown status number represents email addresses where the recipient mail server hasn't yet sent a response regarding the email's status. You may see many unknowns to start with, and as Engage receives updated information about the status, this is updated in the statistics. Please note that an unknown can “become” a delivered, just as well as a hard bounce.

The export of statuses

The Domain overview will help you decide if you must dig deeper into the statistics, analyze, and look for mitigation.

For more details—“Export status codes”. This will download an excel file with detailed statuses for each soft bounced or hard bounced address. For the unknowns, you can´t do this export as Engage doesn't have any more data.

Even though Status codes sound a bit technical and there are a few “strange” numbers and codes in the Excel file, this is nothing technical at all. This is an easy to use, fantastic sheet for marketeers to better understand the send-outs and take needed actions. The columns in the Excel file specified below:

Email
Description: The email address that has bounced.

Domain
Description: The domain you have sent the email to. Ex: Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com etc.

Share of domain
Description: A standardized mail server status code that categorized the type of the bounce.
Reason
Description: A little more, non-technical explained reason for the status.

As a marketeer, do you need to memorize all the codes and know exactly what the codes means? Nope. If not, why bother with this data? We are giving you access to this data so that you can use this insight to better understand the deliverability for your send-outs and use the data to improve your communication. Also, if you need to contact a domain for any reason, the statuses and codes will come in handy.

Take action

It’s hard to cover all possible scenarios but below are some general pointers. One important thing—the more you work with these kinds of statistics, the easier it will be to see and understand the patterns.

In the example below, we're using a fictive send-out and looking at soft bounces.

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The email sent to anna.andersson@me.com has soft bounced due to the reason “550 5.7.0  Blocked—see https://support.proofpoint.com/dnsbl-lookup.cgi?ip=12.24.45.67”. The column Reason is giving you a hint and quite a good explanation regarding why your message to anna.andersson@me.com is getting soft bounced. You have a link to check out and read more to understand why me.com is stopping your communication.

For karl.karlsson@telia.com the situation is a bit different. Here, the reason is “552 5.2.2  Quota exceeded (mailbox for user karl.karlsson@telia.com is full)”—so his mailbox is full. Pretty reasonable why the email isn't getting through.

Different ways to work towards a mitigation

  • See if you have the same kind of Status and Reason for all bounces or if they differ. This will give you an idea if you need to take different types of actions.

  • The Reason column says things like “blocked”, “spam related”, “rejected” and other mentions that you can’t solve at your end by list management:
    • Contact the domain and request a solution. Voyado’s support has template for this kind of communication, feel free to reach out.
  • The Reason column says things like “Mailbox full”, “So such user” and similar statement:
    • These statements point more towards your list management. Please take the time to evaluate your list management- and reactivation routines.

Tip: Use Pivot Table or filtered list in the Excel file to make the listing simpler.

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