Soft Bounce Handling

Hi Matt,

Soft Bounces are usually due to what Email Service Providers classify as a temporary issue, which is why we don't unsubscribe them. When a soft bounce occurs, Marketo won't try to send to the same address again for 24 hours.

The first thing I recommend checking is whether or not SPF and DKIM have been set up on the domain you are using for the From address in your emails:
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KyrDCAS
This will make it so email service providers can better verify that Marketo has permission to send on your behalf (so they know we're not phishing, trying to impersonate you in order to steal the private information of your customers/prospects). Setting up SPF and DKIM tends to drop the number of soft bounces significantly.

I also recommend checking out the resources we have here to improve your email's content (so it looks less "spammy"):
http://www.marketo.com/email-deliverability/

-Grant

See also the email deliverability analysis guide that I put together. 

I also wrote a longer guide with more flow steps to automate much of what Jep discusses.
http://www.slideshare.net/jdavidhill/marketo-email-reputation-management

I figured I would update this thread... after working on the issue with Marketo support, it looks like my problem was primarily rooted in chronic OOB soft bouncers.

This subset of soft bouncers are problematic because their server originally sends back an email delivered receipt, then later changes its mind and sends back a soft bounce. This makes it tough to reinstate leads who have successfully received an email, but were prior suspended for soft bouncing.

Support helped me set up some campaigns to deal with these, so hopefully that should take care of the issue.

Hello,

I would love to hear how you found a solution for the OOB bounces. Deliverability is a hot topic and would love to get others ideas.

We do the standard multiple bounce message supression after a minimum number of times in a certain time frame but do not typically target specific bounce details.

Thanks!

Ericka

Support help me set up two daily batch campaigns as follows:

Campaign 1 (runs nightly at 9pm PST):



Campaign 2 (runs nightly at 10pm PST):



So what the first campaign is doing is it's checking a few situations. It's looking to see if a lead has had three bounces of any sort in the past 90 days, while also NOT having any emails delivered in that same period of time. Secondly, it's checking to see that if it did have any bounces, that none of them contained "OOB" in the details.

If any of this is true, it sets the lead to marketing suspended.

The second campaign is essentially checking these leads again to see if any of the emails got through because the OOB was just temporary. If it finds that to be the case, it sets marketing suspended back to false.

Your timeframe/number of bounces might vary, same with when you want these campaigns to run. But hopefully this helps!

Thanks for sharing Matt.  How long do you keep your leads marketing suspended?

They're suspended indefinitely until that second campaign picks up that they were successfully sent an email (via an operational email sent by a form).

At what point do you remove them from your marketo database?  

I actually haven't gotten that far in my setup yet to purge the suspended--only the hard bounced get wiped out after 90 days. But I imagine I would do something similar where a 90 day clock starts ticking once they're marketing suspended and if they don't come off suspended by the time that clock is up (or they're not in our CRM/potentially being worked), they get removed.