10 X Soft Bounce is (kind of) a lie

TL;DR: A bunch of your contacts scarred with “10 X Soft Bounces” in Vin65 may actually be deliverable. You should check and Vin65 should fix.

Wanted to bring some attention to this for @brent and @karson and the greater community.

So a “Hard Bounce” occurs whenever something is truly wrong with an email address, like the user or domain simply don’t exist. A “Soft Bounce” occurs when the message reaches the recipient email server, but something is wrong like a full mailbox or another technical issue. Vin65 will change a contact’s email status to “10 X Soft Bounce” after 10 occurrences, which seems like a good idea for deliverability reasons.

But…the problem is that Soft Bounces are often (not always) a temporary issue. However, if Vin65 is marking your contacts as “10 X Soft Bounce,” there’s a good chance you stop emailing them. So what can you do? First, export a list of all your “10 X Soft Bounce” contacts in list builder. Next, run them through an external email validation service. The results should reveal hundreds, maybe thousands of deliverable addresses depending on your list size.

Why’s this a problem? You may have stopped emailing these people and are leaving money on the table. Since Vin65 brands them with a scarlet letter, your only options are to manually clear them or ignore it entirely.

The easiest way for Vin65 to fix this would be to add an option to list cleaner to re-check “10 X Soft Bounces,” or maybe just those within a desired date range. They could also allow an option for that email status to expire after a set time-frame.

But bottom line is, don’t give up on this segment just because Vin65 says to. Though most addresses will still have problems, there’s going to be a bunch that work.

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Since List Builder has the ability to filter by email status, you can use any criteria plus “10X…” to build a list, and then generate.

All we would need is an Action to “Re-evaluate bounces”. Simple matter of programming. And should be worth $0.02.

We so very much appreciate @EdFarmCollective 's input (sincerely) and we’re looking into this but I have it on good authority (from a 604 boy) that if one of your 10x Soft Bouncers makes a purchase, they’re bumped up to Purchaser again. Anyway, let’s explore this and improve it.

Thanks, @EdFarmCollective and @ElJefe

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After all, those guys at Farm Collective are doing something right if this made it’s way to my feed.ly: Tank Garage

Right, @EdFarmCollective?

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We have notified to our staff new changes to our dress policy that include the knit-jumpsuit/turtle neck combo mentioned in this article.

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Also, you know that awesome combined-customer data table y’all use to pull email addresses based on credit cards? I wouldn’t hate it if you used it to make a heuristic that recommended the correct email address for ones with typos or syntax errors. Could also use it for auto-completing email addresses at the POS to make sure everything’s irie…Assuming that’s legal. @SarahBarwin

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Confirmed: If you make a quick purchase with cash, then refund, contact will “bumped up.”