If you’ve ever experienced email bounces in Pardot (and chances are you have), you’ll know that reporting on and exporting them has been a labor-intensive task.
That all changes now.
As part of the Summer ‘22 Release, marketers have been blessed with a new tool for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) called Email Bounce Report.
It’s a feature that shows who, when and why prospects bounced. And it also allows you to export all that insightful data.
That’s right, our prayers have been answered. We no longer need to manually pull this data from each and every email report.
What is an email bounce rate?
First, let’s understand what a bounce rate is.
Your org’s bounce rate is the number of hard bounces plus soft bounces, divided by the number of emails sent, multiplied by 100.
In B2B marketing, anything below 10% is considered a good bounce rate.
It’s good practice to monitor your bounce rate. And this report helps you do just that!
Who can get the Pardot Email Bounce Report?
This report is available on all Pardot editions, and it includes bounced email addresses from both Pardot Classic and Lightning.
Not upgraded to Pardot Lightning App? Here’s your nudge to do so.
What do you get in the report?
The report is pretty comprehensive and shows bounce data for ALL Pardot prospects. We’ll go into some of the use cases in another blog post.
From total number of email bounces (filtered by date) to bounce reasons, this report has it all. And yes, all of the bounce rate report data is exportable.
Found under marketing reports, you are greeted with a chart illustrating,
- All emails sent over the last year – one year from todays date – so if its the 12 May 2022, you can go back to 12 May 2021. Personally, I’d hope this is amended in future updates as it would be useful to see further than the last year in some cases.
- Total emails sent
- Total bounced & delivered
- Bounce by type – Soft vs. Hard
Scroll down, and you get to the good stuff… the bounce details, including bounce reason.
It’s no good seeing the number of bounces you’ve received if you can’t do anything about it. Filtered by bounce type and date, the Email Bounce details table tells you:
- Prospects who have bounced
- Email addresses and company names
- Email subject
- Bounce type
- Bounce reason
- Bounce date
- Email name – linked
- Email send type and template name
Why is the Pardot email bounce report so useful?
- Understand why your emails are bouncing
From full inboxes, invaild email address and none responsive servers, there are a number of reasons why your emails may bounce. This report helps you understand those reasons and potentially act on them.
Types of bounces
- Soft bounce – Occurs when an email is recognized by the recipient’s mail server but is returned to the sender because the recipient’s mailbox is full or the mail server is temporarily unavailable.
These prospects may be able to receive emails at a later time. However, after an email soft-bounces five times, Pardot will mark the prospect as undeliverable and suppresses them from receiving emails from you. - Hard bounce – Occurs when the prospect’s email address is invalid, the domain name does not exist, or the sender is suspected as spam and/or has been blocked. Prospects with a hard bounce are no longer mailable.
- Bounce reasons – If you’re able to resolve the email bounce issue, you can reset the bounce count on the prospect record and start mailing them again.
2. Spot trends and take action
Use the report and export feature to filter and identify trends that may be contributing to you bounce rate, such as:
- Particular templates that continuously bounce
- Subject lines that cause bounces – Spammy subject lines?
- Dates of email sends – Think back to the Google outage way back December 2020. Are there any significant dates when bounces were high?
- Certain companies/ email domains – Contact the recipient and ask them if they’ve configured an email rule that forwards incoming email messages from you to another destination. Their rule could have tried to send a copy of your message to a bad email address. Or, have you simply misspelled the address/email domain?
3. See the bigger picture
Ever sent an email and thought “wow, that bounce rate was high!” You may have wondered if this was an isolated incident or if bounces were in fact an issue in your org?
Often marketers see a few emails with high bounce rate and assume they are destined for failure when it comes to getting their message into the inbox of prospects. Using this report, you can see the bigger picture. Then, you can understand how many bounces you have IN TOTAL out of all the emails sent in the last year.
4. Keep your Pardot data clean
Bounces often relate to the quality of your data and a low bounce rate overall indicates a healthy and clean org. Knowing how big of a problem bounces may (or may not) be can help with keeping your org clean and relevant.
Using the “Reset” feature found on individual prospect records you can reset bounces (hard and soft) and give yourself a second chance.
Still no luck? Consider removing these prospects, particularly if the bounce reason is permanent.
5. Avoid Salesforce account suspension
Salesforce is super serious about permission-based marketing. And its reputation as an email service provider, as well as your reputation as an email sender, is why they monitor accounts with bounce rates over 10% (as well as high spam complaint rates).
If Salesforce notices an issue with either of these numbers, they can suspend email sending from your account.
What can you do to lower your email bounce rate?
No email service provider can ever guarantee your deliverability rates — that’s down to your email practices and behavior.
Here are some things you can do to help with your email sending reputation and lower those bounce rates.
- As above, understand why your emails are bouncing and take action.
- Set up email authentication.
- Build email sending lists using a confirmed opt-in process
- Don’t purchase data without getting permission to send emails to the list.
- Clean your database regularly & check that email addresses are spelled correctly.
- Make sure your emails aren’t spammy.
Understanding email bounces is a big win for marketers
Armed with the data behind the bounces, this report is a win for marketers serious about their email sending reputation.
However, if you’re left feeling confused, worried or overwhelmed by the numbers, reach out to the Sercante team to see how we can help.
