Why do I get bounced contacts when I send campaigns?
A high campaign bounce rate could indicate a poorly maintained media list
We use an SMTP provider called SendGrid for the distribution of Prezly campaigns and pitches. When a campaign fails to reach a particular email address because of a problem on their end – for example, the email address no longer existing or the receiving mail server being down – that email address is marked as bounced.
This bounce status is immediately reflected in your CRM and campaign report, and prevents new campaigns from being sent to that email. We do this because sending campaigns to emails that cannot receive your email would affect your deliverability rating and skew your campaign results.
After a certain time, we test the bounced email addresses again to see whether they are still inactive.
There are different types of bounces, grouped in two categories: temporary and permanent bounces. The response codes starting with 4XX are temporary and will be retried automatically for 72 hours. If after 72 hours emails to these addresses still cannot be delivered, they'll be marked as permanent bounces. The response codes with 5XX are permanent bounces and will remain off limits unless you ask us to manually attempt sending to these addresses again.
See a complete list of response codes and what they mean here ▸
One reason that you might experience a particularly high bounce rate on campaigns is if you are using a media list that you purchased from an online database. This is because the information on such databases is often out of date, and the high number of people attempting to reach those emails can result in inboxes becoming overloaded and email addresses being taken down.
Unless very careful, using bought media lists can also have an impact on your spam rating and may breach the GDPR. These are some of the main reasons Prezly does not sell media lists. If you're interested, you can read more about the associated risks here.
If you are certain that the emails to which you are sending your campaigns are active and should not be bouncing, please contact us via the chat bubble in the corner of Prezly or email our support team.
