StrongMail Systems explains why you should be in the know on this hot email topic, and how to measure its success.

Ever since the March release of the Email Experience Council (EEC) research on email metrics and bounce management and the follow-up webinar with StrongMail, bounce management has been one of the hottest topics of conversations among email marketers. That being said, I am continuing my "how-to" series with a look at best practices around bounce management. You can check out part one, two and three here.

Before we begin talking about best practices, we must first define bounce management. In short, it's the process of taking the correct action on the error/failure codes that you receive from ISPs and other domains. Of course, the important question is "what does it mean to me?"

If you are like most email marketers, your bounces are managed by one of two groups, internal IT or an ESP. While there is nothing wrong with depending on either group for bounce management, it is important that you understand the processes that affect you directly, such as the definition of terms that are used by your bounce management system and how the system handles those definitions. More importantly, you need to be the one defining what the rules are and ensuring that they are consistently updated.

As discussed in the StrongMail/EEC webinar, there are three good reasons why you as a marketer should know how your bounce management system works. They are:

• Performance evaluation. Proper bounce management provides you with invaluable data on your use of email and the ROI that comes from it. By keeping track of this information and applying it back to your conversion numbers, you can leverage the data to improve your ROI.
• List management. Bounce management data enables you to keep your lists clean and to maintain or restore contact with customers. With proper bounce management, you are able to remove bad addresses and take action to restore communications. 
• Practice improvement. A good bounce management system will provide you with tons of information for diagnosing issues with your marketing practices (data capture, targeting, etc.) and for taking the corrective action that will ensure both a good reputation and better deliverability. Make sure to review your data regularly, as this will allow you to identify issues quickly, such as if certain receivers are blocking your email.

There are so many different bounce codes sent by ISPs and other domains, and very few follow any standard protocols. So the challenge comes down to figuring out what they all mean. The codes fall into two broad categories that are usually called hard or soft bounces. Lately, the terms "permanent" and "transient" have become more common, with the former referring to conditions that are supposedly permanent, and the latter describing failures that are temporary due to such issues as a full mailbox or bad network connection.

The problem is that even these terms do not fully explain the reasons behind the bounces or what you should do with the customer email addresses that generate them. So as you review your bounce data, you should carefully examine the categorization of these bounces.  \If you're not able to easily see the exact reasons for each failure type, you should ask for them from your IT department or ESP, depending on your situation.

Regardless of whether you have your own system or use one through an ESP, you should make sure that it provides the critical data that you need. So what makes a good bounce management system? We here at StrongMail believe that it should meet five key criteria:

1. Capture all data streams. Make sure that your system can capture all the bounce data streams, both synchronous and asynchronous. A synchronous bounce occurs at the time of the SMTP transaction and takes the form of a code and text message indicating the reason for non-delivery. An asynchronous bounce occurs after the SMTP transaction and takes the form of a "bounce email" that's received along with other inbound emails generated by your mailing. Unfortunately, this is the data stream that's often overlooked or incompletely captured by most bounce management systems.  
2. Correctly interpret data. The right solution will be able to process the incoming bounce data across the data streams and correctly interpret the myriad of inconsistent messages received from ISPs and other domains. Correct interpretation takes continual testing and tuning.
3. Organize (standardize) data. No one wants to deal with hundreds of different bounce codes, so the next thing to do is to standardize the data into logical categories, such as permanent (hard) bounce, temporary(soft) bounce, blocks and technical failures. A good system will then map these failures into sub-categories, such as "unknown user" under permanent bounce.  Identifying the reasons will enable you to diagnose the underlying causes and take the corrective actions that will improve your bottom-line results.
4. Make data actionable. Once organized, the system should generate reports that make the data actionable in addressing the causes of failures. The reporting should be user-friendly and available near real-time so you can easily and quickly take action to clean your list, adjust your targeting or modify other practices to improve your deliverability. It should also allow you to cross-reference your failure data with other key metrics on the same campaign, e.g. open, click and unsubscribe rates.
5. Be continually updated. As things continually change in the realm of email, ISPs continue to update their bounce codes. That being said, it is important that your system has a process for being continually updated with the latest bounce codes and messages.

With a bounce management system that meets these requirements, you'll be in a position to properly evaluate your performance, manage your list and improve your practices, all of which translate into better bottom-line results. If your current system doesn't fulfill these criteria, I strongly recommend you find one that does. Practicing smart bounce management will make both you and the ISPs very happy. Good luck and good sending.

Spencer Kollas is director of delivery services, StrongMail Systems. Read full bio.