Best Practices for Cleaning up Bounced Users

To keep your deliverability high and bounce rate low, it's a good idea to routinely clear out all users that have bounced several times.

Iterable automatically unsubscribes users who hard bounce from a channel that an email is sent from. These hard-bounced email addresses can still cause future bounces, for example, if there's more than one marketing channel.

In addition, it's a good idea to remove users, at least once per quarter, who have soft bounced several times. You can do this by creating a dynamic list that captures these users as described here.

1. Create the dynamic list, using a segmentation query like this one.

   

   Choose however many bounces you'd like. The higher the number, the more conservative the clearing out will be, and the smaller the list will be.

2. Click Refresh Results to search for users who match the segmentation query.

3. Export the users to a CSV file by clicking Export as... > CSV file.

   

   Then, in the Export to CSV window, select only the email field.

4. Navigate to Audience > Lists and click Channel Unsubscribe Users.

   

5. Select the channels from which you'd to unsubscribe the users.

   

6. Toggle Trigger workflows from this list? to determine whether or not unsubscribe events associated with this change should trigger any relevant journeys (formerly called workflows).

7. Click Select a CSV file and select the CSV file you just created.

   

8. Review the subscribes to make sure you want to unsubscribe them.

9. Click Remove Subscribers.

   

Repeat this process periodically to help maintain optimal deliverability and a low bounce rate.

For more information about bounce types, as determined by Amazon SES, see Bounce Types.