Best Practices for Cleaning up Bounced Users

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

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

Users who soft bounce several times are probably not going to open future emails either, and this can negatively impact deliverability. Because of this, it's a good idea to clear these users out at least once per quarter.

The overall process is to create a dynamic list that captures these users.

Follow these steps:

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

   

   You can choose however many bounces you'd like. The higher the number, the more conservative the clearing out will be. The list will be smaller if the number of bounces is higher.

2. Click Refresh (in the top-right corner) 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 an optimal deliverability and keep a low bounce rate.