Unsubscribing Users with Email Soft Bounces

Maintaining strong email deliverability is essential for successful messaging. Repeated soft bounces can harm your sender reputation and reduce good inbox placement. In Iterable, you can keep your lists healthy and your deliverability high by identifying and unsubscribing users with email addresses that repeatedly soft bounce.

# In this article

# Why unsubscribe users who soft bounce?

Soft bounces indicate a temporary delivery issue, such as an inbox being full, message content that triggers spam filters, or a DNS issue. While these issues are often short-lived, email addresses that soft bounce multiple times over weeks or months usually signal a more permanent problem. For example:

• A user's inbox has been full for several weeks, suggesting it's abandoned.
• A domain fails DNS checks for an extended period, indicating it's no longer valid.

Continuing to send to email addresses that bounce only serves to increase your bounce rate and damage your sender reputation. Sender reputation is a measure of how likely your emails are to be delivered to inboxes. A high bounce rate can lead to your emails being marked as spam, which can further damage your sender reputation.

Unsubscribing these users helps to protect your email deliverability and reduce unnecessary costs of sending campaigns to inactive addresses.

# Creating a simple email soft bounce management journey

You can unsubscribe users who soft bounce in Iterable by using dynamic lists and journeys. This approach helps maintain positive email deliverability while reducing costs from sending to inactive addresses.

Components of the automation include:

• A dynamic list that identifies users with the following criteria:
  • Multiple bounce events within a specified time frame.
  • Subscription to your marketing channel.
• A journey that automatically unsubscribes these users on a regular schedule.

Below is a simple example to get you started. If you want more control over who is unsubscribed, see Customizing your email soft bounce management.

# Instructions

The benefit of this journey is that it is simple to set up and requires no maintenance. However, it may unsubscribe users that are only temporarily unable to receive emails (for example, if their inbox is full for a period such as a sabbatical or parental leave).

1. Go to Audience > Segmentation.

2. Create a segmentation query to search for users with all of these attributes:

   • Users who have the Email bounce event occurred between 3 and max times (this means 3 or more times).

     • Where the Email bounce date Is on or after the range of now-60d for a 60-day bounce date range. You can use a bounce frequency and time frame that is appropriate for your use case - see Choosing thresholds for email soft bounce management).

   • Users who have the User Profile Field of Unsubscribed Channels that does not equal the name of your email marketing channel.

   

3. Click View Results to test your query.

4. Once you have the users selected, click Save as and select Dynamic List.

5. Create a journey with the following components:

   • A Schedule Start tile that runs Daily to add users from your dynamic list.
   • A Subscription Preferences tile to Unsubscribe user from your selected marketing channel(s).

   

# Customizing your email soft bounce management

When you set up your journey, you can adjust the logic to fit your sending frequency and business needs. Ways to customize this journey include:

• The time frame for bounce events (for example, 30, 60, or 90 days).
• The number of bounces that occurred within that time frame.
• The bounce reasons that should be included in, or excluded from, the journey.

# Choosing thresholds for email soft bounce management

Set your bounce threshold based on how often you send emails. A 90-day window is a good starting point (or 60 days for stricter hygiene). Temporary issues usually resolve within three months.

Sending frequency	Expected emails per user in 90 days
Once per month	3
Once per week	12
Three per week	38
Once per day	90

# Unsubscribing by bounce reason

You can filter the dynamic list by bounce reasons, to avoid unsubscribing users with temporary issues. The bounce reason is stored in the recipientState field of the emailBounce event.

For example, to include only certain bounce reasons, add a filter to the segmentation query that finds users where the recipientState event field Is One Of and select all of the bounce reasons you want to include.

For a full list of bounce reasons logged in Iterable, see Email Bounce Event Properties.

# Want to learn more?

For more information about some of the topics in this article, check out this Iterable Academy course. Iterable Academy is open to everyone — you don't need to be an Iterable customer!

• Ask an Expert Series: Bounce Handling with Workflows

# Additional resources

• Maximizing Email Deliverability
• Troubleshooting Email Deliverability
• Email Bounces
• Email Bounce Event Properties