Wordfly Hard Bounce Issues

Hi Trevor -

Yes, this is a problem both with Hard Bounces, but also unsubscribes. There are two things to be aware of:

1. If you are creating a standard email and manually uploading your lists, always go to the "Import Issues" section and you can manually re-add your patrons to the list by checking everyone.

2. Dealing with a triggered campaign is more difficult (if down near impossible) because the whole point about a triggered campaign is that you don't have to deal with them after you set them up. The only semi-workaround I've figured out so far is to on a fairly regular basis and before any triggered campaigns upload my 'active' patrons to a dummy list and manually override all the unsubscribes/hard bounces for those subscribers. Of course, this won't sweep up people that say bought tickets after my triggered campaign started, but it at least gets a fair number of those that currently live in my db.

I know a couple of us have been having circular conversations with WordFly about this - they are vouching for us being safe senders and aren't comfortable relinquishing some of that control. Hopefully, with the more people that talk to them about it, perhaps something will change!

If anyone else has a better idea/solution I'd love to hear it too!

Heather
Seattle Rep 

WordFly support team gave me these instructions:

Ok, let's review how to override the hard bounce. If you look on the tab "lists and data" in this account you'll see all the lists he is on. Any list with a red dot indicates that he has been removed. Hover over the list with a red dot and select "View list summary". This will take you to the list summary page, under the section "Subscriber Import Issues" check the box next to his record and in the Actions drop down select the option that is best for the override.

When I went about doing it that way I found it to be VERY time consuming and it only resolves the problem one constituent at a time.

I think Heather's workaround approach is spot on as far as being the easiest and most efficient way to override WordFly's suppression of Hard Bounce addresses.  Linda, when you import a list scroll down to the bottom where it says "Subscriber Import Issues" and go to the Hard Bounces tab. All the way to the right there's a drop down that says Actions... Right below that you can select a box that will check all the addresses in view. Then click  Actions... and select override for this list. It should then see the number next to subscribers currently in the list go up.

I haven't actually sent out an email campaign yet using this method but in theory it looks like it should work? Again, this only helps you out with standard emails...

As a side note, the previous ESP I was using was Exact Target. This is how they handled Hard Bounces in their Bounce Mail Management. I'm planning on duplicating their algorithm in our local procedure to handle hard bounces in a similar manner. That way we'll have an accurate list to use internally.  Has anyone else implemented something similar?

Hard Bounce Management
A hard bounce occurs when the email server rejects the email due to permanent conditions (this typically results when "user unknown" or "domain not found" errors occur). What happens next depends on the subscriber's current status. If the subscriber's status was already Active, their status now changes to Bounced. No more attempts are made to send this email campaign to this subscriber, and the subscriber will be re-tried in your next email campaign. Every email send is considered an email campaign with respect to bounce handling.

If the subscriber's status was already Bounced, which indicates they had experienced a bounce previously, the application treats the bounce differently. If this email campaign is the first or second email campaign in which the subscriber bounced, the subscriber retains the Bounced status and will be re-tried in your next email campaign. No further attempts are made for this current email campaign.


If, however, this email campaign is the third campaign in which the subscriber bounced, the application checks when the first bounce message was received for this subscriber. If fewer than 15 days have passed since the first bounce message was received, the subscriber retains the Bounced status and will be re-tried in your next campaign. No further attempts are made for this current email campaign. If the bounce occurred more than 15 days prior to the first bounce message , the subscriber status changes to Undeliverable unless the bounce is from a trusted domain. A trusted domain is one in which ExactTarget trusts the ISP or receiver's bounce feedback implicitily. For example. if hotmail.com is a trusted domain, we trust Hotmail's feedback that an address is bad, and therefore we'll change the status of a hard bounced hotmail.com address to Undeliverable immediately instead of waiting for the address to bounce three times over 15 days. If the bounce comes from any other domain, a subscriber must receive three bounces to acquire an Undeliverable status. The application will not attempt delivery to this subscriber in any future campaigns

QUICK UPDATE

I had a great conversation with Kirk Bentley from Wordfly yesterday and got some better insight on the issue. For those daring enough, I found out that Wordfly can actually deactivate the Hard Bounce and Unsubscribe suppression in their built-in list hygiene features.

Jamie, if you wanted to be in full control of unsubscribes within your preference center you can technically do it! Just give Kirk Bentley | Engagement Manager | 206.224.0598  a call and he'll walk you through the options.

This is the procedure they suggested:
Step 1: 
Create a List Manager list (or extraction) in Tessitura with criteria matching customers who have been hard bounced or unsubscribed who you want to continue mailing to. This is where you can implement whatever business logic you want. You could look at the number of hard bounces, you check for other responses that may have come back after the hard bounce, you could look sales data to factor in the importance of the contact, you could look at opt-in info to see if they've re-subscribed after the unsubscribe, etc.

Step 2: 
Create a dummy list in WordFly intended solely for managing WordFly subscriber issue suppressions.

Step 3: 
On a regular basis import your List Manager list into the dummy list in WordFly. Depending on your list criteria, you would expect everyone in it to be automatically due to a hard bounce or an unsubscribe. You then go to the "Subscriber import issue" section on the List summary page. For both the "Hard Bounces" and "Unsubscribes" tabs override the import issues as follows:
a. Click the tick box at the top of the list to auto-select every subscriber;
b. Select "override for this subscriber". (Overriding for the subscriber tells WordFly to ignore the issue the current list as well as all future imports. It’s a way of telling WordFly to forget about the underlying hard bounce or unsubscribe. As long as the subscriber doesn’t hard bounce or unsubscribe again they will no longer be suppressed. However, any future hard bounces or unsubscribes will be respected and will once again cause the subscriber to be suppressed.)

That's it! All of the subscribers in your List Manager list will be given a clean slate in WordFly. You'll still be able to take full advantage of WordFly’s built-in list hygiene features, but also ensures that you don’t lose any of your most important contacts. Once you've completed Step 1 and the List is working the way you want it, the rest is pretty easy and can be done as often as you like.