Bounced & unsubscribed
Two important concepts when dealing with send-outs in Engage are bounced and unsubscribed.
Bounced
When an email or SMS sent from Engage can't be delivered, this is known as a bounce. There are two kinds of bounces, with different consequences in Engage:
A soft bounce means the email or SMS can't be delivered. This can happen because the user's inbox is full, or the mail server has temporary issues. When the next send-out is done from Engage, addresses / mobile numbers that have soft bounced will be tried again. If an email address soft bounces 10 consecutive times, Engage will block it for further communication (although this is not the case for SMS).
A hard bounce means that the ISP (for email) or the mobile carrier (for SMS) is permanently not reachable. This might happen because the domain name doesn’t exist, the recipient is unknown, or the phone number is no longer active. Engage will deactivate an email address / mobile number that has hard bounced, which will then be shown in red and struck through on the contact card.
Unsubscribed
An email address or mobile number is considered unsubscribed for a contact when the contact owning it has actively opted out of receiving marketing information. Their email / phone number is probably still valid, but the contact does not want it used for marketing send-outs.
Starting up with Engage
When you're moving to Engage from another platform it's important to realize that Engage will not automatically get updated about historical email bounces and unsubscribed contacts. Therefore you'll need to manually update Engage with the emails and mobile numbers that should not be used for send-outs.
Doing this will ensure you don’t send communication to old and inactive addresses, since that can be devastating to your sender reputation and risk flagging you as a spammer, which you don't want.
Important
While it is possible to have the same email / phone number attached to several contacts, each email or phone number can only be used once in the same send-out. So if two contacts share an email (unusual, but it can happen) and are in the same send-out, only one will be mailed.
Bounced and unsubscribed lists
Updating Engage with hard bounced and unsubscribed emails / phone numbers is done using a bounce list, which is a CSV file with a single row containing the emails that Engage can’t communicate with. These lists can be uploaded in the Configure Engage area of your Engage environment. Once imported, hard-bounced emails are then stored in the database to make sure they are never used in email send-outs from Engage.
Important
Email addresses and phone numbers imported via a bounce list will be blocked for future send-outs. This applies both to contacts who currently exist in Engage with one of those emails / phone numbers, as well as future contacts created with one of these as their identifier.