Managing Email Bounces, Unsubscribes, and Spam Reported Emails
The Brick River email center is a powerful tool that can fit into an organization's communication plan in a number of ways. It not only allows you to send simple emails, but you can also manage your bounces, spam reports and unsubscribes. Here's how:
To start, click on the Undeliverable button in the top bar of the email center.
Once the page loads, you'll see a list of contacts. These contacts appear in the list for a few reasons:
- The contact has unsubscribed to any email coming from the Brick River emailer and/or a specific email subscription list.
- The contact has marked one of your emails as spam.
- The contact's email address bounced for one of many reasons. If an email address bounces, this is noted in the email system and will prevent the Brick River email center from sending emails to this "unreachable" address again. A bounce retains all the contact's subscriptions but prevents the email center from contacting that address. Repeatedly emailing bounced addresses can affect your email deliverability. A bounced email address remains on the bounce table until you remove it.
On this page, you'll see six columns. You can filter each column either A-Z/Z-A or Old-New/New-Old. Here's what each column details:
- Email: The specific email address that spam reported, unsubscribed or bounced.
- Type: The type of action that was taken. Options include bounce, spam report or unsubscribe.
- Date: The date the spam report or unsubscribe action took place, or the date the email bounced.
- List: In this column, you will either see the word ALL or a specific email subscription list. When a specific email subscription list is named in this cell, the contact has unsubscribed from that list only. When ALL is listed, this means the action has affected the way the contact relates to ANY communication coming from the Brick River email center. This is important. Oftentimes contacts want to unsubscribe from a specific list but accidentally unsubscribe from any email coming from the email center.
- Details: The communication on which the action was taken. For example, if a specific email newsletter edition is listed, the contact hit the unsubscribe button on that email, or their email address bounced when the email center tried to send and deliver that edition of the newsletter.
- Remove: Buttons to remove someone from the bounce table or resubscribe them to the email center.
Additionally, you can filter the undeliverable screen by email domain. Sometimes, the Brick River email center has trouble with specific domain names. Now you can easily unbounce all email addresses by domain.
Important things to note:
- A bounced email stays on the bounce table until you remove it. This means once an email address has bounced, no emails will be sent to it until it's removed from the bounce table.
- If someone has unsubscribed to the email center as a whole, they will receive no email from the email center. It doesn't matter how you add them to the email - via csv file upload, by hand, etc. - they still won't receive the email if they've unsubscribed.
- The same is true for spam reports.
- If someone has unsubscribed to a specific email subscription list correctly, they will be removed from that list but will continue to receive other communications.
- Consider your organization's policy for resubscribing unsubscribed contacts and clearing spam reports. Ethically, you cannot force someone to receive email they haven't consented to receive. Asking permission or verifying intent before resubscribing or removing a spam report is best.