Reliable tracking of opt-outs and hard-bounces

[Compuware]

Need a repeatable & reliable way to capture all opt-outs and hard-bounces. There is currently no clear filter critieria that can be used to identify those who previously may have bounced or opted-out vs. those that are currently opted-out and hard-bounced outside of exporting the bounces and unsubscribes data from the Email section to create a Static List which is not substainable. There should be a way to pull this into a smart list and/or a contact setting that can be referenced. Would like to know when sending my email I have the cleanest list possible prior to hitting send.

[Compuware]

Please see this update: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Creating-A-Smart-List-for-Hard-Bounced-and-Unsubscribes/idc-p/338167/highlight/true#M56761

We just introduced two new contact properties that solve this. 

[Compuware]

@KeyWestScott that's certainly one way to say it.

I find it simpler to think of the Emails Bounced property as a way to see the number of bounces associated with an email address.

The static list created from the dashboard is what we advise should be used for cleanup. It is a snapshot of the contacts who are ineligible for future email due to bounces.

[Compuware]

@Compuware is right again. The Emails bounced contact property has always been just that. A count of the number of emails that bounced to the email address. It increments each time a bounce occurs and does not decrement with the contact being unbounced. It also increments for soft bounces, which is another reason it should not be used to identify contacts for deletion. It was not designed to be a yes/no answer to the question is this contact currently eligible to be sent email.

A dynamic yes/no such as this was attempted years ago and it proved to be a disaster; frankly, it caused more confusion than it solved for. It was promptly rolled back. This most recent change allows users to see a static list of their hard bounced contacts (not including contacts that are unbounced) over a certain time frame. We will not be offering this as a dynamic property at this time due to the load it weighs on available bandwidth for our users.

[Compuware]

Hello everyone!

You can now easily create a static list of all hard bounced contacts directly from the email dashboard. Please see the following Knowledge Base article for the steps how to do this: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/contacts/how-can-i-delete-contacts-who-have-unsubscribed-or-hard-bounce

You can also stipulate the specific bounce categories you wish to populate the list and the timeframe where the bounce occurred. This should increase visibility into hard bounce data for HubSpot users trying to clean up their portals of hard bounced contacts.

Side note regarding unsubscribes, to create a smart list of all unsubscribed contacts use the property Unsubscribed from all email as Compuware suggested above.

[Compuware]

You can now create a list of hard bounced contacts directly from the Email Dashboard:

This should help customers working though active clean ups and provide greater visibility into permanently bounced contacts.

[Compuware]

The export now has options to include deleted contacts or not; and allows the user to specify any combination of unsubbed, hard bounced and spam reports.

There will no longer be a need to filter this export outside of hubspot. Simply check the group of contacts you want to isolate and open the CSV sent to your inbox.

[Compuware]

@marketingman83, my sincerest apologies for that UX. I want you and the others on this thread to know that we hear you. We understand it is important to understand the segment of active contacts within your database that will end up in the Not Sent category through HubSpot, and this will be easier sometime in the near future.

Thank you for your patience.

[Compuware]

The most automatic, despite being technically difficult, way to get this information is by using the Email Events API to GET the status of an email address: http://developers.hubspot.com/docs/methods/email/get_status

If the bounced parameter is true, the contact is hard bounced.

The Emails Bounced property is not a representation of currently ineligible contacts (contacts in 'Not Sent') for a multitude of reasons:

• The Emails Bounced property will not increment for global bounces. However, we will put the contact in the Not Sent category if it is globally bounced.
• The Emails Bounced property will increment for soft bounces, but soft bounces will not put a contact in the Not Sent category.
• The Emails Bounced property will not reset to 0 if a contact's email address is updated, however, we will attempt to send to that contact again if the contact's email address is updated.
• The Emails Bounced property will not reset to 0 if a contact's email address is unbounced, either by Support or in-app.
• We put contacts in the Not Sent category without ever sending them an email if there is no MX record set up at their domain. The lack of an MX record shows that the domain can not send or receive email, and therefore we do not have to attempt to send the email to know that it will not deliver. These contacts will end up in Not Sent but their Emails Bounced will be 0.

Use this workaround for creating a list of ineligible (hard bounced) contacts if you can not use the API:

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/email/how-do-i-create-a-list-of-bounced-email-addresses

[Compuware]

Hi folks, our public API is one way to get this information: https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/methods/email/get_status

if ...

"bounced":true,<code></code>

then the contact is hard bounced.

Until there is a better solution it is important to know the "Emails Bounced" property is not a representation of currently ineligible contacts (contacts in 'Not Sent') for a multitude of reasons:
* The Emails Bounced property will not increment for global bounces. However, we will put the contact in the Not Sent category if it is globally bounced. An email becomes globally bounced if we received a permanent error when emailing that address in the past. Permanent errors in this case are bounce messages that indicate if an inbox has been disabled, or if there is a typo in the address).
* The Emails Bounced property will increment for soft bounces. They increment the Emails Bounced property but they will not put a contact in the Not Sent category.
* The Emails Bounced property will not reset to 0 if a contact's email address is updated, however, we will attempt to send to that contact again if the contact's email address is updated.

* The Emails Bounced property will not reset to zero if the contact is unbounced, by Support, or in-app.
* We put contacts in the Not Sent category without ever sending them an email if there is no MX record set up at their domain. The lack of an MX record shows that the domain can not send or receive email, and therefore we do not have to attempt to send the email to know that it will not deliver. These contacts will end up in Not Sent but their Emails Bounced will be 0.

Use this workaround for creating a list of ineligible (hard bounced) contacts if the using the API is not an option:
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/email/how-do-i-create-a-list-of-bounced-email-addresses

[KeyWestScott]

I really believe that the "difficulty" in getting HubSpot to do this, is their "pay per contact" model.  If it were easy for us to remove bounced/invalid address's, they would have less contacts to charge for.

[pgonzalez]

Being able to filter for hard bounces (Contact has Bounced) should be part of a data hygene process. Sadly HS just doesn't want to make this field accessable or does it think its a priority in smart lists.

[marketingman83]

Following up on this thread. I just had a bad experience with exporting/importing bounces to create a bounce list and wanted to warn others about this issue. The Opt-Out and Bounce list that you can export will contain Contacts previously deleted from your HubSpot portal. If you don't clean the list to remove previously deleted records (involves comparing your current Contact list to the Opt-Out/Bounce list), like I didn't, before re-importing them to create a bounce list, you will end up re-creating the deleted Contacts in HubSpot. No big deal, right? You can just create a list in HS to locate those new Contact records and then delete them... Except if you have integrations or workflows that trigger when new HS Contacts are created, like we do with Salesforce and other services. This can create issues that extend beyond HubSpot.

In my experience, this ended up creating hundreds of of new Leads in Salesforce that were assigned to our Biz-Dev reps. Luckily I caught this early, and thankfully our automation processes didn't involve email notifications to the reps or other processes that would be hard to back out - that could have been very distracting for our reps and time-consuming to undo. In this case I was able to simply delete the newly created SF records (after exporting and confirming they were generated by the bounce list) and I was able to quickly delete the newly created HS Contacts in HS.

This could have been worse. But I'm irritated that it could have been avoided if HubSpot provided the bounce data in a Contact Property, rather than requiring me to export/import the Opt-Out/Bounce list manually. Alternatively if we had a way to upload a CSV to create a static list and ignore Emails not already in HubSpot (Mailchimp has this feature and I miss it dearly), then we could avoid the issue of potentially creating new Contacts when all we want to do is segment existing HS Contacts via a CSV list.

[paxton]

@marketingman83, my sincerest apologies for that UX. I want you and the others on this thread to know that we hear you. We understand it is important to understand the segment of active contacts within your database that will end up in the Not Sent category through HubSpot, and this will be easier sometime in the near future.

Thank you for your patience.

[Compuware]

@marketingman83 it's great to hear that a fix is in the future. Thanks for the support!

[JimA]

@marketingman83 - Thank you for posting your heads up. I confess I couldn't believe that could really happen until it happened to me! Fortunately, having just read your post I understood what was going on and quickly deleted all of our "previously deleted created today" records. Thank you!!!

[MikeWW]

As a first time Hubspot user and longtime Marketo user I am totally baffled that something this basic is not available. Please implement asap. 

[EMSAdmin]

Well it has been one year since HubSpot last updated this idea (5/16/18). This seems like such an easy fix!! Create a field that is triggered when an email has bounced. We need this field in order to automatically identify which leads are bad or can try to rectify.

[paxton]

The export now has options to include deleted contacts or not; and allows the user to specify any combination of unsubbed, hard bounced and spam reports.

There will no longer be a need to filter this export outside of hubspot. Simply check the group of contacts you want to isolate and open the CSV sent to your inbox.

[EMSAdmin]

Thank you Paxton - this will help but it does not solve the issue. Need a filter so we can add to smart list for easier reporting of hard bounces.

[eComEngine_Suz]

When you export hard bounces, please allow to customize the data columns included. For example, I would like to include a secondary email address column so identify who has a primary email hard bounce, yet a valid secondary email to try.

It is not viable to do this manually.

[paxton]

You can now create a list of hard bounced contacts directly from the Email Dashboard:

This should help customers working though active clean ups and provide greater visibility into permanently bounced contacts.

[GmidD]

That is fantastic news! Been waiting on this feature for years! Thank you!!!

[KeyWestScott]

How about unsubscribes.  If they don't want to hear from us, I dont want them to be clogging up my database, either.

Scott

[marketingman83]

Excellent! This will definitely help, thank you for your efforts on this.

Slight note, I see this can be generated as a static list. It would be ideal to have this capability as a smart list but one step at a time 🙂

[marketingman83]

@KeyWestScott  You can create a Contacts smart list where "Opted out of all email" = "Yes".

[EMSAdmin]

Really need a "hard bounce" field on the contact record. Then we would not have to export it everytime we create a dynamic list.

[KeyWestScott]

Well, I'll be....  Must be another new feature.  Been asking for this, forever.

Thanks for the update!!

Scott

[Compuware]

For the new dashboard feature does this rely on the hardbounce field? As, from past experience, when a person's hardbounced is removed (verified correct email,etc.) the hardbounce field is not reset or cleared so that field remains as Hardbounced "1", "2" etc. When we initiated our Hubspot instance there was an issue with IP warming and caused many of our valid records to be marked as bounced and since then we have no true reliable way to identify those that are truly bounced vs. those that are not.

[KeyWestScott]

@marketingman83 What filter is it under?  I'm not finding it.....  Thanks.