Removing Hard Bounce Statuses and Manually Resubscribing Leads

Email addresses can hard bounce for a number of reasons. For situations where a valid email address is flagged for a hard bounce and excluded, there is a way to remove that lead from your exclusions and get them back to receiving your communications.  This article will provide information on removing the hard bounce status and resubscribing hard bounced leads. Article Contents Removing Hard Bounce Status A Disclaimer on Resubscribing Leads Understanding Hard Bounces Resubscribing Leads in the Contact Manager			Available with:
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Removing Hard Bounce Status

Before you can manually resubscribe leads in the Contact Manager, contact SharpSpring Support. SharpSpring adds two suppressions, also known as blocks, to a hard-bounced contact. Additionally, SharpSpring's mail transfer authority (MTA), SendGrid, also adds a block to a hard-bounced contact. As such, SendGrid adds the contact to a suppression list. In order to thoroughly remove the hard-bounced status from a lead, you will need to contact SharpSpring Support.

A Disclaimer on Resubscribing Leads

Contacts that have been hard-bounced are automatically unsubscribed to prevent further emails being sent to those contacts. Resubscription should only be done for email addresses you are absolutely sure are valid and the bounce happened as a result of some extraneous circumstance, such as an overly aggressive firewall or filter. Resubscribing an invalid email address will cause the send to hard bounce again, hurting your sender statistics.

Senders with poor sending status hurt not only themselves, but SharpSpring as well. This is why SharpSpring does not recommend creating automation that resubscribes users and instead recommends that you manually resubscribe each lead individually. 

Understanding Hard Bounces

Hard bounces are emails that are rejected by recipient Internet service providers (ISPs) and are marked as permanently undeliverable. The most common reasons for a hard bounce include, but are not limited to:

• The recipient email does not exist or is otherwise invalid. The email could be deactivated, or the address that is being sent to is formatted incorrectly.
  
  
• Your emails are being considered as spam by spam filters. Spam filters and similar tools could be flagging specific terms, phrases, or content in your email as spam.
  
  
• You are sending to blacklisted ranges. Blacklists are third-party data sources that inform receiving email servers whether the sender or the email content should be considered as spam. 
  
  
• The contact list is outdated. An abnormally high bounce rate can be indicative of an outdated list. Outdated lists are lists with recipients who no longer use a specific email address or otherwise have old, incorrect information.
  
  
• The contact list is purchased. Purchased lists are lists that are developed based on certain contact similarities, such as demographics, and then sold to marketers. Purchased lists, in particular, can be dangerous, as they may be riddled with ISP spam traps. Compared to opt-in lists, these lists also have a substantially higher chance to be flagged as spam. As such, SharpSpring does not allow the use of purchased lists.
  
  
• Your sender reputation is problematic. Email senders must have email statistics within acceptable thresholds, as defined by ISPs. Spam complaint, bounce, and unsubscribe rates need to be within an acceptable range.
  
  
• The recipients have a low engagement score. Engagement scores determine the number of emails a contact can be sent—without any sign of engagement by the contact—before they are considered unengaged and sending to that contact is suppressed.

Resubscribing Leads in the Contact Manager

To manually resubscribe leads in the Contact Manager, do the following: