Best practices for Bounced Email in NXT

Gina Smith

Researching best practices for handling bounced emails in NXT. 


Do you do any research, follow-up, reach out to the constituent through another contact option?  If so, would you be wiling to share your procedures/thoughts?


Do you try multiple times or do you mark them Do Not Email right away? (i know soft bounces are supposed to try 5 times within a specific time period)  


Thanks for any insight you'd like to share.

Tom Klimchak

We admittedly do NOT follow our own process any more (reduction in staff) but for about a year or so we did the following:


Coded bounced emails with a "Bounced Email 1" type and gave them a modification date.  We could then run a query to find all the people who had a bounced email in the last few months AND we had no other email on file... Then we mailed them a short letter explaining how important email was, how convenient it was and how it saved us money... Then we we asked them to update their info through a website or using a pre-paid reply envelope.


I think our reply rate was around 10 to 20% if I remember correctly.... 


Now we don't do nearly as much... we simply have other priorities and less staff than we used to.  We have used emailing finding services in the past (and still do I suppose) though our results are usually.... less than stellar. ?

Gina Smith

Thanks, Tom!  

Phillip Bicknell

Hi Gina,


We're using a digital engagement platform that is from a third-party, but I think the principle of handling bounces can be the same:


I do all the bulk tasks, whereas our Supporter Care Team do the tasks relating to individual supporters. So barring there being an ISP outage (like Gmail on 14th & 15th December 2020), any bounces are handled by supporter care.


They review the other available data from the supporter records, assessing how engaged the supporter is, whether they're a regular or major donor, looking for obvious email-domain typos, etc - then they contact the supporter by whatever other channel we have available. Failing that, they will use the email address, and because their email comes from a different domain and email-client, there's a possibility that it will be delivered.

Gina Smith

Thanks, Phillip! Very helpful!

Linda Gatzow

With limited resources (staff & budget), we can't do the deep assessment that Phillip talked about. We did invest time to de-bounce hundreds of emails and tried again. Sadly, most just bounced again so it was a waste of time. Like Tom Klimchak's response, we do code them with a "Bounced" email type but haven't sent out a follow-up letter to them. Will give that a try.