Reporting and Analytics10% of the exam
Bounce categories, spam complaints and deliverability
How to read bad send results: hard, soft, block and technical bounces and what each calls for, how bounces move a subscriber from Bounced to Undeliverable, what to check after block bounces, and why spam complaints unsubscribe people and hurt reputation.
Interpret undesired send results and possible deliverability consequences.
~6 min read · 7 practice questions ·
What the exam expects
- Classify a bounce reason as hard, soft, block or technical, and say what the marketer should do next.
- Tell a block bounce apart from a hard bounce, and list the checks Salesforce recommends after block bounces.
- Explain how repeated bounces change a subscriber's status.
- Predict what a spam complaint does to the subscriber and to the sender's reputation, and pick remedies for negative engagement.
- Key terms: bounce (a message the ISP sends back explaining why it couldn't deliver the email); hard bounce (a permanent failure such as an unknown user or domain); soft bounce (a temporary failure such as a full mailbox); block bounce (mail refused for authentication, volume or reputation reasons); technical bounce (a rejection for technical errors such as formatting or connection problems); Undeliverable (the status after repeated bounces, shown as Held on some pages).
Key facts
Hard bounce
- Detail
- Permanent: user or domain doesn't exist
Mailbox Full
- Detail
- Soft bounce; may mean an abandoned mailbox
Data Format Error
- Detail
- Technical bounce; often more than 999 characters on one line
Soft bounce count
- Detail
- All retries of one message count as one soft bounce; the third sets Held (Undeliverable)
Undeliverable
- Detail
- Third bouncing campaign, more than 15 days after the first bounce; one hard bounce from a trusted domain
Block bounce checks
- Detail
- Volume trend, SPF and DKIM, hard bounces, content size
Spam complaint
- Detail
- Subscriber unsubscribed automatically
Metric review cadence
- Detail
- Every three to six months
Sources for this section (5)
- Bounce Categories and Reasonshelp.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Bounce Mail Managementhelp.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- How to Handle Block Bounceshelp.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Identify Spam Complainershelp.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Addressing Delivery and Reputation Issueshelp.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Why can't a sender usually tell whether a block bounce is temporary or permanent?
- When should a sender ask the ISP directly to remove a block?
- How is a bounce with no identifying error code treated?
- What does Help suggest for data capture that keeps producing User Unknown bounces?
The questions are free to read. Answers with their sources and self-grading are included with the pack.
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