Overview
Engage uses your personal business/work email to send out all email sequences. This means that any/all bounces sent will impact the domain's reputation.
For this reason, we both provide visibility into the bounce rates and have implemented daily safeguards to prevent exceeding acceptable bounce rates.
Email bounces can happen as soft and hard bounces.
A soft bounce means that the email is valid but the email filter rejects the email (mostly because of the email content and/or the domain that send the email).
A Hard bounce means that the email itself is not valid (not the inbox), this prevents the email from being delivered.
From time to time, you get a soft bounce for many different reasons.
For example, the sender was blocked because he did not pass the "email firewall" for the following reasons:
1. His domain marked as spam/high-risk domain
2. His content (text) was marked as spam
3. The company email admin bounces all new incoming emails.
In other words, your email health score will not only depend on the number of bounces, but also on the overall number of emails your team sends out daily.
If your domain is considered a spam domain, because the emails are either not being opened, or are being blocked by the firewalls of the recipients, your email domain health score will go down and you will be restricted.
Therefore, it is important to understand that bouncing email is a complex area and there are many reasons that email will bounce back.
How it works?
Once a contact status changed to “bounced” or “replied” the sequence stopped for this specific contact. In fact, we don't even know what the replied email contains, so if it's an auto-reply it will behave the same.
What does it look like?
A team member adds contacts to a sequence and starts to send out emails automatically.
Once there is a certain ratio of bounced emails, that sequence will pause to prevent you from getting flagged by your email provider.
Other sequences can remain active but they can also get paused for the same reason.
How to improve the bounce rate?
If you notice a high bounce rate, consider extending the time frame for your schedule. If there is sufficient time allocated per day, the emails will be sent at longer intervals, rather than 60 per hour.
Additionally, you can pause the sequence for some contacts and reactivate it after the current batch has been sent.
To do that, simply remove some of the contacts in the sequence and send up to 10 emails per day, you can do it by clicking the sequence, going to the "Contacts" tab and removing users using the trash bin icon:
Once done, make sure to activate the sequence by toggling on the button next to the sequence name, on the sequence page or the Engage dashboard.