Get The Block Out Of My Way!

It happened again!!!

Just as I was packing my bags and getting ready to head out to Austin for the Newsletter Marketing Summit, I received a notification from one of my newsletters that it was receiving an abnormal amount of bounces.

I immediately had a flashback to the holidays when I received a similar notification the day after Christmas.

My newsletter had gone from perfect delivery to receiving thousands of soft bounces overnight.

Most newsletter operators would be 💩’ing bricks, but for me, it was just another day at the office, or on vacation, that is.

As my family was relaxing and enjoying the time off, I simply walked over to my home office to take care of the situation.

I quickly took a seat at my desk in my wingback leather chair and logged into my ESP and my custom Audience Bridge deliverability dashboard.

It was time to figure out which email addresses were bouncing and what the reason was.

Unfortunately, not all ESPs make it easy for you to locate the issue, but luckily, I have my nifty dashboard, which allowed me to identify I was having a deliverability issue with Yahoo Postmaster (Yahoo and AOL).

Now that I knew the culperate of the block, I could take a look at the reason for this sudden change of policy.

I went ahead and took a look at the broadcast and filtered by the emails that were bouncing.

When I looked at the details of the bounce, I could see it was a standard TSS04 error response from Yahoo Postmaster, which you can see below.

This happens when you have a drastic, sudden increase in volume or if you are receiving too many complaints from your subscribers.

Most of the time, this is the ISP, in this case Yahoo, telling you there is an issue and to take care of it.

Now, all I had to do was tighten up my sending segments for Yahoo and AOL so that I would only send to my most engaged subscribers.

I went ahead and added my custom exclude segments for Yahoo and AOL subscribers who have not clicked an email in the last 14 days so they would not be sent an email.

Then I sent like this for about a week, until I could see that emails to AOL or Yahoo were no longer getting blocked.

Once I started to see delivery getting through, I gradually loosened the exclude segments to allow more subscribers from AOL and Yahoo to be sent to, until I reached full sending capacity about a week and a half later.

Dealing with bounces is something all newsletter operators and email marketers will deal with as they scale their email lists.

The engagement and health of your list are the most important factors in delivering to the inbox.

But if you hit a roadblock, don’t worry; you can always fix the issue.

Next time you start getting a ton of email bounces, take a breath, tighten up, and slowly scale up again.

It’s that simple.

BEFORE YOU GO

If your emails aren’t landing in the inbox, they’re not doing their job. I’ve seen too many brands struggle with deliverability issues without knowing why.

The truth is, a few key optimizations can make all the difference in getting your emails seen, opened, and clicked.

Deep breaths,

Chris Miquel

PS: Want to explore the health of your list and deliverabilty? Reply to this email and let’s chat!