Keeping a “clean list” is an important part of email marketing. The email bounce report is one of the tools you can use to keep your list clean. But, did you know you can also use your bounce report as a prospecting tool?
What is a “Bounce”?
When speaking about email, a bounce is an email message that was not delivered for some reason. There are a variety of reasons why an email may bounce. Most bounce reports contain a “bounce code” that helps you identify the cause of the bounce.
Today, we are only concerned with the two broad categories of bounces – hard and soft bounces.
Hard vs Soft Bounces
Bounces (rejected emails) come in two main flavors- soft bounces and hard bounces.
Soft Bounces are often caused by temporary conditions. Examples of soft bounces include:
- A server is unavailable or it’s down
- The server is overloaded
- The recipient’s mailbox is full
- Your message size is too big
Hard Bounces represent conditions that are more permanent in nature. This Small Business Server Pricing Guide sheds light on the contribution of servers in creating hard bounces. The others are as below:
- Address does not exist
- Bad destination mailbox address
- System not accepting network messages
As you can see, hard bounces can mailbox (or recipient) specific, or system specific.
When using your bounce report as a prospecting tool, you will want to focus on the hard bounces. Further, you will want to focus on those that are mailbox specific.
Our Assumptions
Let’s start by outlining the underlying thought process behind this technique.
We are going to use our bounce report to identify contacts who may have changed jobs. We do this by focusing on hard bounce codes like “Address does not exist”.
We are also making two other assumptions when using this technique:
- The contact who “bounced”, has probably taken a similar position at a different company.
- Someone with a similar title replaced the contact who “bounced” at their old company.
That means every contact who meets our hard bounce requirements represents two potential prospects:
- The old contact at the new company
- The new contact at the old company
The Process
Now it’s just a matter of:
- Determining where the old contact works now
- Determining who the new contact (at the old company) is
- Reaching out to them and beginning your sales / qualifying conversations
Your will also need to take into account whether the bounced contact was a customer or prospect.
Hopefully you learn about your customers key contact changes long before they show up on a bounce report. In this case, you may only need to clean up your list and move forward.
You can usually find out where the old contact is currently working from your customer.
Another option is to check LinkedIn to see if they have updated their profile with their new position.
Bounced Prospects – Should You Even Bother?
That’s a fair question. The answer will depend somewhat on your business. It will also depend on how well you can identify a strong prospect from a weak prospect.
This is where list segmentation and/or lead scoring can come into play. Let’s say a prospect only visited your website once. They downloaded a free resource and never interacted with you or your website again. You may just want to delete them from your list and move on.
Let’s say another prospect also downloaded your free resource. They also attended one of your webinars. They visited the pricing page on your website and had one or more conversations with your sales rep(s). In this case, it may very well be worth the effort to find their replacement. You’ll also want to touch base with them to see if they can use your help at their new company.
Wrapping Up
I hope this has helped you see how you can use your email bounce report as a prospecting tool. Do you have other “non-traditional” ways for finding prospects? Leave a comment below, I’d love to hear about it.
