Marketing Cloud Next Email Bounce Management

Note: this applies to Marketing Cloud (Growth/Advanced) as well as the Marketing App for Salesforce Foundations, Salesforce Pro Suite, Salesforce Starter.

Marketing Cloud is designed to effectively monitor and manage email bounces, which are crucial for maintaining a healthy sender reputation and ensuring successful email delivery. The platform handles two primary categories of bounces:

Hard Bounces

These occur when an email cannot be delivered permanently (e.g., the email address does not exist). Marketing Cloud Next actively monitors for hard bounce responses from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). When a hard bounce is detected for an email address, that address is immediately put on hold within the system. This means that these email addresses will be suppressed and will not be targeted in any future email campaigns. This automated suppression helps to protect your sending reputation by preventing repeated attempts to send to invalid addresses.

Soft Bounces

These are temporary delivery failures (e.g., the recipient's mailbox is full, the server is temporarily unavailable, or there's a transient network issue). Marketing Cloud Next is configured to retry soft bounces that occur during email delivery. The system will attempt several retries over a 12-hour period before it terminates the delivery attempt for that specific email. Unlike hard bounces, email addresses that experience soft bounces will still be included in future email campaigns, as the issue is considered temporary.