Once again - EVERY SINGLE EMAIL FOR COX.NET CLIENTS BOUNCED!!!
I can’t keep doing this - I may as well take our business elsewhere at this point!!!
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Getting bounce backs sucks. Figuring out what caused them sucks more. A bounce back is a server response down the line from your server. In addition to there being no requirement to reply with a bounce back message at all, servers can send messages that are both intentionally false or just plain incorrect. Some admins just don’t care what it does. Your bounces seems like a you problem to them.
If I were to receive an entire category bounce back (e.g. all of a certain domain), I would assume some sort of blacklisting/blocking policy that the broadcast breached. For example, an entire broadcast can be metered because of a high number of spam complaints on the previous broadcast. Similar policies might spam filter based on content, sender, hosting IP, etc. And even if you did get bouncebacks, they still might have all delivered. Frankly, it’s just the way email is. It’s only slightly more reliable and measurable than sending an actual physical letter.
You overcome these issues by giving every email a call to action that at least gets the viewer to load the images, so that you can register an open. If they opened it, it’s obviously a false bounce.
Thinking about your exact issue, I took a look at all my cox.net contacts, 31 in total. All of them had emails not bounced from the last few broadcasts. This at least shows that it’s not a system wide issue with IS. A good portion did have bounces as well. I’m not sure if these 31 cox emails are representative of my entire list, but it did seem like a lot of dispersed bounces, so maybe cox is just really bad at this, for one of the myriad reasons named above.
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I appreciate your response and completely understand and agree in what you are saying - This is NOT an Infusionsoft issue - It’s relational to cox.net.
BUT - If you were to go back and read my many posts about the reporting Widget for email blasts, this is and has been an ongoing issue where I am not comfortable with the information being presented when a blast is sent - Each week, I cannot tell the owner of the company that I “think” everything was sent…
Again, this has been going on for awhile - Yet this one just put me over the edge (again, realizing it’s cox.net) - The last time this happened, IS support told me to call all my Clients and have THEM call the carrier - 
Each week, I cannot tell the owner of the company that I “think” everything was sent
Well, I was kind of saying that you can and you should. Everything was sent, right? You sent all the emails you wanted to send. IS pushed them off to the next server. After that we hope for inbox delivery, then opens, then clicks. All we can do to improve inbox delivery is try to not trigger spam filters. Opens can certainly never give false positives, but they very often give false negatives. Only clicks are truly reliable measures.
Yes, a category bounce like yours can be worked on and probably improved, but we need to manage the expectations of the people we report to. Many managers not terribly familiar with this kind of thing don’t understand what we’ve been talking about here, so we need to direct them to look at the right things. Bounces aren’t nearly as important as opens and clicks. Highlight those and perhaps consider not even mentioning bounces. Then as you work on the bounces behind the scenes (by pruning legitimate bounces from your list and addressing false or IP bounces as best you can), you’ll improve the opens and clicks too.
I’ll share some data from our last broadcast, which was yesterday.
For me, I’d say “delivery” means “to the inbox”, but apparently infusionsoft considers it to mean “no bounce message reply received”. That’s probably closer to industry standard than me. Either way, it’s ultimately unknown if any given unopened non-clicked email made it into their inbox.
Opens are counted by a unique image load. There cannot be false positives. They did indeed open it. However, there could be a lot of false negatives under unopened. For this broadcast, if I click that 3093 unopened, I can see that none of them clicked anything, so perhaps most or even all of them are truly unopened. I always take a look at this every broadcast and consider what I could do to get these people to click. Eventually, non-clickers get removed from the list. I delete hundreds from the list every year.
The clicks vs non-clicks is 100% reliable. This is the single most important metric. Everything else is a bit more clandestine and should just be considered gravy.
Now let’s look at the bounces. 116 of them. 3% is kind of a lot for my tastes. I always try to keep it under 1%, mostly by pruning the persistent bouncers and one or two bouncers plus non-clickers. They aren’t my customers so they shouldn’t be in my list. If I click though though and check out clicks, some of them are actually clickers! So a bounce message is also a pretty unreliable metric. Mostly you just use it to narrow down non-clickers and likely true non-openers, all so you can just delete them from your list. One thing that I’ve noticed is that seemingly false bounces occur if it’s been a while since your last broadcast. I haven’t sent since December, so that could be why. I’ll probably not delete many of these bouncers this time.
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Before anything - Where did you get that report 
On my dashboard I have the following widget, which shows basic stats for the last five broadcasts. I can’t seem to figure out how to add it to the dashboard though …
You can get to the same report in the Marketing Reports
- Open the main dropdown menu
- Click on Reports under Marketing
- Click “Email Broadcasts” with the description “Check the status of Email Batches that you have sent.” It’s 6th one down for me.
- Highlight your name or whoever usually sends the campaigns then click search.
- This page shows you all previous broadcasts with that same data.
- Click View under the Report column. If the report column is not there you can add it by clicking Edit Criteria/Columns.
Yes, I can do that - But you must be using a different version?
I’m using the “Old” InfusionSoft…
What Platform are you using?
I can’t say I know …
The whole Keap rebranding thing has me confused. I’ve been using InfusionSoft for years. When I saw the Keap announcement I verified multiple times with support that what I’m using wouldn’t change, either in function or pricing. So I guess that sounds like “Old InfusionSoft”. With that widget, maybe deleting it unhides the option to bring it back, but I’m not going to delete it just to find out. I like having it …
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Man - You Nailed it!!!
Keapconfusing is what I’m calling it now!! LOL
For example - Do you have “Opportunities” available to you?
I may not even use them but I do not have the option - When we purchased IS - We had 3-4 choices I believe?
I tried chatting with someone but I had to explain what an Opportunity was (which I’m not even sure of) - So I just ended the chat…
I’m going to jump over and try a chat session again - Anything specific you have a question about?
Obviously, I 'll share my results here…
Just let me know!
I do have opportunities.
I’ve never used them. Seems like an interesting feature that lets you keep track of pushing prospects into customers. Maybe I could use it, but what I sell isn’t that expensive for my customers. It seems more like a feature you’d want if you sell really high dollar items. The kind of items that customers spend months thinking about before committing to a purchase.
True. Opportunity records are used in companies that have a sales team(s) that need to manage high value deals. It’s a manual process of moving an opportunity from one stage to another (from a “new opportunity” stage to a "closed " stage.) There are settings and permissions that allow a “sales manager” to track all the deals on his or her team.
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Opportunities are extremely under used, mostly because people don’t really understand them and their use and the fact that support has so little knowledge about them just compounds this.
You have to think of Opps, not as simply a marketing tool, but rather as a process tracking and automation tool. This is why many think Opps are only useful for high end ticket sales and such…in fact, Opps are useful for things outside of sales as well. Workflow management, customer fulfillment, marketing, internal business processes, ALL can be tracked and managed with Opps. Basically, if you have a process that has a specific set of steps (stages) to process through, then Opps can be used to manage that.
But back to marketing. Opps can be used to track ROI (revenue over cost) and to track effectiveness of your stage to stage process, on a stage level (meaning each stage transition can be a metric). This allows for analyzing and improving the process. Both lead sources and product sales can be assigned to an Opportunity record. Lead sources allow you to define costs (both one time and recurring) and the product assignment allows you to assign revenue to the process. Having done this, the ROI and opportunity/stage reports have what it needs to provide you with a myriad of valuable information for your business.
Outside the marketing end, you can also use Opps to track the cost and effectiveness of your internal processes of emaployees, teams and sales reps alike…it just takes shifting your understanding and perception of Opps from only marketing to any process with steps/stages…they’re actually quite flexible for this.
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That’s an interesting idea. I suppose some creative thinking can have you using ops as something else than what they look like.
I see the Stage IDs as “New Op, Working, Closing, Won, Lost”. I don’t see a way to change that, which kind of makes your idea a bit too hard to implement. For example, I record conferences. There’s a process for starting and completing each one. Those names don’t quite work, plus I think I might divide it into more than 5 segments. With some changes to “recurring tasks” you can get the same thing, namely if “recurring” were set up more like “repeatable”.
They can be changed under Marketing->Settings
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So…I still don’t have access to Opportunities?
I’ve contacted Support and they said a Sales Rep would get in touch with me - It’s my understanding, that since we’re already using InfusionSoft - We shouldn’t have to purchase anything? Am I wrong? (I don’t remember where I heard I wouldn’t have to pay) but it was somewhere…
Hi, @Cindy_Glover,
Even with Infusionsoft, there are modules that you may or may not have. The marketing module contains the ability to use opps. That’s why the rep will be contacting you.