Email Statistics Report Update: Who Bounced Your Email?

Email Statistics Report Update: Who Bounced Your Email?

I bet you already knew about all the awesome statistics and information you can find through the GAIL Email Statistics Report. Now a new section has been added to the report that allows you to see your email bounces. Email bounces happen when your email can’t be delivered to a recipient.

 

Maybe there is a constituent who mentioned that they were really excited to attend your event but never registered for it because they never got your email invitation. Maybe you just updated a constituent’s email address on their profile and want to check that it was entered correctly and that they are receiving your newsletters. It’s a good idea to keep updated with bounced emails to ensure your constituents are receiving important communications.

 

 

Where can I find the email statistics report?

 

Within the Marketing and Communications functional area, click Email Statistics Report (under Custom Reports). On the new screen you’ll be presented with a complete list of emails sent through GAIL. This may take a second to load and will probably contain many email efforts from across the University. You can use the search bar to find a specific email or use filters (the little funnel icon next to each column header) to see only emails sent in a certain time frame, or that only start with a certain naming conventions.

 

 

What information is listed on the report?

 

Once you’ve found your email and click into it, you’ll be presented with a report that gives an overview of how people interacted with it. (If you sent the email to a lot of people, GAIL may take a second to load all the information into the report.) On the report, you’ll see how many people received the email, how many opened it, which links in the email were clicked on the most, if the email generated donations, and who decided to opt-out of future communiques as a result of the email.

 

 

If you scroll down to the bottom of you report you’ll see a new section labeled Bounces. (You may need to click the blue arrows at the top of the report to navigate to another page in the document.) In the bounces section, you can view the constituents who didn’t receive the email. The list will also contain the constituent’s email address, last name, first name, and the bounce message.  If your report contains a lot of entries you can always download it by clicking the floppy disk icon at the top of the report.

 

What is a bounce message?

 

The bounce message describes why the email was unable to be delivered. The message may sometimes be a little difficult to decipher as the message is auto-created by the recipient’s mailing system. Depending on how many people you sent the email to, you’ll likely have many entries in the bounces table of your report.

 

 

What happens to the email address after they bounce?

 

GAIL’s advanced capabilities automatically flag these constituents’ profiles as having an invalid email address which ensures that it doesn’t send to that address in the future. If there is a back up email on file for a particular constituent it will automatically make that secondary address the primary email address! In the event that more than one backup address exists for a constituent, records@uga.edu will be notified and step in to choose the most appropriate next-best address.

 

What steps can I take after I have identified a bounced email address?

While bounce messages can give you an idea about why an email couldn’t be delivered, your next course of action will usually be minimal. For example, if your email was marked as a spam complaint, the constituent probably wants a “Do Not Email” solicit code added to their communication preferences to remove them from future emails. You could also try sending future emails to an alternate email address (especially if you know they’re interested in what you’re trying to send to them). If you want to unravel the secrets of the bounced email message here is a good place to start.