Hard Bounce Recovery – September 2025 – Campaign Of The Month

The idea of a hard bounce has been around even before email existed. If you don’t know, when an email “hard bounces” that basically means the recipient’s email address is no longer valid. This existed with phone numbers back in the day where you would call a number and hear an error message that the call could not be completed. With physical mail, this looked like getting your letter back as undeliverable.

When it comes to modern marketing, attempting to send emails to addresses that no longer work is a real problem. Not only because your email is not being delivered. Over time, if you continue to try and send emails to hard bounced addresses, the email service providers like Google and Microsoft will not longer even attempt to deliver your valid emails! In other words your sending domain gets blacklisted which is an even bigger problem for your business 😣

Email list decay is a real thing, and invalid hard bounced email addresses can make up to a quarter of your database over the course of a years (Source).

One step at a time...

Not all data is valuable though, you gotta maintain it πŸ‘©β€πŸŒΎ

How Can I Maintain A Clean CRM Database With Minimal Hard Bounced Emails?

The answer is simple and not necessarily easy: you have to pay attention to those hard bounces and actively work to clean them up.

Each time an email hard bounces, you need to have some kind of recovery plan in place:

  1. The best option is to pickup the phone and have a conversation, really! Ring them up, explain how it looks like the email on file is no longer working and ask them for an updated email address. You could also text them but that short conversation does wonders for the relationship. More on that below.
  2. If you don’t have a phone number, the next best option is to message them on social media if you can find them. The message is pretty much the same as what you would say on the phone with them.
  3. Or, the worse case scenario is you take the loss and remove them from your mailing lists. You could even delete them entirely. All the hard work and resources you spent to get them into your database is now for naught.

Why Should I Use Automation For Hard Bounce Recovery?

If you didn’t know, “CRM” stands for Customer Relationship Management. Yes you are probably managing leads and vendors and maybe even employees in the same database, but the keyword is “Relationship”. People do business with people. And exactly like real life relationships, they are not a one-and-done. There has to be consistent work to maintain them. You DO care about the relationship your business has with its customers, right?

With a hard bounced email speed is critical. The faster you can identify a bad email and attempt to fix it, the greater the chances you WILL get an updated email.

When you use automation for hard bounce recovery, you can start taking action immediately as soon as an email comes back as bad. You can manually do this kind of maintenance in batches but striking while the iron is hot gives you the best chance of keeping a clean database. Having recovery tasks show up in small clusters is far more manageable than doing it periodically too.

When you develop the Habit of recovering hard bounced emails your database will be as clean as possible 😎

Free Campaign Of The Month – Hard Bounce Recovery

We have packaged up a free one-click install of our Hard Bounce Recovery for Keap users.

When you install this into your account, you will get a pre-configured automation model that is 95%+ ready-to-publish which contains:

  • 1 Tag to trigger the automation in realtime.
  • 1 Internal Form to collect good email addresses.
  • 1 Note Template to indicate when a recovery has failed.
  • 2 automated follow up Tasks, depending on if there is a phone number on file or not.
  • 1 Setup Play with the publishing steps below (Keap Pro/Max only, for now).

Automation Overview

First, watch this quick video to understand the strategy being used for this automation, including when and where you want to use it in your business. If you’d like to learn more about the ball-and-stick diagram and planning framework, please register for the mini-course here.

πŸ‘‡ Request Your One-Click Install Now πŸ‘‡

 

Hard Bounce Recovery Launch Steps

Getting the Hard Bounce Recovery going on your Keap CRM database is literally as easy as 1, 2, 3! After you have done the one-click install…

Step 1 – Email Status Trigger Configuration

This automation requires one email status automation trigger to apply the starting Tag. All you need to do is configure this and you are ready to go!

Step 2 – Task User Assignment

This automation is pre-configured to create a simple follow up Task. However, you do still need to choose which User is being assigned the Tasks.

Step 3 – Publish The Automation

Verify all objects and the sequence is marked as Ready, then publish the campaign. Congratulations! You did it πŸ₯³

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *