Email bounces blocked for good, and follow-ups that stop on a reply

Hard and soft bounces

A bounce is an email that comes back undelivered. A hard bounce means the address does not exist or will never accept mail: the server says the user is unknown, or gives a permanent failure code. A soft bounce is temporary or unclear: a full mailbox, a server that is down, a message we cannot read.

• A hard bounce puts the address on your blocklist. Every unsent email to it, in every one of your campaigns, is stopped, and no later campaign will email it.
• A soft bounce does not block the address for good. On your sending domain it stops the rest of the sequence to that store, and an address that keeps soft-bouncing is treated as a hard bounce.

Why it matters

Mail providers watch how many of your emails bounce. A mailbox that keeps writing to dead addresses looks careless, and its good emails start landing in junk too. Blocking every hard bounce at once protects your sending domain and every mailbox on it.

The best cure is fewer bounces in the first place. Every contact is checked before anything is sent to them; finding stores covers how we find the owner or buyer and check their address.

What you might want to do

Nothing, most of the time. Bounces are handled for you, and the address is blocked without you lifting a finger.

Sometimes a bounce is worth a look. If the store was a strong fit, the person you wrote to may simply have moved on. Ring the store, ask who orders for them now, and add that person by hand. A store that bounced is still a store that could stock you. Bounces never count as positive replies or as rejections; they just mean the message did not arrive.

In Flow

If a follow-up from Flow bounces, its plan is cancelled and we ask you who to write to at that store instead, so a store you are working on does not go quiet because one person left.

Follow-ups stop on a reply

A sequence is usually four emails, because most replies come on the second or third. The moment a store replies, the rest of its sequence is cancelled. That applies to any real reply: yes, no, "send me the price list" or "please stop". Nobody who has answered you gets another cold email.

Out-of-office replies are the exception. An automatic reply never stops a sequence, so a buyer on holiday still hears from you when they are back. A reply asking you to stop is marked as an opt-out.

Nobody gets two pitches

When a campaign starts, a contact is held back if any of your other campaigns emailed them in the last 30 days, still has them queued, heard back from them, or saw them bounce, or if they unsubscribed. Their steps in the new campaign are cancelled before anything is scheduled.

All of this happens without you lifting a finger. What you do see is in your reply inbox: the conversations that are worth your time. Our guide to getting your product into stores covers how many follow-ups to send and when.