When reviewing subscriber reply mail to email newsletters, what action is recommended for responses that aren't specifically unsubscribes, like various automatic bouncebacks, account no longer exists, "I have left the company", etc. Heard discussion that one should just unsubscribe these people since they are unable to receive the newsletter and why send to them if they won't receive, however I would think that skews the stats a bit, as these people aren't actually requesting to be unsubscribed. Curious as to what the EEC audience considers best practice in these cases. —Meaghan Peters, UnitedHealthcare

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Stephanie Miller: This sounds like a bounce management issue. Proper bounce management should be handled by your IT team or your ESP—and be sure you understand what your processes are. Poor processes can result in deliverability failure for all your messages.

There are two kinds of bounces—hard and soft. Hard bounces are "user not found" errors and should be immediately taken off your file. Soft bounces include the types of messages you describe above, and depending on your mailing frequency, you can remove these records after a certain number of bounces. If you mail weekly, you might try three more times, then consider the account dead and remove the record. If you mail monthly, one more mailing is probably appropriate. This approach will quickly remove any accounts like "I no longer work here," which you don't want on your file anyway.

Jeanniey Mullen: This is a tough one, especially as you are in the healthcare market. Many pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations have a policy that does not allow them to review or respond to replies from an email as it may put them in a legally challenging situation. If you do not need to worry about the legal issues, the next thing to consider is the amount of replies you receive. If your list is small, it is worth reading through the replies and makings edits to manually unsub people who have left their jobs or have email verification services turned on. This process becomes very time consuming if your list get larger. In this case, some companies have built "bots" to help pull these types of emails out, but many just let them go and have rules set up to move them to a "bounced" status after three unsuccessful mailings.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

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