Review recurring email bounce issues

One of the most important parts of maintaining a healthy marketing environment is making sure your email marketing lists remain current and engaged. Clean lists can help protect your sender reputation, improve engagement, and provide a better return on your email marketing efforts. A good place to start is by reviewing recent email campaign analytics and identifying contacts that may need attention. There are two main types of email bounces to review: hard bounces and soft bounces.

Hard bounces

A hard bounce is generally associated with a particular contact or email address and usually indicates a permanent delivery problem. Common hard bounce issues include:

• Invalid mailbox: The email address may contain a typo or the mailbox may no longer exist.
• Invalid domain: The domain may be misspelled, incorrect, or inactive. For example, a company's email domain may have changed after an acquisition.
• Inactive mailbox: The mailbox no longer exists. In B2B marketing, this commonly occurs when an employee leaves an organization and their email address is deactivated.

Sometimes these issues can be corrected by checking for typos or other errors. When an address is no longer valid, however, consider adding the contact to a suppression list or similar segment, or deactivating the contact. Continuing to send messages to invalid addresses can eventually affect sender reputation.

Soft bounces

Soft bounces can have a wider variety of causes. They may relate to the email content, the sender, or recipient-side server and routing restrictions. Email content and design can contribute to a soft bounce, including elements such as:

• Language
• Images
• Links
• Other characteristics that could cause content to be treated as spam

Repeatedly sending email to recipients who have already bounced can also affect your reputation. When investigating soft bounces, review the reported error to determine whether the problem is something you can correct within your content or sending practices. In other situations, the recipient organization's policies may be preventing delivery and require action on their side. Above all, make sure your contacts have given you permission to send them marketing content. Unengaged contacts can negatively affect engagement rates, so reviewing these audiences can also help you determine where to reduce the frequency of marketing communication.

Deactivate inactive and invalid contacts

After reviewing your campaign analytics, take some time to clean up inactive and invalid contacts and merge duplicate records. Customer Insights – Journeys supports up to 500 million marketing contacts, but that doesn't mean quantity should be your goal. Maintaining a clean, engaged contact list can improve the quality of your segments and marketing results. Inactive records can clutter your database and segments while potentially affecting delivery and engagement rates. Focus on the quality of your marketing lists rather than simply their size.

Address duplicate contacts

Email deduplication in Customer Insights – Journeys can prevent multiple messages from being sent to the same email address. When email deduplication is enabled, a journey evaluates the email addresses of contacts within a segment when they reach an email tile. Only one email is sent to each unique address. For example, if three contacts share the same email address, only one receives the email. The other two will appear as blocked under the Duplicate recipient address category in the Delivery and interaction details. You can also configure duplicate detection rules across your Dynamics 365 CRM environment to identify duplicate contact, lead, and opportunity records. System administrators can enable and configure these duplicate detection rules.

Clean up old and unused templates

Templates are another area where unused content can quickly accumulate. Your organization may use templates for:

• Journeys
• Emails
• Forms
• Pages
• Segments
• Tasks

Review the templates you currently use and determine which ones are still valuable. As part of your transition to Real-time marketing, decide which segments, content blocks, email templates, and journey templates need to be rebuilt and which can be left behind. Keep in mind that content moving into Real-time may require adjustments. For example, an existing template or content block that contains dynamic content may need to be updated to take advantage of Real-time functionality. A transition is a good opportunity to avoid bringing unnecessary clutter into your new marketing environment.

Review and deactivate unused segments

Customer Insights – Journeys supports up to 13,000 total segments, including 3,000 dynamic segments and 10,000 static segments. Even if you're nowhere near these limits, regularly audit your segments and deactivate ones that are inactive, unnecessary, or sitting indefinitely in a draft state. Large segments can include thousands or hundreds of thousands of members, so maintaining unnecessary segments can also contribute to storage usage. Use this cleanup process to audit your broader collection of marketing assets, including:

• Segments
• Content blocks
• Templates
• Triggers

This isn't only an opportunity to remove unnecessary items. An audit can also reveal gaps where your team may benefit from creating new reusable marketing assets.

Deactivate old emails

Your marketing email library may contain years of previous content. Review your saved views and look for emails that were created for testing purposes or designs that remain unused in a draft state. Deactivating these records can make your email library easier to navigate. Be careful about deleting emails that were actually sent or included in customer journeys. You may still need those records to reference analytics from previous campaigns. For outbound emails that are still useful, determine which ones should be imported and adapted for Real-time marketing.

Rebuild the forms you still need

Forms require a little more preparation for the move to Real-time. Outbound forms must be recreated in Real-time rather than imported in the same way as emails. While this means some additional work, it's also an opportunity to reconsider your existing forms and rebuild only the ones that still provide value. Review your Outbound forms and make sure any form you'll continue using has a Real-time replacement. You should also consider whether there is form data you need to export and preserve before retiring your old Outbound functionality. Starting with intentionally selected forms means your Real-time form library can begin in a much cleaner state.

Organize your asset library

Your asset library deserves its own spring cleaning. Start by agreeing with your team on consistent organization practices, particularly how you'll use tags and keywords. Tags make it easier to search and filter your uploaded assets. Because previously used tags appear when adding new ones, inconsistent tagging can quickly become difficult to manage. In general, specific and consistently applied tags will be more useful when searching for assets later. While reviewing the library, look for:

• Duplicate assets
• Low-quality uploads
• Outdated materials
• Assets your team no longer needs

Unneeded items can be deactivated or deleted, including through bulk selection when appropriate. Remember that files in the asset library count against your overall Dataverse storage capacity, so cleaning up unnecessary assets has benefits beyond simply making the library easier to navigate.

Review settings, feature switches, and permissions

If you're an administrator, spring cleaning is also a good time for routine system maintenance. Dynamics 365 applications regularly receive new functionality through release waves. At the same time, your organization's policies and marketing strategies may evolve. Review your app settings and available feature switches to determine whether your current configuration still reflects the way your organization works. Permissions should also be reviewed periodically. Check for scenarios such as:

• Former employees who may still have licenses
• Employees whose roles have changed
• Users with outdated permission levels
• New functionality requiring additional or different permissions

Major application changes, including the transition to Real-time marketing, are a particularly good reason to reassess whether users have the access they need.

Create more useful list views

A clean system should also be efficient for the people who use it every day. Take some time to review the list views you and your team currently rely on. Adjusting default views or creating specialized views for common job responsibilities can make record lists easier to navigate. Consider whether each team has quick access to the information they use most often. If you create new views, make sure the appropriate users have access and know that the views are available. A few useful, thoughtfully designed views can make your system feel significantly more organized without changing the underlying data.

Prepare for what's next

Once you've cleaned up contacts, segments, templates, forms, emails, assets, permissions, and list views, you'll have a leaner environment for working in Real-time marketing. Maintaining that environment should be an ongoing process rather than a one-time project. Periodic reviews can prevent unused assets and records from accumulating again. With your system cleaned up and organized, you can also turn your attention toward new Customer Insights – Journeys functionality introduced through Microsoft's release waves and decide which upcoming capabilities make sense for your organization.