Subscriber Status :: Converting HELD to ACTIVE - How to identify ONLY Hard Bounced?

Question

As per the official documentation here the HELD subscribers, consist of both Hard_Bounced and Soft_Bounced subscribers.

I went through this Knowledge Article we export the Held Subscribers and update the status to Active and re-import the list.

But I want to remove all the Hard_Bounced emailAddresses. How do I achieve this?

Answer 1

Even though if you update the subscriber status you can still use query or tracking extract to find the emailaddress history in tracking.

You can follow either of 2 approaches:

1. You can able to query in _Bounce data view and filter with BounceCategory = 'Hard Bounce'. But you can only the last 6 months of record.
2. If you need more than 6 months, then you can use tracking extract and extract each month by month bounce data and apply the same filter with BounceCategory = 'Hard Bounce'

Post that join the data of bounce with All subscriber list based on subscriber key and delete the contact.

Let me know if this helps.

Answer 2

Subscribers don't get 'held' status the same way with soft and hardbounces, an address has to softbounce rather consistently to become 'held'. See this documentation: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_es_bounce_mail_management.htm&type=5

If that doesn't change anything for you, then you will probably have to turn to the _Bounce data view which holds the bounce details for the last six months.

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_as_data_view_bounce.htm&type=5

You could INNER JOIN this data view with your subscriber base and check for records with BounceCategory = 'Hard Bounce'.

SELECT DISTINCT SubscriberKey FROM _Subscribers s
/*depending on where you run this, ENT. prefix if from child BU */
INNER JOIN _bounce b
on s.subscriberkey = b.subscriberkey

WHERE s.Status = 'held'
and b.bounceCategory = 'Hard Bounce'

Note that the bounce data view holds events, so you can and likely will have several events per subscriber, if you're only joining on SubscriberKey. This is ok for your requirement I presume. An approach could be that anyone with at least one hard bounce event qualifies for hard bounce, hence the DISTINCT.

To not run into this in the future (not an adhoc solution), there are several approaches: a) 'mirror' the complete data views through SQL into data extensions regularly if you need a longer timeframe b) An alternative is to have running processes that process data daily, then the six months timeframe is not an issue.

Answer 3

We can simply change held subscribers inactive to using email studio. You have to access the admin level in the marketing cloud. Follow the steps: For individual Email add: Go to Allsubscriber >> Search >> criteria search where- the email address is equal to [email protected]. Then view properties > unsubscribe from all > then activate >> if you wanna add this subscriber So individually we can handle this as above.

For multiple records:

Allsubscriber >> search >> criteria is subscriber status -undelivered > then export it. next change held status in export file as active >> then import in all subscriber with add and update or update.