Manage bounced emails

Manage bounced emails in Mailchimp — with the four heights of help laid out: do it now, make it easier for the next person to accept, work out the right move when you are stuck, and learn the pattern so it stops coming back.

4prompt heights
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The four heights

The same task, four distances: today's deadline, the next reviewer, the stuck moment, the pattern.

Execute — do the immediate task

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This morning the automations show 312 hard bounces from yesterday’s newsletter. Forward the bounce…
This morning the automations show 312 hard bounces from yesterday’s newsletter. Forward the bounce list to Priya in ops and to our ISP contact, ask Priya to confirm which addresses match recent purchase records, and request that the ISP investigate DNS and sending quota issues. Ask for replies by 3pm today so I can suppress them before the next send.

Improve — make it easier to accept

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Before I hand the bounce file to operations, make it actionable: group bounces into hard and soft…
Before I hand the bounce file to operations, make it actionable: group bounces into hard and soft with counts, flag addresses that belong to active customers in the CRM, highlight any domains with repeated failures, and suggest the exact suppression list to apply so ops can run it without questions.

Decide — diagnose the stuck moment

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Yesterday’s newsletter produced 312 hard bounces; some are customers who bought within the last…

Newsletter returned many hard bounces.

Yesterday’s newsletter produced 312 hard bounces; some are customers who bought within the last month. I don’t know if these are stale addresses, a sending reputation hit, or a credential/DNS problem. What sequence of checks should I run immediately to decide whether to suppress, retry, or escalate to our ISP?

Become — change the pattern

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We repeatedly get spikes in hard bounces after big blasts and I spend hours coordinating manual…

I keep getting bounced lists after big blasts.

We repeatedly get spikes in hard bounces after big blasts and I spend hours coordinating manual cleans with ops. What process or habit change would cut that cycle so bounces are caught earlier and our delivery reputation doesn’t crater every quarter?

Next to this one

Other email marketing work people do in Mailchimp.

Every task here came from the work, not from a feature list — which is why the prompts name what you want done and never the button that does it. The tool changes; the work does not.
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The rest of the map

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