If you have Marketing Cloud Connect for Sales or Service Cloud, you likely are syncing individual email results back to your CRM after an email send in Marketing Cloud. The base setup of individual email results can help you identify contacts with a bounce, but what if you and your team need more information?
If you work in a high-touch environment, it can be vital to know not just that your contact’s email bounced but why it bounced. To solve for this, here’s a simple query and journey to give you more robust bounce information in your CRM:
Query the _bounce data view
Stat by creating a sendable Salesforce data extension that contains the following fields:
| Field | Data Type | Primary Key? | Required? |
| SubscriberKey | Text (18) | Yes | Yes |
| JobId | Number | Yes | Yes |
| EventDate | Date | Yes | Yes |
| BounceCategory | Text (50) | No | No |
| BounceSubCategory | Text (50) | No | No |
| BounceType | Text (50) | No | No |
| SMTPCode | Text (50) | No | No |
| SMTPMessage | Text* | No | No |
Your query should select all of the fields listed above. I typically set a data retention policy of 7 days on this data extension and run the query to add and update new records. The query will result in a data extension that contains one record per job ID per subscriber.
Create Salesforce fields
On your leads and contacts, create Salesforce fields to match what is stored in your data extension of bounces. I like to add these fields to their own section on the page layout.
Create a journey
The final step that will send your bounce data to Salesforce is creating a journey. You will create the journey from your sendable data extension that contains bounce information. You will likely need the following two steps:
Update Contact: Map the subscriber key to the CRM Id. Map all fields from your data extension.
Update Lead: Map the subscriber Key to the CRM Id. Map all fields from your data extension.
When this process is complete, you and your team will be able to view not just that a subscriber bounced, but why they bounced. Some scenarios where this might come in handy:
- A bounce message indicates your domain or IP is blocked. Your service team can ask the subscriber to whitelist your sending domain and IP.
- A bounce message indicates a full mailbox. Your service team can confirm you have the most recent email for the subscriber.
- A bounce message indicates an a nonexistent domain. Your service team can check for common typos (gmil.com instead of gmail.com) and confirm the correct email for the subscriber.