What Sorcery Is This: Simultaneous Email Opens and Hard Bounces

What Sorcery Is This: Simultaneous Email Opens and Hard Bounces

Have you ever looked at a prospects activity and wondered how to make sense of it?

As an Account Engagement administrator, coming across prospect activities where an email open activity is followed by a hard bounce notification within a matter of seconds or minutes can be perplexing. However, it does make perfect sense if you understand how email tracking works.

We need to know two concepts for this.

1) How does Account Engagement track email opens?

Every email sent out from Account Engagement has an invisible, single-pixel image that Account Engagement inserts into HTML emails. When a 'recipient' opens the email, the image loads, and it’s registered as an email open activity.

Note: If email clients have disabled image loading then even if the recipient opens the email Account Engagement will not be able to track the open because the single pixel image wouldn't load.

2) Some organizations scan the emails before forwarding them to a recipient email address.

Some organizations have their emails routed through antispam and antivirus filters. These filters can download attachments (including images) for the emails they scan. In cases like this, the spam or virus filters can trigger an open activity in Pardot when the image is loaded.

After the emails are scanned, they are then forwarded to the intended email address. At this stage the system determines whether the email address is valid or invalid. That's why some prospects may appear hard bounced even if their immediate prior activity showed an email open.

This is a valuable feature for the end users but as a marketer that tends to track email opens to gauge the interest of the recipients, it can be a misleading metric.

For this reason marketers are encouraged to shift their focus from tracking email opens to tracking link clicks or landing page visits to access customer interest in their marketing campaign.

Note: Concept not specific to Account Engagement 

By Ananya Agrawal