When you log into your TalkBox account, you will find information about your contact list and the number of emails and mobile that are either contactable, or uncontactable
Contactability refers to whether a contact can be sent an email or SMS communication.
There are four different statuses that contribute to contactability: subscription, reachable, confirmed, validated.
Subscription
Also known as marketing opt-in or consent. Marketing subscription can be collected from various sources, such as:
- a loyalty sign up or membership program,
- terms and conditions when making a booking,
- Signing up via a webform
All contacts have a legal right to unsubscribe from marketing communications, and must give their consent to be opted back in for marketing.
You can manually unsubscribe a contact, or trigger a resubscription message (opt back in) from the edit contact page.
Further reading:
– The subscription process
– How to manually unsubscribe a contact
– How to resubscribe a contact
Reachable
Reachable refers to ongoing, successful delivery of an email or SMS message.
Continuing to send to email addresses that are invalid or cannot be delivered to can negatively affect your sender reputation. TalkBox will automatically mark an email address or mobile number as unreachable if they have bounced or failed to be delivered.
In the case of mobile numbers that fail delivery, these are typically when the network carrier has responded that the number is not valid or was out of service.
Email Bounces
Email bounces indicate that your communications are undeliverable for a particular reason. There are a variety of reasons why an email can bounce:
- The recipient’s email address is invalid
- The recipient’s domain name is incorrect or misspelled
- The recipient’s server does not exist anymore
- The email you are sending is too large
- The recipient’s mail server is temporarily unavailable
- The recipient’s mailbox is full
- etc.
Note that an email address will have “hard bounced”, such as the mailbox does not exist, it does not include an address or service that was temporary unavailable.
Bounces can also occur due to the recipient email client’s anti-spam and security criteria. There are some basic measures you can take to improve your overall deliverability and consequently reduce the number of bounces that relate to these reasons. Read more about email delivery and deliverability here.
Confirmed
Confirmed is a state that relates to when a new contact is created via a TalkBox form, such as a sign-up form on your website.
When a new contact is created this way, they are sent a Confirmation email – also known as a double opt-in. You can resend a confirmation email if required from the edit contact page.
Confirmed status does not apply for contacts created by a Connection or upload
Validated
When a new contact is created, or a contact’s email address is updated, TalkBox performs a basic email validation check. If the address fails this validation test, the contact will be marked as invalid and excluded from Communications, as it will likely cause a negative affect to your sending reputation.
An email address may be invalid for one of several reasons, including:
- Problems with MX record: recipient’s domain does not exist
- Domain risk: the domain is known to have a high risk of spam or malicious actors
If you believe an invalid email address should in fact be valid, you will need to duly verify that the email address is correct before contacting our support team.
Looking to filter and delete uncontactable records? Find out more