Bounces and skips explain why a message did not reach someone. Review them before assuming an email campaign failed.

What this guide helps you do

• Tell the difference between bounced, skipped, unsubscribed, and missing-email cases.
• Clean customer data and Audience rules.
• Avoid repeated sends to addresses that should not receive email.

Before you start

• Open the specific campaign, journey, newsletter, or delivery report.
• Know whether the message was marketing or operational.
• Have permission to update customer data if cleanup is needed.

Do it manually

1. Open the delivery report.
2. Filter to bounces, skips, or failed deliveries.
3. Review reason, email address, customer record, Audience, and subscription state.
4. Update invalid customer data or suppress addresses according to your policy.
5. Fix Audience rules when eligible people are being skipped unexpectedly.
6. Retry only when the reason is safe to retry.

Ask Faster AI

• Group bounces and skips from this broadcast by likely cause and suggest cleanup steps.
• Find contacts skipped because of missing emails and prepare a CRM cleanup list.
• Tell me whether these failed deliveries are safe to retry.

Review before saving, sending, or starting

• Do not retry hard bounces without fixing the address.
• Respect unsubscribe and suppression reasons.
• Avoid changing contact preferences just to force a send.

Common issues and fixes

• If many skips come from missing emails, update CRM records or form mapping.
• If bounces cluster around one domain, check sender or domain setup.
• If people were skipped by Audience rules, preview the Audience again before the next send.

After you review delivery data

• Look for patterns across bounces, skips, clicks, replies, and unsubscribes instead of reacting to one number alone.
• Open the customer records behind important events so follow-up is grounded in real context.
• Create cleanup tasks for bad addresses, risky lists, missing consent, or unclear ownership.
• Use the findings to improve the next Audience, broadcast, journey, newsletter, or sequence before sending again.

Email deliverability at scale

For why hard bounces, soft bounces, and deliberate skips need different responses, read the deliverability engineering article. What It Takes to Deliver Email at Scale.

Newsletters people open

For why bounce and skip spikes should be checked before changing subject lines or content strategy, read the newsletter growth article. Grow a Newsletter People Actually Open.

Connected workflows

• Manage sender mailboxes
• Respect unsubscribe and contact preferences
• Review campaign performance
• Use customer activity for follow-up

Placeholder media

• Screenshot placeholder: add an annotated screenshot of investigate bounces and skips with customer names, emails, counts, and private campaign data blurred.
• Video placeholder: add a short walkthrough that starts from Engagement, shows the manual path, then shows the review step before any journey, broadcast, newsletter, or sequence goes live.

Related help

• Review engagement events
• Investigate bounces and skips
• Troubleshoot email deliverability