SAP Hybris Marketing – Campaign Success and Bounce Handling

SAP Hybris Marketing – Campaign Success: This block should give an high level overview about how bounces for email are handled in  SAP Hybris Marketing and how the Bounce information is reflected in the Campaign Success Details.

The sample is taken from the development system so the campaign success diagram may differ from the previous releases, the data however should be the same.

The the process flow the following. There is a target group containing 5 members, and an email campaign executed for that target group.

The initial information is that 4 emails have been delivered to the email service provider, 1 is failing due to missing marketing permissions.

Outbound Email:

On executing the campaign an outbound email interaction is created for all valid email addresses.

For the sample campaign, there are the following interactions created:

4 EMAIL_OUTBOUND interactions
1 OUTBOUND_CHCK_FAILED interaction

Campaign Success Screen

In the campaign success screen the figures are displayed as following – this figures are calculated based on the campaign interactions.

There are the following key figures filled:

Marketing Permission Check Failed: 1
Number of Sent Messages:               4
Number of Delivered Messages:       4

Those key figures are calculated based on the following formulas:

Delivered Messages = Number of EMAIL_OUTBOUND Interactions
Sent Messages = (Number of Delivered Messages + Number of Bounce Messages)
The success key figures ‘Sent Messages’ and ‘Delivered Messages’ do not yet give any information that the email was delivered to the contact email account but just gives the information that the email is sent to the email provider (AmazonSES or SAP Mobile Service).

Bounce Handling

Hybris Marketing collects the bounce information from the email provider from a background job executed every minute. If there are bounce records returned the Hybris Marketing Bounce Handler takes the information received from the email provider and creates the interactions accordingly.

Soft Bounce:

A soft bounce is usually returned if the recipient’s mail address is valid but the mail server bounced back. Typical examples for soft bounces are when the recipient’s mailbox is full or when the mail server is currently down. This creates an EMAIL_BOUNCE_SOFT interaction for the contact. From Hybris Marketing there is no follow up processing done for soft bounces.

Hard Bounce:

A hard bounce is returned when the recipient’s mail address is permanently rejected, for example if the email address is not valid or does not exist.This creates an EMAIL_BOUNCE_HARD interaction for the contact. Hybris Marketing invalidates the EMAIL ORIGIN ID and removes the email address from the godlen record.

Campaign Success Screen

The bounced email addresses are reflected in the campaign success accordingly.

There are the now following key figures filled:

Marketing Permission Check Failed: 1
Number of Sent Messages:               4
Number of Hard Bounces:                 2
Number of Soft Bounces:                  1
Number of Delivered Messages:       1

Those key figures are calculated based on those formulas:

Sent Messages = (Number of Delivered Messages + Number of Bounce Messages)
4 Sent Messages = 1 delevered + 2 hard bounce + 1 soft bounce

Email Open and Click Through:

When a contact receives the email and opens the email or clicks a trackable link from the email, an EMAIL_OPENED and CLICK_THROUGH interaction is created. The EMAIL_OPENED interaction is created when initially opening the email only, whereas the CLICK_THROUGH interaction is created each time a link is opened from the email. The interaction is created with having a reference to the EMAIL_OUTBOUND interaction.

Campaign Success Screen

The email open and the click through information is available in the campaign success as well.

When a link inside an email is clicked more often the number of clicks might increase.

Delivered Email + Soft Bounce:

In some cases it might happen that the email service provider first sends a soft bounce response to Hybris Marketing but later on delivers the mail successfully. In that case Hybris Marketing creates a soft bounce information first. If the contact than opens the email, the soft bounce will be transfered into an email outbound interaction again.

This happens only if the contact opens the email or opens a trackable link from the email. If the email is delivered despite a soft bounce response, and the contact does not open the email, Hybris Marketing cannot update the interaction – in that case the bounce information remains in the system.