Better handling of soft bounces & more with Groundhogg 3.5.1

Groundhogg 3.5.1 is here! This update included new features, like better handling of soft bounces and more.

Here’s what you need to know:

💔 Better handling of soft bounces

A soft bounce is a bounce, but not a real bounce. It’s a lesser bounce that might turn into a hard bounce, maybe? Email is hard.

What we do know is that if soft bounces stack up, and there’s no activity from that recipient, it’s probably a good idea to stop emailing them.

Soft bounces will now appear in the activity timeline so you can see a contact’s deliverability history.

If a contact has 5 consecutive soft bounces, with no other activity (opens/clicks) Groundhogg will presume that the contact is undeliverable and their status will be automatically changed to hard bounce, preventing further outgoing email.

You can manually change their opt-in status later and try to email them again, however further soft bounces without other activity will immediately reclassify the status as hard bounced.

All API enabled SMTP services (MailHawk, Postmark, SendGrid, AWS, etc.) have been updated to support the improved soft bounce handling!

Using a third-party SMTP Plugin like WPMailSMTP or FluentSMTP will not work with our feedback system, so please use an official email integration if you’re not already.

🤩 Track changes to Opt-in status in funnels!

Use the new Opt-in Status Changed benchmark to track changes to a contact’s opt-in status within a funnel.

This might be useful if you want to end a funnel immediately when someone unsubscribes or bounces. Another use case might be to move deals to a dead stage in your sales pipeline if a contact unsubscribes from emails.

Here’s the complete changelog for Groundhogg 3.5.1

• ADDED Opt-in Status Changed benchmark.
• ADDED PHP API methods to better handle hard bounces, soft bounces, and complaints.
• ADDED PHP filters for subject and content for the email reports.
• TWEAKED After 4 consecutive soft bounces a contact’s status will change to hard bounced.
• TWEAKED Automatically unsubscribe users from email reports whose email domain does not match the url of the site (those users can still opt-in).
• TWEAKED Automatically unsubscribe super admins on multisites from email reports (those users can still opt-in).
• TWEAKED Orderby param in the API docs is now a dropdown.
• FIXED Use white-label name in email report subject lines
• FIXED site_name not being replaced in the broadcast email report.
• FIXED When moving a field in the form editor the open field does not persist.