Keeping your contact lists clean and up to date is a great way to improve your deliverability rate and also your open rate. One way that we recommend doing this is to look at the bounces for each campaign that you send out. In your Constant Contact account, we give you the reason why a particular contact bounced. Some are self-explanatory, like Vacation/auto-reply or Non-existent.
So what exactly does it mean when a contact is Suspended?
Repeatedly sending emails to Non-existent email addresses can have a negative impact on your deliverability rate. A Suspended contact is an address that has consistently bounced as Non-existent. If this happens, the email address is put on a temporary hold for 15 days. During this time, our system will not attempt to send any campaigns to this address from any Constant Contact account. If an account attempts to send to a Suspended address, it will be included in that campaign's Suspended bounce category under the Reporting
After the temporary hold is lifted, we will attempt to send to this address the next time that an email is scheduled for them to receive. If the address bounces as Non-existent again, the email address will be placed on an indefinite hold. We do not automatically remove these contacts, however, we do list them as Recommended for Removal under your reporting.
What if you've never sent to this contact before and they already show as Suspended when you send your first email to them? Emails addresses can become Suspended from any Constant Contact account sending email to it. So although you haven't sent anything to them, there may have been another account that had tried to send to them in the past and we then note them as Suspended.
If you see an address listed as Suspended that you know is a good email address, you can unsuspend the email address to reset the address. However, this will not prevent it from becoming Suspended again in the future if it does bounce as Non-existent so you want to make sure that you have verified that this address is valid.
Want to know even more about these types of bounces? Check out this article that explores Suspended and Non-Existent bounces a little deeper.
