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Unsubscribed, bounced, complained: what is the difference?
Three different events. systeme.io records them under two statuses: Unsubscribed is its own, while a delivery failure and a spam complaint both land the contact in Bounced.
The three side by side
| Unsubscribed | Bounced | Complained | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who caused it | The contact, or you | The receiving mail server | The contact |
| What happened | They opted out, or were opted out in bulk | The address failed to accept the mail | They pressed the spam button |
| Status in systeme.io | Unsubscribed | Bounced | Bounced |
| Still in the contact list | Yes | Yes, unless the address was fake | Yes |
| Receives anything further | No | No | No |
Unsubscribed
A decision, made by a person or made on their behalf. The contact stops receiving marketing emails and stays in the contact list with their history intact.
You can set it yourself. Selecting contacts and choosing Unsubscribe from all marketing emails under More actions does it in bulk, and the automatic list cleaning in Settings can do it every week to anybody who has not opened an email for a number of weeks you choose, anywhere from 1 to 26.
Unsubscribing rather than deleting is the recommended move for customers, because the purchase record survives it. Unsubscribing stops the emails without taking the contact off the list.
Bounced
A delivery failure reported back by the recipient's mail server. Nobody chose it. There are two kinds and only one changes the contact's status.
- Soft bounce. Temporary. The server was unavailable, an IP or domain was blocked, the content was flagged. The address stays active and the contact is not marked, because only that one message failed. It appears in blue and clickable in the statistics.
- Hard bounce. Permanent. The address is invalid, does not exist, or the inbox is full. It appears in grey, and it is not going to work later either.
A full inbox marks the contact as Bounced. Addresses identified as fake or deactivated are removed from the contact list automatically instead of being marked.
Once a contact is Bounced, systeme.io stops attempting to send to them at all rather than trying and failing. Support can reverse the status by hand if the address is known to be working again.
Complained
A complaint is a reader pressing spam or junk in their own inbox. It is the most expensive of the three, because it tells the inbox provider directly that mail from you is unwanted.
systeme.io has no separate status for it. A contact who marks one of your emails as spam is moved into the Bounced status, alongside the addresses that failed to deliver.
That is the part worth carrying away. A Bounced list is not purely a list of broken addresses. Some of the entries on it are perfectly working addresses belonging to people who did not want the email.
What none of the three do
None of them take a contact out of a campaign. An unsubscribed or bounced contact stays enrolled and keeps moving through the steps on the delays that were set, receiving nothing along the way.
If the status ever returns to subscribed, they resume at whatever step the timeline has carried them to by then.
Finding each group
The contact list has a Contact Status filter. Bounced contacts also carry a stop icon on their profile, and clicking it shows the reason that address failed.
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