First and foremost, it is essential to ensure that your contact data is clean and regularly updated. Remove old and invalid contacts that have hard bounced from your segments. Additionally, keep an eye on the open and click rates of your contacts. If a contact consistently shows no interaction with your emails over a long period, it's wise to exclude them from future mailings.

Consistency in your email flow is crucial. Avoid frequent changes in campaign frequency, volume, content, subjects, or media assets, as this can trigger spam filters and make your emails appear suspicious.

From a deliverability standpoint, it's better to send emails regularly to segments of approximately the same size, rather than sending a large campaign once a month.

Lastly, always monitor your delivery results. Regularly check bounce rates and engagement rates (opens and clicks) to identify any potential increase in bounces across your campaigns. By monitoring these metrics, you can protect your sender's reputation and ensure that your contact data remains up to date.

Bounce rate serves as an important indicator of the health of your contact list. While a few bounces are expected and normal in every campaign, it's crucial to minimize a large number of bounces to maintain a positive sender reputation. Consistent monitoring is key to achieving this.

When training clients on segment creation, I always emphasize the importance of including the following three conditions consistently:

• Do not allow Bulk Emails: Set to Allow.
• Email Contains Data.
• Status Is Active.

I understand that D365 Marketing won't send emails to individuals with "Do not allow Bulk Emails" set to "Do Not Allow." However, it's crucial to avoid mistakenly thinking that you've sent a journey to 6,000 contacts, only to realize that 2,000 of them would never receive it. By including these conditions in your segment, you'll have accurate numbers rather than inflated figures. The "Email Contains Data" condition helps reduce the occurrence of "Recipient address isn't valid" sending errors, and excluding inactive contacts is a logical choice. After all, why include them in your segment?

In summary, ensure you consistently include these three conditions when creating segments to avoid misleading numbers, reduce sending errors, and exclude inactive contacts.

The most crucial aspect to consider is the delivery failure of emails due to hard and soft bounces. Unfortunately, there is no option to create a segment directly from this list. However, a manual segment can be created to address this issue. First, it's important to understand what a hard bounce entail. It occurs when an email is sent to an invalid mailbox or domain. This typically indicates that the recipient has either left the organization, their email address no longer exists, or there is a typo in it. It could also mean that the domain itself is no longer valid. In any case, it is not advisable to include such contacts in your journeys.

To create a segment for hard bounces email, you can add a behavior block and select "Email hard bounced." No specific message needs to be associated with this block since the focus is on identifying the bounced emails. Next, add a query block to filter contacts where "Do not allow Bulk Emails" is set to "Allow." This ensures that even though the hard bounce emails failed to be delivered, they won't be continuously brought into your journeys since the segments would not filter them out. Ensure that the link between the two blocks is set to "and also." By following this approach, you can effectively manage hard bounces and prevent irrelevant contacts from entering your journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing.

To put this into practical use, we now can use this segment of suppression list in a customer journey. There is one configuration field where we can tell the system to exclude contacts that are in certain segments. This field is called Suppression segment.