| ActiveCampaign | |
|---|---|
| Their stated threshold | ActiveCampaign's guidance treats bounce rates above 2% as a deliverability risk, and their compliance team reviews accounts with sustained higher rates. |
| What happens if you cross it | ActiveCampaign reviews accounts and can suspend sending. They are notably strict about list provenance on new accounts, and their onboarding asks where your list came from before releasing volume. |
| Where the bounce data lives | Campaigns, then the campaign report, then the Bounced tab, which separates hard from soft. Contacts filtered to a Bounced status show the account-wide picture. |
| How bounces are classified | A hard bounce sets the contact status to Bounced immediately. Soft bounces accumulate against a threshold you can configure, and crossing it sets the same status, so persistent soft failures do not go unnoticed. |
Bringing the rate down
Each step is an action inside ActiveCampaign, in the order worth taking them.
Check your soft bounce threshold setting
Settings, Advanced holds the number of consecutive soft bounces before a contact is marked bounced. The default is generous, and lowering it removes abandoned mailboxes faster.
Filter contacts by Bounced status and read the tags
If you tag contacts by source on import, the bounced list immediately shows which source is failing. If you do not tag on import, start.
Audit your automations for send triggers
ActiveCampaign automations fire on events, so a contact can enter a sequence long after import. A bad import keeps bouncing for months through automations nobody is watching.
Use a scoring rule to sunset silent contacts
Contact scoring can decay with inactivity, and an automation can move a contact out of active lists when the score drops. That keeps the list healthy without manual work.
Verify before import and store the verdict as a tag
A tag carrying the verdict lets automations exclude unresolved addresses from a first send without deleting the contact.
The mistake people make here
A bounce report mixes two causes that need opposite responses: addresses that do not exist, and receivers refusing mail they could have delivered. The first is fixed by checking the list. The second is a sending problem and no amount of cleaning will move it.
Questions people ask
How does ActiveCampaign handle soft bounces?
It counts consecutive soft bounces per contact and marks the contact as Bounced once the count crosses a threshold you configure in Settings, Advanced. That is more aggressive than most platforms and it is useful.
Do bounced contacts still count toward billing?
Yes, while they are in your account. Deleting or archiving them is what removes them from the billed count.
Why does an address keep getting mailed after I removed it from a list?
An automation is sending to it. Automations act on contacts rather than lists, so removing someone from a list does not take them out of a running sequence.