📋 Overview
If your email campaign delivered more messages than the number of contacts you selected — or if you noticed a high bounce rate — this article explains the most common causes and how to resolve them.
🔍 Why Did My Campaign Send More Emails Than Expected?
There are several reasons a campaign may exceed your intended send count:
- Duplicate contacts in your list: If the same email address appears more than once across your selected segments or contact lists, each instance may trigger a separate send. Deduplication does not always happen automatically if contacts were imported from multiple sources.
- Multiple list segments selected: When you build an audience from more than one segment, contacts who belong to several segments can be included multiple times unless a unique-contact filter is applied before sending.
- Retry logic on soft bounces: The platform automatically retries delivery for soft bounces (temporary delivery failures). Each retry counts as an additional send attempt in your campaign metrics, which can inflate the total send number shown in your report.
- Transactional or trigger duplicates: If the campaign was connected to an automation routine, the routine may have re-enrolled contacts who met the trigger condition more than once.
📊 Understanding Bounce Types
Bounces fall into two categories, and each requires a different response:
- Hard bounces: The email address is invalid, does not exist, or the recipient domain is blocking delivery permanently. These contacts should be removed from your list immediately to protect your sender reputation.
- Soft bounces: A temporary issue prevented delivery — for example, a full inbox or a server timeout. The platform retries these automatically. If a contact soft-bounces repeatedly, it will eventually be treated as a hard bounce.
🛠️ How to Audit and Fix Your Contact List
- Open the affected campaign from your email campaigns list.
- Review the delivery report to identify the total send count, bounce count, and bounce type breakdown.
- Export your contact list and check for duplicate email addresses. Remove any duplicates before your next send.
- If you used multiple segments, consolidate them into a single deduplicated list and re-upload it before creating a new campaign.
- Hard-bounce contacts should be suppressed or deleted from your audience. Do not attempt to re-send to addresses that have hard-bounced.
✅ Best Practices to Prevent Over-Sending and High Bounces
- Clean your list before every campaign: Remove invalid addresses, role-based addresses (e.g., info@, noreply@), and any contacts that have previously hard-bounced.
- Use a single deduplicated segment: Merge all target contacts into one list and remove duplicates before selecting your audience in the campaign builder.
- Verify new imports: When importing contacts from an external source, run a quick deduplication check and validate email format before saving the list.
- Monitor your sender reputation: A bounce rate above 2% can damage your deliverability. Aim to keep hard bounces below 0.5% and soft bounces below 1.5%.
- Review automation routines: If your campaign is triggered by a routine, open your automation routines and confirm that re-enrollment conditions are set correctly to avoid sending to the same contact multiple times.
💡 Checking Your Campaign Metrics
You can review detailed send and bounce data for any campaign by going to your campaign analytics or reporting view. This view shows total sends, unique opens, bounce breakdowns, and unsubscribe counts. Use this data to identify patterns before launching future campaigns.
🆘 Still Need Help?
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.