One of the ways the Marketing Automation Team keeps our UW-Madison Eloqua instance running smoothly is to monitor our deliverability. A big part of deliverability is the viability of contacts in the database. We regularly review contacts that have either hard bounced, globally unsubscribed, or had no activity in the last 18 months to determine if they should continue to be used.
Oracle support, as well as email marketing industry standards indicate that deleting contacts that are not mailable is necessary to maintain a high Sender Score. In addition, we pay for the amount of contacts we have, so removing inactive ones allows us to better utilize our shared UW-Madison resources.
If you would like to see which of your contacts are bounces, you can learn more on our Knowledge Base (KB) article about email bounces at: https://kb.wisc.edu/eloqua/109951. And here is information on how we keep our Eloqua database in order: https://kb.wisc.edu/eloqua/123652. Learn more about deliverability and bounces in Oracle’s help documentation.