Clean Up Contacts with Errors
This article provides a method for cleaning up contacts who receive repeated device unreachable errors when sending broadcasts.
Background
On the Broadcast results page, Avochato provides message delivery statistics which includes the percent of messages undeliverable to your audience. It’s normal to have undeliverable messages. There are various reasons a message may have returned an error. For full details on different error types, refer to this article: Error Codes.
In some cases, you may notice multiple broadcasts where the unreachable percent remains the same.
One of the reasons messages return an error is due to a bad phone number. This could be a landline (code: 30006), an inactive number, or a number that is out of service or unreachable (30003 or 30005).
To view a report of your contacts who have received a 30006 landline error, follow these steps. If you’d like to delete contacts with a landline error, add a tag to all landline contacts with “landline” and then delete all contacts with the landline tag.
How to Clean Up Contacts with Device Unreachable
Cleaning up contacts who repeatedly receive error codes with 30005 or 30003 will help reduce your costs and decrease your message error rate. A high error rate may cause your phone number to be flagged by carriers because it can imply best practices for opt-in compliance are not being followed.
The 30005 and 30003 errors are defined as:
- 30003 – Delivery of your message failed due to an unavailable or unreachable destination. Common examples are a user who is generally unreachable or is outside of cellular service or whose mobile device is powered off.
- When sending business text messages through carrier APIs (as opposed to your personal device), the carrier API requires the contact’s device to be connected to a network or Wi-Fi signal at the time the message is sent.
- 30005 – Delivery of your message failed due to an unknown or inactive destination number, for example, a number that is no longer in service.
If you have contacts that continue to receive 30005 or 30003 errors 3+ times, there may be a better phone number for the contact.
Recommended Action
- Remove contacts that keep getting error codes will a) avoid using segments when you know a phone number isn't correct and b) reduce overall errors
Process outlined below - you will repeat this process three separate times.
Steps for Contact Clean Up
- In Avochato, navigate to Broadcasts and click into the Completed tab
- Then, click on a Broadcast to open the broadcast results (for this exercise, ideally one that includes all and/or historic contacts, or a high audience count)
- Once broadcast results are open, under Delivery Stats, locate the Undeliverable section and click on the person icon to the right of the Undeliverable breakdown
- This will redirect you to Contacts and display all contacts the broadcast failed to deliver messages to (note: this list includes contacts who received any type of error, not just 30005 and 30003)
- From here, select all contacts on this list via checkbox and create/apply a tag to their contact profiles (we recommend the following tags for each Broadcast: ”oneerror” for Broadcast 1, ”twoerror” for Broadcast 2, and “threeerror” for Broadcast 3).
Repeat the above process for three recent Broadcasts with a large audience
- Once you’ve completed the process across three broadcasts, navigate to the Contacts section in Avochato and search for the tags created in the above step (formatted as [tags:”oneerror” AND tags:”twoerror” AND tags: “threeerror”]).
- Then, confirm contacts displayed upon searching have one of the three tags created from this exercise (i.e. “oneerror”, “twoerror”, and “threeerror”)
- Once confirmed, select all contacts and click the Delete button
- Upon clicking delete, all selected contacts will be removed.
- If you need to retrieve removed contacts at a later date, click on the Removed button.