The Do Not Contact (DNC) report in the category of contact reports helps you to analyze unsubscribes and bounces from your contact list.
Knowing which emails trigger contacts to unsubscribe can help marketers identify improvements in subject lines, content, personalization, and timing of email sends. Identifying bounces helps marketers to keep a clean database and avoid issues with email deliverability.
The DNC report also helps you to maintain a good email reputation. For more information, see Maintaining email reputation.
For more information on creating reports, see Reports.
Columns
The primary difference between various reports is the data available for such reports. Columns that are available for the DNC report are:
Standard and custom contact fields
Standard and custom company fields
DNC Channel: A channel to indicate if a contact was marked as DNC for Email or Text Message. Mobile and web push notifications are not available in the Campaign Studio preference center as they are handled by the application. Opt-outs for these channels don’t appear in DNC reports.
DNC Channel ID: The ID number of the email or text messages that the user bounced or unsubscribed from for the respective channels.
DNC Comment: A comment to indicate if users don’t exist on a domain, address is improperly formatted, or the recipient’s server rejected the message. This column shares important information about the DNC, particularly for bounces. Acquia recommends that you monitor your contact list to avoid bounces which can harm your deliverability. For manual unsubscribes, if you add a contact to the Do Not Contact list for a channel in a campaign, you can add a comment. This comment should indicate the reason why a contact is manually unsubscribed in the campaign, so that you can easily identify it in the DNC report.
DNC Date: The date and time when the contact was marked as DNC.
DNC Reason: The type of DNC. Available options are Contactable, DNC Unsubscribed, DNC Bounced, and DNC Manually Unsubscribed.
Note
Contactable records aren’t included in a Do Not Contact report.
Filters
You can use any of the column data points as filters as well. Here are the most common use cases:
DNC Reason = DNC Bounced: Bounce data is critical and you can notice trends with domains or recipient servers that may not accept your messages. Popular providers, such as Google or Outlook have documentation available to help email senders reach inboxes on their servers.
Combine this filter with the IP Address column to see if there are IP addresses that reject messages, even across domains. This might be because of a spam protection service, such as Barracuda, filtering your messages before they’re delivered.
DNC Date: Use one or two filters to identify a specific range of time and see how many records were marked as DNC during that time. If you notice a spike in a certain time, you can look for similar DNC comments and identify if there was an issue with a destination server.
For example, in December 2020, there was a Google outage that resulted in millions of emails bouncing. Acquia pulled reports on specific contacts that were affected within the timeframe of the outage with the same DNC comment and quickly reenabled those records for sending.