In Zoho Marketing Automation, when a contact is marked as “Hard Bounce”, we noticed that the contact stops receiving updates from CRM fields and may be excluded from automations.

Is this expected behavior?

In our case, the primary identifier and verified communication channel for users is their phone number, not their email address. Email is only a secondary channel.

Because of this, it is important for us to keep these contacts fully active in the database (including CRM synchronization and automation flows), even if their email address is temporarily invalid or bounced.

What would be the recommended way to manage this scenario, so that:

• contacts continue to receive CRM updates
• remain usable in non-email channels (e.g. WhatsApp)
• are excluded only from email campaigns without being “deactivated” at a system level?

We would like to avoid treating these contacts as inactive users, since they are still valid and active within our platform.