An email bounce is an event when the email you send fails to get delivered to the recipient’s mailbox. The email is simply rejected by the recipient’s mail server. Email bounce is classified into two types:
Type of Email Bounce | Definition | Cause | Action Item to Avoid It |
Hard Bounce | Permanent delivery failure of email |
|
|
Soft Bounce | Temporary delivery failure of email |
|
|
Let’s read on to explore in-depth what is hard bounce & soft bounce in email marketing. We will also see how you can handle these to ensure your emails are actually sent to people’s mailbox.
Hard bounce definition: When the email you send fails to get delivered for permanent reasons, it is said to be hard bounced. Permanent reasons mean that even if you resend the email, it will not get delivered. It will be returned to the sender’s address with a failed delivery notification.
The metric it affects is the delivery rate. The delivery rate is the percentage of emails that got delivered to the inbox out of all the emails you send.
If your delivery rate is constantly low, it will signal the spam filters of inbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) that your email list is filled with invalid data and hence might not be from genuine signups. So emails will end up getting classified as ‘spam’ & your sender’s reputation will become low. Hence inbox providers will try to protect the valid email addresses from getting your supposedly ‘spam’ emails by sending those to the spam folder, instead of the inbox.
SendX takes email delivery seriously and hence automatically removes any hard bounced emails from future campaigns. Even if they are part of your broadcast list, we will not even try delivering email to those addresses as we know they will negatively impact your sender’s reputation.
You can also manually see all the hard bounced emails and delete them from the list, permanently.
A healthy bounce rate is below 2%. Anything higher than that will negatively impact your overall email delivery and sender’s reputation. Thus impacting the reach of your email.
Here's a summary of action items for you to maintain a low soft & hard bounce rate:
Please note that if your email goes into the spam box of the recipient, it is not considered a bounce. It is considered to be delivered but not just to the inbox. While bounced emails impact your 'delivery rate', an email going to the spam box negatively impacts your ‘deliverability rate’ which is the percentage of emails that go into the inbox and not the spam box.
If you want to read more about it, check out this article on email deliverability.