How Soft and Hard Bounces are managed?

An email bounce refers to non-delivery of your email campaigns to your subscriber inbox. When a subscriber rejects your email message then it is called as a bounce. There are two types bounce depending upon the reason it bounced. Soft and Hard Bounce - these are the terms which are more important in email marketing to carry out effectively. It is highly important to check with these rates to know whether your campaigns are in your subscriber inbox.

Hard Bounce:
Hard bounce occur when your emails are unable to get delivered due to a permanent error like invalid email address, the most common cause for such are the typo errors in email address. Since hard bounce messages are permanent errors, they are added to suppression list and will be cleaned. In future, email campaigns are not sent to such cleaned lists. Not only the typo errors, there are many reasons why could a hard bounce might occur?

• The email address is invalid
• The email address does not exist
• Invalid and does not exist domain names
• Recipient email server blocked emails delivery.

Remember:
If your emails blocked by the recipient spam filter or email firewalls considering email content to be spam and in such cases valid email address would hard bounce or a subscriber might mistakenly unsubscribe your emails, so you need to opt them back to your list.

Soft Bounce:
Generally we look at soft bounces as temporary or short term issues, which can be cleared up easily. When an email address soft bounces then it will get notified in the reports. At MailGoes we retry sending to these soft bounce emails for 5 campaigns. If the message does not get delivered after 5 campaigns then we mark it as hard bounce.

Not only the email message, if the emails address soft bounces for all email campaigns, then the email address is converted to block list and future campaigns are not designed to send to that email address.

Generally, for an email address before converting soft bounce in to a hard bounce or block list, five soft bounces are allowed with no subscriber activity and 10 soft bounces with previous history of activity for a subscriber.

Reasons for a soft bounce:

• The message of the email campaign is very large
• Recipient server is down or offline
• Recipient inbox is full

 

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