Email Marketing – Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce Management

Soft bounce vs Hard bounce is very important to email deliverability. If you do Email Marketing you should know this. Recently, I started Email Marketing. After looking at a lot of tools like MailChimp, SendGrid, Aweber, OptinMonster, SocketLabs. Finally, I have chosen ‘SendInBlue‘. Do you want to know why? I will tell you later in this article.

I have created a New Year 2019 Wish Campaign to my 1829 recipients. Then I came to know that, there is a term which we call soft bounce and hard bounce in Email Marketing.

Today I am going to discuss soft bounce and hard bounce Management in detail. So let’s start with the basics.

What is an Email Bounce?

An email bounce signifies that the sent mail is not delivered to the recipients. There can be many reasons for that, which I have discussed below. If a soft or a hard bounce occurs, then the sender will get a message about the mail deliverability. The message is just a delivery failure automatic notification.

You might have observed this in Gmail. Have a look at the screenshot given below.

How to fix bounced or rejected Emails?

This is just a temporary solution. People like you and me always do mistakes in writing and typing. Based on that I am giving you these solutions.

These are common mistakes which can be fixed –

1. Quotation Marks
2. A dot at the end or middle of Address
3. Placing comma instead of a dot in recipient Gmail like this gamil,com
4. Spaces before and after the address
5. Spelling Errors

You can check with the recipient to correct the address. But, keep in mind if the above mistakes are not done then the address might be a wrong address or an email fake id.

Being a blogger I have seen bots creating and registration my website. The name, email and website created by a bot are fake. They are Garbage. To stop spam comments on your website you should use the Anti-spam plugin

Let’s see the topic soft bounce vs hard bounce.

Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce in Email Marketing

Soft Bounce and Hard Bounce, these are the two email bounces which you can get which in your email campaign report. It is also referred as email block. It can be due to some firewall. Like you can’t send me a mail on my Company Email.

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce signifies a valid email id and the message reached the recipient’s mail server. However, it bounced back because:

1. The mailbox was full (the user is over their limited quota)
2. The server was down
3. The message was too large for the recipient’s inbox
4. The message contains some sensitive information so the server denies it.

The Email Marketing Service like Sendinblue and Mailchimp tries again to send that message at a fixed interval like 72 hours. If it is still not delivered then it is either blocked or deferred. It is not added to the suppression list. But it actually depends on email provider you have chosen.

Hard Bounce

A hard bounce signifies that the meassge has been permanently rejected by the server either because –

1. The recipient address is invalid
2. The recipient addresses don’t exist anymore

These emails will be added in the suppression list. A suppression list is a list of email which is excluded automatically from a campaign recipients list. The provider will not even try to send any further campaigns to those emails.

Pro Tip –  Think soft bounces are a short-term issue–you don’t need to delete these address permanently from your contact list. However, hard bounces are either invalid, fake or non-existent addresses. So, it should be removed immediately.

So, you got a clear idea of soft bounce vs hard bounce now. Let’s learn how can you reduce your bounces?

Reducing the number of bounces

I want to start this topic with a case which had happened to me when I have started Email Marketing. I have some hacked databases of email. unknowing without reading the terms and policy I have uploaded 1100000 contacts in my list. Within a certain moment, my account is blocked and I have asked to contact the support team.

It was due to spam activity. Any email marketing services will ask you “How you have grown your list?”, “How you have collected your subscriber email?” and many such questions.

So, basically the idea is to maintain hygiene and to gain subscriber by legitimate methods proposed.

Best practices to reduce the email bounces –

1.Maintaining an opener’s list – Whenever you send a campaign, you can see the no of openers. these are the people who have opened your sent mail. On every successful campaign, you can create a separate list of such openers. If a recipient is not responding from a long time you can purge those members from the list permanently.

2. Monitoring your email delivery – You can Monitor your contacts activity after sending a campaign. How they behave in clicking a link, responding back to you, opening a mail? This will help you to identify your loyal subscribers.

3. Using Double Opt-in Feature – Sending a confirmation email when users subscribe to your list. This way you can ensure that the user’s email is not only valid but that they, in fact, want to receive your email messages. So-called, genuine subscribers.

4. Deleting the suppressed emails – Remove all the emails causing hard bounces immediately. This will help you to maintain a healthy list of subscribers.

You know gaining a high deliverable rate is a challenge for you and me as well. But, it’s not impossible if you know the right rope to touch.

Why have I chosen SendinBlue Email Marketing Platform?

The reason for joining sendinblue is very simple. Sendinblue is providing a good range of email marketing services at a pocket-friendly cost. It is a good alternative to Mailchimp. You can easily send 300 Email per day free for lifetime.

And the feature I like the most is “no subscriber restriction”, You can upload your all contacst. But make sure to reach them if you have a huge contact list. Otherwise your accpount will be suspended.

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