Understanding Email Bounces
Managing the way you handle bounces for your Subscriber Lists has never been more important. Keeping a close eye on your bounces can reduce your email delivery costs, therefore having a direct impact on the ROI of your campaigns.
Before looking at how to reduce bounces let’s look at the difference between soft and hard bounces.
A soft bounce is an email message that gets as far as the recipient’s mail server (it recognizes the address) but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s mailbox is full, the server is down or swamped with messages, the message is too large or the user has abandoned the mailbox. Most email service providers will attempt to deliver the email regularly for a few days. If it is still undelivered, it becomes a hard bounce.
A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn’t exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient’s mail server has blocked your server. Servers will also interpret bounces differently, meaning a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounce on another.
At Bluelime Media we use Campaign Monitor which automatically moves subscribers that hard bounce into a “Bounced Subscribers” category, so they don’t receive future campaigns. This maintains your list clean and reduces your cost.