Hard Bounce And Soft Bounce In Email Marketing Explained: 4 Simple Ways To Solve

Introduction: Hard Bounce And Soft Bounce In Email Marketing Explained: 4 Simple Ways To Solve

What is a hard bounce and what is a soft bounce in email marketing?

These are questions that many people ask when they are trying to understand how their email list is performing.

In the digital age, email marketing is one of the most popular ways to reach people.

Whether you are trying to promote a new product or service, keep up with your customers, or build your brand image – email marketing can be an effective tool for doing all these things.

However, there are some drawbacks to using this form of communication that you need to know about before starting your campaign.

One type of problem that can occur is called hard bounce and soft bounce in email marketing.

This blog post will help our readers understand what hard bounces and soft bounces are so they know how best to avoid them.

Hard bounce and soft bounce rates are some of the most important email marketing metrics that influence your email marketing success.

As a result, it is important that you understand the difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce as well as how they impact your email marketing campaign’s success.

The difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce is that a hard bounce is when one of your emails ends up in the spam folder or junk email. This can happen due to a misconfigured server, an incorrect recipient address, or a non-existent person’s email address. A soft bounce is when an email address that has been used in the past tries to contact you and your email server does not receive a response. A soft bounce can also be considered an email that couldn’t be delivered for temporary reasons while a hard bounce is more permanent.

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What Is A Hard Bounce In Email Marketing?

A hard bounce is when one of your emails ends up in the spam folder or junk email.

This can happen due to a misconfigured server, an incorrect recipient address, or a non-existent person’s email address.

A soft bounce will end up in this same location but it typically happens because someone has changed their account and updated their contact information with the mail service provider without informing you about the change – for example, if they have moved and not notified you.

A hard bounce in email marketing in its simplest terms is an email that couldn’t be delivered for permanent reasons.

Some things that may cause hard bounces include:

1. Accounts were disabled or suspended by the ISP (Internet Service Provider) for suspicious activity.
   
2. The email address is invalid and could not be found in our database of subscribers, contacts, or customers.
   
3. All outgoing mail from this server has been blocked because of spam complaints.
   
4. An automated process at the destination mail server responded to your message.
   
   This may happen if you have entered erroneous information on a web form that was then submitted back to you as an error response with instructions telling you what went wrong – such as mistyping a recipient’s name when sending something through their contact form.
   
5. Having an error or typo as you typed the recipient’s email address

A hard bounce can occur due to one single factor: The address itself doesn’t exist!

How Can You Avoid A Hard Bounce?

Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid hard bounces in email marketing.

This can happen when an address does not exist or has been marked as a spammer by the recipient’s ISP (Internet Service Provider).

This is something that is entirely out of your control and you cannot directly influence or change.

The best thing that you can do is always make sure your list of contacts remains fresh and accurate.

You should also have a plan for how you will handle residual customer contact information while providing them with other means for contacting you such as phone, chat, social media outlets, etc.

You can also double-check and ensure both the email addresses you get and type are accurate by contacting the recipient.

On this note, it would be helpful that you do the same for email the addresses that you share with others.

What Is A Soft Bounce In Email Marketing?

A soft bounce is when an email address that has been used in the past tries to contact you and your email server does not receive a response.

A soft bounce can also be considered an email that couldn’t be delivered for temporary reasons.

This can happen for various reasons such as:

1. The recipient’s ISP (Internet Service Provider) was unable to transfer their message successfully
   
2. Your email service provider rejected it because of misconfiguration settings or spam filters
   
3. It could also be possible that they are using a free webmail account, which means if the mail server goes down at all then there will be no way for them to retrieve any emails.
   
   A hard bounce would occur if this same person tried sending you an email from another domain, like yahoo or google –the difference being that with a hard bounce the email will be sent back to the sender, whereas with a soft bounce it would stay in your email inbox.
   
4. If an email is rejected as spam by our server and you want the message delivered anyway, then there are some options that may help increase deliverability rates such as adding “delivered” into the subject line or including text like “Please do not consider this mail to be unwanted” before sending.
   
5. The recipient’s email inbox might be full or the size of the email that you’re trying to send might be too large and doesn’t meet server requirements.

It can also help if you use double opt-in instead of single opt-in when someone subscribes to your website because they have more chances to confirm their email address than just once when signing up for updates.

This step also helps you to avoid spam and unwanted, clutter emails filling up your email list.

It is recommended that you remove any email address that continues to give a soft bounce or hard bounce.

The reason is that it impacts your email deliverability rating and when those ratings increase too much it can impact your overall email marketing capability.

Besides, good email marketing practices dictate that list health is practiced and that means deleting inactive and unreachable email addresses permanently from your list.

How Can You Avoid A Soft Bounce?

There isn’t much that can be done to avoid soft bounces while we send our emails but we are not entirely hopeless in this situation.

To get started you must always ensure you are mailing the email to an accurate, valid email address.

This is a general rule for all emails that people send from their businesses or personal accounts because it has been shown to increase response rates and open rates in most industries.

It is recommended that if your company sends bulk mailings (many messages at one time) then you need to be very careful about data validation as a single soft bounce can hurt your reputation with ISPs and other companies who want deliverability of their own messages sent through email marketing lists such as MailChimp using HTML templates.

You should also avoid sending multiple identical requests within 24 hours of each other especially on different days of the week when possible because this could result in hard bounces which will hurt your reputation and deliverability score.

You can learn more about your email deliverability issues by visiting MX Toolbox.

The best advice would be to avoid sending the same email request more than once in a 24 hour period.

Moving forward, when you need additional information about hard bounce and soft bounce then contact your ISP or industry experts who are familiar with these issues.

Bonus – Master Email Marketing With These Free Resources

We have prepared a list of helpful resources to help you master email marketing today.

We want to help you on your journey to online success and so we have decided to link below some helpful articles and guides to help you on your email marketing journey. Feel free to use them to as much as possible.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to do all the heavy lifting you can get a free consultation from our team and we will help you on your journey to success.

Additionally, you can sign up for a Cyber Site Online Presence for as low as $1,200 per month. You will get a website that grows your business that is built with a 12-month marketing strategy for your business. It will be fully managed and marketed by our team.

You can get your Cyber Site Online Presence here.

Here is a list of those extra resources we mentioned

1. Email Marketing Benefits: 22 Powerful Email Marketing Benefits To Grow Your Business
2. Email Marketing Conversion Tips: Email Marketing to Grow Your Business: 15 Powerful Conversion Tips
3. Email Marketing Lead Generation: 16 Powerful Email Marketing Lead Generation Strategies
4. Digital Marketing Strategy: 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses and Startups
5. Does Your Business Need A Website? Does my business need a website?
6. Drip Campaigns: 3 Effective Sign-up Drip Campaigns for Effective Email Marketing Conversions
7. Website Conversion Optimization: 10 Worst Reasons Your Website Isn’t Converting
8. Improve Your Inbound Marketing Results With Email: How To Supercharge Your Inbound Marketing Results With Email Marketing
9. Is Email Marketing Dead? Is Email Marketing Dead In 2021?
10. Marketing Tips For Small Businesses & Startups: Powerful Marketing Tips For Small Businesses In 2021: How To Get Explosive Growth
11. Lead Generation Complete Guide: Lead Generation Complete Guide: From Basic To 5 Powerful Strategies
12. Inbound Marketing and Email Marketing: How To Supercharge Your Inbound Marketing Results With Email Marketing

We hope you find these articles helpful on you journey to online success.

Conclusion – Hard Bounce And Soft Bounce In Email Marketing Explained: 4 Simple Ways To Solve

In this article, we discussed the issue of a hard bounce and a soft bounce in email marketing.

Email marketing is a powerful way to grow your business online and can help you to get a steady stream of sales and clients from your subscriber list.

A Hard bounce and soft bounce will hurt these prospects because you can’t sell to someone who you can’t reach.

While there isn’t a whole lot you can do to avoid every instance of hard and soft bounces we hope that you found value in this article as we’ve tried our best to help you as much as possible.

If there are any further questions or concerns on this topic please leave a comment below and we’ll help you resolve the problem.

If you’re looking for expert help with your email marketing strategy to grow your business then reach out to our team and get a free consultation today.

There are many ways to grow your business with email marketing and we would be happy to help you achieve success!