Email marketing professionals need to have a good understanding of the technical details of many terms. In addition, they also need to keep an eye on several metrics. The list of such metrics also includes email bounce backs. The latter happens due to the failure of the delivery of an email to an intended server.

An email bounce can be either soft or hard. Both differ from one another in many ways. Read on to know more about how they differ from one another.

What Is Email Bounce Back?

Email bounce back is a widely discussed topic in the world of email marketing. Why not? After all, it draws the line of separation between the success and failure of an email marketing campaign.

Email marketers send several emails as a part of their email marketing campaign. Some of their emails may not get delivered to the email inbox of recipients. From the standpoint of email marketing, it amounts to email bounce back.

Email bounce back is an automatic communication that comes from a service provider to an email sender. It informs the latter about the failure in delivering their email to their intended recipient’s email inbox. The communication also consists of the reason for the non-delivery of the email.

Now that you have come to know what email bounce back is all about it is, let talk about the two different alternatives and how they differ from each other:

Soft Bounce Vs. Hard Bounce: How They Differ From One Another

When an email bounces, it does not reach the email inbox of the intended recipient. Hard bounce and soft bounce refer to two kinds of email delivery failure. One of them is permanent by nature, whereas the other one is temporary.

A hard bounce happens due to permanent reasons. Usually, it happens due to different factors. These may range from an invalid email address to the rejection of an email by an email server. Notwithstanding the reason, a hard bounce indicates one of the permanent reasons for the non-delivery of a recipient’s email inbox.

For email marketers, it is imperative to address hard bounce at the earliest. Otherwise, it may negatively affect their email marketing campaign. Worse, it may even prevent them from achieving their targets.

On the other hand, soft bounce happens due to temporary reasons. Due to such reasons, the email from a sender does not reach the recipient’s email inbox. It usually occurs when a recipient’s email inbox gets full due to its maximum capacity.

Unlike hard bounce, email providers attempt to deliver an email to the intended recipient’s email inbox in the case of soft bounce. The email may be delivered whenever the email inbox receives new emails. This may take a few days, depending on how soon a recipient deletes excessive emails for receiving new emails.

Thus, there is a higher likelihood that an email might be delivered in the case of a soft bounce compared to a hard bounce.

How To Resolve The Problem of Email Bounce?

Hard bounce can be a cause of concern for email marketers. To get rid of it, email marketers or senders need to focus on increasing their email reputation. Fortunately, there are some proven ways of building email reputation. These include the filtration of email lists, tracking negative marketing objectives, and building email engagement.

Clearing the email list may necessitate removing all those email addresses that are invalid. Though this activity takes time, it pays dividends with desired results in email marketing.

Email validation also helps keep the email bounce rate to a minimum. An email marketer can verify the validity of recipients’ email addresses on an email list by this method. Also, it enables them to know if the email addresses of recipients are from reliable domains like Yahoo or Gmail.

The best thing about email validation is that it is an automated process. An email marketer does not need to worry about typos or making mistakes while entering the email addresses of users. Whether it is a purposeful misdirected or an honest mistake, email validation can take care of both.

Apart from these methods, an email marketer also needs to monitor the number of emails they send daily. It is a good idea to increase the volume of outgoing emails gradually.

Email providers keep an eye on the volume of emails that originate from new IP addresses. If it is higher than usual, they view them with suspicion and mark them down. This activity diminishes the email reputation of an IP address.

The sure-fire way to address this problem is to increase the volume of sending emails systematically. This helps an email marketer who sends emails from a new IP address win the trust of reputed email service providers.

Final Thoughts

The right practices in email marketing are comparable to the use of emojis in communication. Just like the idea of emojis for marketing drives engagement, adopting the best practices in email marketing produces a similar result. It helps resolve issues like email bounce rates and low email sender reputation.