What You Should Know About Hard and Soft Bounce in 2024

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Updated: February 22nd, 2024

What You Should Know About Hard and Soft Bounce in 2024

Email marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach potential customers and build relationships with current ones. However, email can also be tricky to navigate. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your email marketing efforts, it’s important to understand the different types of email bounces.

Hard and soft bounces are two of the most common types of email bounces, and understanding them is key to creating successful campaigns. This guide will provide an overview of soft and hard bounces, how to identify them, and how to prevent them from hindering your email marketing goals.

Once you’ve got a handle on hard and soft bounces, you’ll be well on your way to creating an effective email marketing strategy for 2023.

What are hard bounce and soft bounce?

When a recipient's mail server rejects an email, an email bounce occurs. A multitude of reasons can cause an email to bounce on a server. Because a bounced email means that the recipient will never receive your message, which could mean a significant loss of revenue, this might seem like a technical email issue. Most frustratingly, the marketing team that ran the email campaigns was using email newsletter templates but did not consider or have a well-structured understanding of the common reasons for email rejections.

The cause of a bounced email message may be a combination of many things, not just one. The recipient's full mailbox or the domain name not existing, for example, are just two of many possible causes. What distinguishes a soft bounce message from a hard bounce message? A hard bounce message is permanent, while a soft bounce is not. The two bounce email meanings are a hard bounce message, which requires action to be fixed, and a soft bounce message, which may be solved with time.

Hard bounce

An email that could not be delivered permanently is known as a hard bounce. The recipient's server might not accept emails, for example, or the recipient's email address might be a fake address. There are numerous reasons why an email might be hard to bounce, but the basic idea is that it is a permanent failure. You should delete all of these email addresses from your list.

Soft bounce

Some email inboxes are too full to receive messages, or the files are excessively large, for example. If an email fails to be delivered, the recipient's inbox is typically congested or the email is excessively large, the majority of email services will attempt to deliver the email over the course of a few days. It is important to monitor these addresses if you see them reappearing frequently.

Try to keep your total bounce rate under 2% — email deliverability issues will start to appear if it is higher than that.

Why do hard bounces happen?

There are many reasons an email might bounce hard or softly.

There are a few common reasons for hard bounces:

An error has occurred, and the message cannot be delivered. This might be because the recipient misspelled their email address , or because the message was intended for a different organization.
You’re offering something in exchange for a contact email, and that’s why the email address is fake.
Your message was denied because the receiving email server either rejected your email or because the recipient blocked you.

When your emails are not being delivered, you will usually receive a delivery status notification. To figure out why your emails aren't being delivered, you should keep retrying the emails to gain additional information. You should keep track of the date of the bounce, the bounce code, the bounce type, and the bounce description shown in your campaign reports.

These SMTP error code numbers provide some context if you're having issues sending mail. These codes are a standard implemented by mail servers and are used to diagnose sending problems. Mail providers frequently provide these codes with their messages to inform you.

The recipient does not exist

A bounce marked as a “non-existent email address” indicates that the address has a typo or that the person who had the address has left the organization.

Someone may have given you a fake email address if you were offering something online in exchange for an email.

It's crucial to review the contacts in this category and see if there are any obvious typos in the email address. If there aren't any, try to reach the contacts by other means to verify the address.

Your email was blocked by a server

If the email addresses are listed in the “Blocked” category, the receiving server has blocked the incoming email.

Servers in government institutions or schools are often stricter when it comes to receiving emails.

You must talk to the contact and ask them to properly categorize your emails, or if they are sent to a corporate address, ask their system administrators to unblock IP addresses, in order to fix this problem.

What about soft bounces?

There are several common reasons for email soft bounces:

An undeliverable email is caused by a temporary server outage or server maintenance. If this issue persists, the server may be permanently out of service.
In addition to the bounce message, a soft bounce can also indicate that the recipient's inbox is too stuffed with messages and cannot accept any more. This may also indicate that your contact has stopped using this email address, so you should follow up with them through another medium to update their information in your system.
The recipient server has specific anti-spam, antivirus, and DMARC authentication requirements that your message does not meet.
Your message is too large.
If your contact is away on vacation or otherwise out of the office , your emails to them will be returned.

DNS Failure or other errors

On the receiving end, DNS failures are often due to a problem with the Domain Name System. The message was not delivered at that time because of a DNS issue. A server may have been down or incorrectly configured, causing the DNS failure. A hard bounce will likely occur if the message is not delivered after multiple attempts over the next few days.

The error might also appear if the domain you send it to doesn’t exist. In this case, there will be no future attempts, and you will need to look for other ways to contact a recipient.

Other errors can occur during a transmission — for example, a connection may time out. In such a case, a server is likely to retry several times at a later time before giving up.

Conclusion

Bad things happen when you bounce an email marketing server, so keep track of your hard and soft bounces throughout every campaign and take care of mass email software that analyzes why your emails bounce. A hard or soft bounce could cost you money if it prevents a customer from receiving your email.

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Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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