Hard Bounce Versus Soft Bounce

Are you doing “the bounce”?

No, it’s not a new hip-hop dance.
Bounce, or bounce-back, is an e-mail that is returned to you because it cannot be delivered. You’ve probably gotten bounces on your personal e-mail program when you send an e-mail and then receive a response saying it was undeliverable.

These get to be more of a headache, however, when you publish an e-zine. Sending e-mail to more people means more bounce-backs. And too many bounce-backs can cause your mailings to be blocked by certain Internet service providers, meaning many of your e-mails won’t reach your readers.

What You Need to Know

There are two sorts of email bounces:
A hard bounce is an email that has been come back to you on the grounds that the beneficiary’s location is invalid. A hard bounce may happen on the grounds that the space name doesn’t exist, the beneficiary is obscure, or there’s some system issue on the beneficiary’s end.Hard bounces are for all time undeliverable email messages. The causes are invalid locations (email or space name doesn’t exist, spelling blunders), or the mail server has obstructed your server, or filtered messages and returned them as hard bounced.

A soft bounce is an email message that gets similarly as the beneficiary’s mail server yet is bounced back before it achieves the beneficiary. A standout amongst the most widely recognized foundations for a soft bounce is a full letter box. This will happen A LOT with your endorsers who utilize free email administrations like Yahoo and HotMail in light of the fact that they take into consideration microscopic email storage.A soft bounce is an email message that returns to the sender because of some brief reasons: busy mailbox, blocked domain, mailbox full, account temporary down, network busy, mailbox over a limit, etc. If after several attempts to deliver such a message, it still bounces, a soft bounce email is classified as the hard bounce.

What You Need to Do

Ask your current list service how they handle your bounces.

Some of them have a hands-off policy and don’t do anything. If so, ask them how you can go for yourself and see how many names are bouncing and who they are. Then you can decide to keep them on your list or delete them.

One factor to consider here is your listserver’s “retry” policy. That is, how many times do they try to send out your e-zine to the soft-bounce people? Some only try once, others try several times, waiting a few hours in between.

Sometimes you’ll also see a few e-mail addresses that are obviously misspelled (e.g. “nancy123@aolcom” — note the missing dot), and you can fix them yourself manually.

If your listserver is hands-off, you’ll want to go in and look at your bounce situation at least once a month to check things out and delete names if necessary.

The other extreme is list services that automatically remove people after only hard bounce, that isn’t good because a temporary problem could cause it as a network outage. If this is your listserve’s policy, find out if you can change it.

Then some list services take the middle road by automatically deleting anyone who has had a certain number of bounces in a row. Ideally, you want them to wait longer on soft bounces to ensure the problem isn’t resolved over the next few issues you send out.You can often instruct the listserver to unsubscribe soft bounces after a particular time, say, five bounces over a two-week period.

Whatever your case, be sure you get a handle on your bounces this month.

Dealing with bounced emails after each mailing campaign is critical for every reputable marketer. Here are some quick tips you can follow to minimize the number of bounces, reduce email delivery costs, and increase conversion rates of your email campaign:

– Check emails in your list for validity. You can use an email verifier software (you can find plenty of them on the Internet) to test the list of invalid emails/domains. Or, at least check the addresses for typos manually.

– Confirm email addresses. Send a confirmation message after the user subscribes to your list. If the message bounces, you will know that the invalid address from the start. Also, you’ll want to have a “Confirm E-mail Address” field in your sign-in form requiring the user to re-type his email address.

– Include “Edit Your Account” link in your emails. This will make it possible for your subscribers to keep their email addresses up-to-date with you.

– Check the blacklists and assure that neither you nor your ISP is blacklisted. This is important because you will not receive a bounced message as a result of a blacklist.

– Remove SpamTrap addresses from your list. A spam trap address is an email address, to which nobody should be sending an email. Such email addresses are often added maliciously to identify the senders of spam. Examples are abuse@ postmaster@, nospam@, etc.

– Send a test message to yourself. Before emailing to your subscribers, send a copy of your newsletter to yourself or some of your colleagues to check if everything is all right (pictures are displayed, links are working, formatting is correct.