Email Bounce: Definition, Types, What to Do About Them
Understanding Email Bounce
Ever wondered whether your emails are reaching all your target customers or not? Well, some of them might not be. It is time to understand why this may be happening.
Email bounce occurs when an email communication fails to reach its intended recipient for several reasons.
This leads to poor email performance. Depending upon the type of bounce, taking corrective action at the right time can help improve essential metrics for your email campaigns.
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How to Know If Your Email Is Bounced
When an email bounces, the recipient’s server sends an automated message to the sender about the non-deliverability of the message and the corresponding reason for it.
Modern CRM and automation tools display the number of bounced emails in tabular and graphical formats for you to analyze. You could exclude these users from future campaigns or try to target them again if the bounce was a temporary issue.
Types of Bounce Rates
Not all bounced email addresses need to be treated in the same way. Study the email delivery report in your CRM software for more details. Discussed below are the two significant types of bounce rates:
Soft Bounce
A soft bounce occurs when the issue with email delivery is temporary. Common soft bounce issues include inboxes being full or the email size being too large, or the server being down. The campaign can be sent to these users again and have them in your email marketing for future campaigns.
Hard Bounce
On the other hand, a hard bounce is when the issue with email delivery is of a permanent nature. This happens when an invalid email address or the domain is non-existent. It is best to remove these addresses to improve your email marketing performance.
Why Emails Bounce
Keeping email bounce rates to a minimum is an important email marketing activity to ensure the optimization of campaigns. Bounce rate is a percentage of email addresses that did not receive the email sent by the marketer.
An email bounce can be attributed to several reasons. Let us explore some of them below:
Non-Existent Email Address
As the name suggests, non-existent email addresses are emails that either do not exist or have been deleted. This could also happen if someone mistakenly entered the wrong character while sharing their email.
There is a chance of your customers voluntarily entering an incorrect email address into your opt-in forms to get access to free resources. Ensure that email bounce checkers verify emails.
Undeliverable Email
What happens when the recipient’s server is down due to overload? Where do the emails that were to reach them go?
These fit into the undeliverable category of bounced emails. These emails can be targeted again later, but if the problem persists for longer durations, it may mean that the server is permanently gone.
Mailbox Full
Email service providers offer some free space to store emails, pictures, videos, and other files to their users. Google offers 15 GB of free space across all Google products like Drive, Gmail, Photos, Sheets, and others. If you require more space, you must choose a paid plan.
There may be chances that the recipient has exhausted their space or that their inbox is full. They will need to clear some space to start receiving future emails.
DNS Failure
DNS stands for Domain Name System. This issue occurs when the recipient cannot get your email communication due to problems with DNS on their end. It is possible that the server was temporarily down or was not configured properly. In such cases, the email delivery is tried again over the next few days, and the results are returned accordingly.
Vacation/Auto Reply
Auto replies and vacation responses are set up when people are on vacation and cannot check their emails but are still receiving your communications.
If email bounce due to this reason continues for a more extended period, you may want to reconsider marketing to these addresses to improve your email bounce rates.
Tips to Prevent Bounced Emails Effectively
Bounced emails lead to your email metrics looking bad. Your email bounce rate should be less than 2%, if it is more than that, you should take corrective action.
Sharing some effective tips to prevent or reduce email bounce:
- Verify the email addresses when the customers opt-in to your communications. Use double opt-ins. However, do not make the whole process too complicated for the users.
- Build your own email list, do not buy a list. Buying a list might lead to a lot of your emails landing in the spam folder because the users did not consent to receive emails from you.
- Keep an option for users to opt out of your communications at the end of your emails so that the people feel that they are in charge of their inboxes.
- Check your campaign delivery reports regularly, check for soft bounces and hard bounces.
- Have an option for users to update their email addresses with verification mechanisms in place.
- Remove repeated bounces.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean if an email is bounced?
If an email bounces, it simply means it did not reach the intended end user. Depending upon the reason for the bounce, it may be categorized into a soft bounce or a hard bounce.
Where do bounced emails go?
Bounced emails do not reach their intended recipients. The sender is sent back a bounce message and the reason for the bounce. Some of the emails can be tried again and sent after some time.
Should I remove bounced emails?
If the issue is temporary, the emails can be sent again after some time. However, if the bounce is happening consistently, it may be a hard bounce, and it is better to remove it to improve email bounce rates. You can check the reason for a bounce in your CRM software.