Bounce is an email address that cannot receive emails because of a permanent or temporary error. This means that your sent email was rejected by this lead.
Bounces are also a quality metric for your contact base, as high levels of email rejection indicate that you need to review and clear your list, as well as how these leads are captured.
There are two types: Soft Bounces and Hard Bounces. Let’s see what they are and how they work.
Difference Between Soft and Hard Bounces
Soft bounces
This is when a lead rejects your email for some temporary reason, such as:
- Inbox full;
- Lead email server does not respond;
- Email is too large and takes time to deliver;
- Server antispam protection rejected the campaign;
- The maximum amount of uploads to the same server has been exceeded in a given period of time.
- When the lead is no longer a Soft Bounce, the campaign is not resubmitted. However, you can submit other campaigns for this lead as this state is temporary.
Hard bounces
Leads are classified as Hard Bounces when:
- Lead email address does not exist or was misspelled;
- The domain does not exist;
- Lead’s email server has blocked sending your emails.
- Hard Bounce is a permanent state, meaning this lead will not be reactivated to send your campaigns.
We recommend that your campaign has no more than 3% Hard Bounces, as the high rates of this error are an indication that your contact list has been purchased or is already too old. Therefore, whenever an email returns as Hard Bounce, it is advisable to inactivate it from the contact list to ensure a good reputation on the email servers.
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