In email marketing, a bounced email is an email message that gets rejected by the recipient mail server. A bounced email can be either a hard bounce or a soft bounce.
What is a hard bounce?
A “hard” bounce means an email has bounced back to the sender undelivered without having been accepted by the receiving email server. Sometimes even a valid email address can bounce.
The most common reasons for a hard bounce are:
The email address doesn’t exist
The domain doesn’t exist
The receiving email server has completely blocked delivery.
What is a soft bounce?
When e-mailing, a soft bounce is used to describe an e-mail that has bounced back to the sender undelivered after it has already been accepted by the recipient’s mail server. A soft bounce is a transient state that changes into a hard bounce after three failed sends.
The most common reasons for a soft bounce are:
Mailbox is full (over quota).
The recipient email server is down or offline.
The email message is too large.
How does Outfunnel manage bounces?
Outfunnel's deliverability system automatically unsubscribes bounces so you don't need to do this manually. A contact may bounce up to 5 times before they get unsubscribed - this depends on the type of bounce.
For example, if the email address does not exist, the contact gets unsubscribed immediately. If their email inbox is full, however, the system will try to deliver up to 5 email campaigns to them before unsubscribing the contact.
How to keep track of the bounce rate?
You can view industry benchmarks and track your account Email Health after sending out at least 250 emails. Read more.