Do you know what Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce are? These two concepts are fundamental to your marketing strategy. Therefore, the Amplifica Digital produced this article to help you better understand how they work and how they arise. Enjoy reading!
What are Bounces?
When users subscribe to Landing Pages to receive their e-mails, the information collected there must necessarily go to some contact base.
Over time, this data becomes outdated. With this, your basis for sending marketing e-mail is outdated and some e-mail messages sent may be returned by the recipient's server, generating what we call a bounce.
Bounces are returns from providers to email addresses that have an error. When an email is rejected by the recipient's server, it is considered to have a “bounce”. The bounce can be divided into two categories: Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce. Here's how to tell them apart:
Hard Bounce:
Occurs when an email cannot be delivered for permanent reasons. These reasons can be many, but the most common are:
- The recipient's mailbox does not exist in the destination domain;
- The domain name does not exist;
- The recipient's email server has blocked receipts.
The recommendation is that your campaign never has more than 3% hard bounce. That's because high rates of this type of error are a strong indicator that your email list is not real or very old, and sending emails to these recipients is a very bad practice.
For this and other reasons, it is very important that, once an email returns as a hard bounce, you deactivate that address from your list immediately, to avoid damage to your reputation as a good email sender.
One of the actions that can be used to combat Hard Bounces is to include a short paragraph in each of your emails, with an informative text and a link that allows your customers to update the information and eventually exchange the old email for the new one.
Soft Bounce:
It is an email that was not delivered for temporary reasons, the following being the most common:
- The recipient's inbox is full;
- There may have been a failure to receive on the part of the recipient or some blocking at the destination;
- The e-mail time in the queue has expired. The sending server attempted to relay or deliver the message.
Unlike Hard Bounce, in the case of Soft Bounce it is not recommended to remove these contacts from your list, unless you notice that a certain email results in this type of bounce for a few months.
As a soft bounce is a less serious problem than a hard bounce, the limits for this type of error are more flexible, but still the recommendation is that your campaign does not have more than 6% of this type of error. Also, in some cases, an email that bounced back as a soft bounce may actually be experiencing a permanent downtime.
For example, if the error is received because the recipient's box is full and the user never clears that box, then whenever you send an email to that address you will get a soft bounce error. For this reason, it's important to remove email addresses that bounce back repeatedly as a soft bounce, so you don't experience deliverability issues in the future.
Tips to Avoid Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce
Clean up mailing lists before importing
When importing an email list, the first step is to make sure that those Leads make sense to your base and that they want to receive your content. In this way, in addition to avoiding bounces, you will be acting in accordance with the LGPD.
Before importing, it is recommended to clean the list, if possible, using a service that checks your entire list and points out which are the valid and invalid emails.
Create a low-activity user segmentation
Since there's no additional financial cost to continuing to send emails, many companies don't care about the opening rate of an Email Marketing send, but the providers do.
Email engagement metrics are also relevant to build your reputation with email providers and ensure your message doesn't land in your Leads' SPAM box.
Therefore, we recommend that you build a segmentation of disengaged Leads and build a parallel email marketing strategy for them, aiming to engage these Leads.
Think of strategies to encourage the use of valid emails
One way to ensure that only valid email addresses enter your database is to use double confirmation in your forms. The functionality sends a message to the registered email and only after clicking on the email will the Lead enter your Leads base.
Another strategy is that when the user shows interest in rich materials produced by your company, make it clear that the link to the material will be sent by email. Therefore, if the “Lead” uses an invalid email, he will not have access to the material he wants to download.
We emphasize that this does not prevent the entry of invalid Leads, but reduces it, making those who are really interested in the material inform a valid email.
A Amplifica Digital uses and recommends RD Station. A platform that indicates the emails that most feature both types of Bounce, thus helping to keep your email list clean.
We hope this content is useful to you!
