BlogTips & tricks for reducing bounces

As a full service emarketing platform, we regularly get questions regarding one of the key metrics in our email marketing KPI reporting: the so-called “bounced email statistic”. So what are bounced emails? And as we provide a drilldown on the statistic, what is the difference between hard and soft bounces?

Let’s start with a definition

A bounced emailis simply a mail that has not reached the inbox of the client and has returned to the sender.

Hard versus soft bounces

One of the key aspects to understand bounced emails, is the difference between a hard bounce and a soft bouncing email.

The easier of the two types of bounces, is the hard bounce. A hard bounce can show up for several reasons. One reason for example is the situation where the clients email address does no longer exist. Obviously there are far more causes for a hard bounce, for example a webdomain (with email addresses) that stops to exist, a mailbox that is abandoned and eventually is removed from the mailserver, ... As our email marketing engine has built-in intelligence regarding type of bounce, it will immediately put hard bounced email addresses to non-active.

Now, regarding the soft bounces, the variations are a bit more diverse and therefore sometimes more difficult to explain why a mail has softbounced. A good example of a soft bounce is an email box that is full (eg. An employee that didn’t clean up his mailbox and eventually it ran full). The mailserver of the recipient will bounce your email as it cannot deliver the email into the inbox. As this is a (normally) temporary situation, the bounce status will be set to “soft”. Soft bounces only get removed by our mail engine after three returned mails.

As bounces are a loss of email credit and email reputation, we encourage you to keep this number as low as possible. Below you will find some more information where you can check this important metric, in addition we tell you some tips and tricks to avoid bounces and increase your email deliverability!

Where can I identify bounced emails in mailpartners?

Choose an email campaign and check its statistics. If you have zero ‘total mails bounced’, perfect! Otherwise click for more details. You will find more information about the type of bounce (hard or soft) and the reason for returning.

How do I reduce bounces?

1) Keep your address list clean

Like we’ve said before, bounces are a loss of credit. Check therefore invalid domain names and typing errors. Our system automatically removes invalid or duplicate email addresses. But when new subscribers sign up on your website or social media, they may enter a wrong address.

In the details of bounced mails, you can easily remove all hard bounces from your list or export this data into an excel file.

2) Confirm subscribers

When a user subscribes, send an auto-reply confirmation. If that mail bounces, you can attempt to correct it right from the start. You can also you a double opt-in to verify e-mail addresses. It’s little trick that will save you a lot of work afterwards!

3) Check the stats by domain

We also recommend to verify the domain statistics. There you’ll see a ranking of all the domain names that opened your email. If a certain domain name has zero opened emails, your campaign is maybe getting caught by spam filters.

4) Monitor your blacklists

Another tip is to check blacklists and major spam databases to make sure your email provider has not been added. To improve deliverability of your campaigns, we advise you to add DNS data to your domain name. You’ll find this in mailpartners under: my account, blacklist.