A hard bounce is a permanent rejection of an email by the recipient’s server. This can occur due to a non-existent or invalid recipient email address, either because the email domain name isn’t authentic or is incorrect or because the recipient is entirely unknown.
A high rate of hard bounces in your email subscriber list can directly affect your email deliverability, and spam filters can see this as a red flag. However, some email service providers can monitor hard bounces and remove them from your list so you don’t spend money to resend them again, and email clients will not see it as a reason to flag your email.
Soft Bounce
A soft bounce is an email that reaches its recipient’s email server but isn’t delivered for temporary reasons. It may be because the server is down, but the reasons are always temporary, you can resend the emails after some time, but if it still doesn’t go through, consider it a hard bounce and try to fix the underlying issue.
How to Improve Your Bounce Rate
Improving your bounce rate automatically boosts email delivery and can significantly contribute to the success of your marketing campaigns. One of the best ways to do this is to maintain a healthy subscriber list.
Take your time to remove inactive email subscribers to get accurate metrics and keep your list healthy. But before doing this, send a re-engagement campaign so you don’t remove people who may still be interested in your email campaigns.
The re-engagement campaigns will encourage them to start interacting with your brand again; it should explain why your subscribers are receiving the emails and then encourage them to decide if they want to stay on your list or unsubscribe. After this, you can remove all those who are still inactive.
In addition, you can send a confirmation email to new subscribers to ensure their email address is valid. When they confirm their subscription, it means they are genuinely interested in your content and want to receive your emails.