How To Deal With Bounced Emails & What Can Happen If You Don’t
Occasionally when you send out an email it will come straight back at you with a ‘message undeliverable’ error or something similar. This is called a ‘bounce’: it bounced back to the sender. Bounces come in two types: soft and hard.
What’s a Soft Bounce?
A ’soft bounce’ is an email that reaches the recipient’s server, the server acknowledges that the email address is correct, but the email still can’t be delivered. Soft bounces can occur if the recipient’s mailbox is full or if there’s a temporary error.
What’s a Hard Bounce?
A ‘hard bounce’ is an email that is returned because the recipient’s address doesn’t exist (either because the recipient moved on, the domain name doesn’t exist, or the recipient is unknown).
What Do Bounced Emails Mean For My Email Campaigns?
If your system doesn’t automatically deal with bounced emails, removing bad email addresses itself, then it can be tempting to just leave bouncing emails on your list. Firstly it takes a bit of effort/programming to remove them, secondly nobody likes to see their email list size reduced (especially if you’re selling advertising space on emails & want to keep subscriber figures high). But this is the wrong thing to do for a few reasons:
- It gives you a false picture of your results: If your open rates are 10% one month & 8% the next, does that mean your creative is getting worse or just that there are less functional email addresses on your list to open in the first place?
- It wastes your resources: Your broadcasts take longer; your mail servers clog up with incoming bounces; your mailboxes fill up with incoming bounces & you’re likely to miss any important email amongst all that chaff.
- It risks your entire email strategy: If you continually send to the same bouncing email addresses, their mail servers will eventually become wise to this & (if you’re lucky) will block your emails completely or (if you’re unlucky) will report you as a spammer & potentially have you blacklisted
Trust has become a big factor in mass email over the last few years & that’s only going to continue, so it’s definitely worth putting in the effort to fix your bounces. The risk of getting blacklisted just isn’t worth it:
Firstly, blacklisting doesn’t just affect your email campaigns, it also affects your day-to-day email: say you send your campaigns from marketing@yourdomain.com; blacklisting doesn’t just affect that address, it affects everything @yourdomain.com.
Secondly, even if you’re only banned by a small mailserver, blacklists are held centrally & subscribed to by many other mailservers, so the ripple effect can easily put a gigantic hole in your ability to use email at all.
What Can I Do To Make Sure I Don’t Become Blacklisted?
Newer email broadcast systems usually include automatic systems to take care of bounces. Often they’ll remove an email address from your list after 1 or 2 hard bounces, and after 4 or 5 soft bounces. It’s worth a check in your system to see whether this option does exist & whether you have it turned on.
If you don’t have an automatic bounce removal system, you have two basic options:
- Go through your mailbox checking for bounces (either fairly regularly, or after each email) & manually remove recipients
- Upgrade your email system to automatically remove hard bounce addresses from your list immediately & soft bounces after a few failed attempts
