What are bounces? Is there a difference between hard bounces and soft bounces? What is a drop? These are common questions and the answer to them will help keep your database clean and healthy! Clearing up your questions will also making reporting on your campaigns much more accurate. Below we’ll be discussing the difference between bounces and drops and what you should do when they happen.
Email Bounces
Basically, if an email bounces it means it was failed to be delivered to the recipient. However there are two types of bounces:
Soft Bounces
A soft bounce indicates that the email address is valid but it couldn’t be delivered. Here are some of the most common reasons this can happen:
- The mailbox was full (the user is over their quota)
- The server was down
- The message was too large for the recipient’s inbox
Hard Bounce
A hard bounce means that the email address was permanently rejected, which is most commonly caused by one of two things:
- The email address is invalid
- The email addresses doesn’t exist
The email provider that we use (Sendgrid) will automatically add hard bounces to a suppression list so that they can not be sent to again. We do this to protect your reputation because sending to previously hard bounced emails is a very bad idea!
How to improve your bounce rate
The best way to reduce the number of bounces is to be vigilant about your data. You're doing your best to reach customers who actually want to hear from you; don't waste time or resources interacting with people who aren't interested! If you want to limit the number of email bounces you get, here’s a few tips:
Maintain a clean and active database: Old email addresses, unengaged contacts and even the wrong type of contacts could be weighing you down. Make sure to keep your database clean by doing the following:
- Weekly purge of bounces, drops and unsubscribes
- Quarterly purge of unengaged prospects
- Monthly review of prospecting settings
- Keep everything in one place
Use explicit consent on your forms:
When launching forms or web magnets from the platform you can give the end user the option to opt-in for different forms of marketing. Having explicit consent is a great way of guaranteeing valid and engaged contact records.
Dropped
Email events classified as drops are emails that have previously bounced or unsubscribed. Sendgrid keeps email lists which track bounces, spam reports, and unsubscribes. If an email address ends up on one of these lists they will be dropped before sending to protect your reputation.
Basically if an email address has been dropped before sending it has been identified as a bad email and will not be delivered. We do everything we can to ensure your content is getting in front of the right people!