Whether you’re new to email marketing or a veteran, you’re certainly familiar with the huge amount of new terms you need to know. For many people it seems like there is a new term to learn every day for months on end. What were the first terms you remember learning? Do you remember understanding the difference between what is a hard bounce and what is a soft bounce? If you’re new to email marketing, you’re probably here because you want to learn.
Like many others, you’re probably also curious about the difference between hard and soft bounces. If the terms are still new to you, you’re probably already aware that they terms are related to deliverability. You also probably know that one is bad and the other one is just sometimes bad.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Hard and soft bounces are crucial metrics, so here’s a quick guide to help better understand these two email marketing terms.
What is a Hard Bounce? What is a Soft Bounce?
In general, when an email “bounces”, it means that the message can’t be delivered to an inbox. “Hard” and “soft” are used to define two types of failures.
A hard bounce is an email that couldn’t be delivered due to reasons that are described as permanent. The email could not exist, the domain is fake or incorrect, or maybe the email server doesn’t accept incoming emails. There is a wide variety of reasons for an email to hard bounce. but the essence of a hard bounce is that the failure is permanent.
If you do see emails in your recipient list flagged as a hard bounce, the emails should be removed to keep your sender reputation intact.
A soft bounce is an email that couldn’t be delivered due to a non-permanent or temporary reason. For example an inbox might be full, an attachment is too large. There are also many other reasons an email could soft bounce. Typically, when an email soft bounces, email providers will continue to attempt sending for the next few days.
So what should you do in the case of a soft bounce? Monitor the email addresses that soft bounce and if the same emails continue to be flagged as a soft bounce, remove them from your list.
Why should you even care? If you ignore the soft and hard bounces and your bounce rate moves above 2%, you’ll likely face more deliverability issues beyond simply hard and soft bounces.
There you have it; what is a hard bounce, what is a soft bounce, and what should you do in response to each. Hard bounces are permanent delivery failures. Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures. It’s not complicated but understanding the difference is crucial to your understanding your email marketing metrics.
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