What is Soft Bounce?
Soft Bounce occurs when a failed email delivery occurs. That is, this metric indicates the number of undeliverable emails in any of our email marketing campaigns that bounce back to us.
Generally, this is due to a temporary problem with the email address, so once fixed, the recipient will return to receive our emails normally.
Causes of Soft Bounce
There are different reasons why a soft bounce may occur:
- Inbox full: If the mailbox is full because the user has exceeded the quota, then there is nothing we can do. It is the recipient himself who must empty his mailbox to be able to receive the emails, so if this does not happen, our messages will never arrive.
- Email size too large: This happens when the size of the email exceeds what the recipient’s inbox allows. In this case, we can identify and fix the error. If we see that our soft bounce rate is too high, we can try reducing the size of our images and attachments.
- Internet or temporary server failures: Since this is a momentary error, the email will be delivered as soon as the server problem is resolved, which may simply be down or offline.
- Filters or spam: Emails that are filtered and do not pass anti-spam barriers are not delivered and are returned.
Tips for controlling Soft Bounce
- Optimize your contacts’ database
- Continuously track bounce rates
- Renew the contacts database always respecting anti-spam practices
- Include double validation in your email marketing campaigns
Soft Bounce VS Hard Bounce
As we have seen, the soft bounce rate responds to a temporary issue with a valid email address. Therefore, the recipient will be able to receive again the emails that could not be delivered due to various problems.
However, Hard Bounce measures permanent errors that prevent email from reaching the recipient’s inbox. This happens when the email address is incorrect or invalid because we misspelled it or because it has simply ceased to exist. Therefore, the email will never reach its destination.
In the case of hard bounce rate, it is best to delete invalid addresses from our contact list since they are useless. In fact, bounces significantly affect the deliverability and reputation of the sending domain name, so it is best to fix these errors as soon as possible.
Why is it important to know these bounce rates?
The Bounce Rate gives us very useful information when analyzing the success of our email marketing campaign. Soft or hard bounces in email marketing indicate the degree of effectiveness and reliability of our contacts. Thus, they serve as a reminder to review and improve our contact list, as well as our communications.
Therefore, both soft and hard bounce are email marketing metrics that you should always control, because if their percentage is high, you will be facing a problem with the reception of your sent messages.
In both types of rebound we will have to analyze the problem and how we can solve it, if possible. As you know, this analysis is very necessary since bounces also affect our future shipments and deteriorate our reputation.
Is there an ideal bounce rate?
As you can imagine, our goal is to keep the percentage of emails, out of all those sent, that do not reach their destination as low as possible. Although there is no official number of bounced emails or estimated bounce rate, it is estimated that about 2% could be a general average to obtain a more or less feasible or stable bounce rate.
Email marketing tools such as Easymailing are the best option if you want to know how to design a good database, as they provide the ability to filter and have a more advanced contact list. This is undoubtedly one of the keys to reducing the bounce rate of your emails.