One of the biggest failures in Email Marketing has to be the hard bounce. Since your success in any email marketing campaign is when your subscribers open your email.
So, when you discover that your conversion rates are dropping, one of the most common causes is email bouncing. This is when, for some reason, your subscribers are not even getting your emails. The most severe level of email bouncing is called a hard bounce.
What is email bounce?
Email bouncing happens every day. However, it is very troubling when your business depends on the subscribers on your list getting every email that you send out.
Email bounce simple means the inability of your emails to reach one or more email addresses after attempting to send a message across. There are numerous reasons why your email could be bounced, and it happens to billions of emails every day.
There are also different types of bouncing. It can be either a soft bounce or a hard bounce.
What is a soft email bounce?
A soft email bounce is a temporary failure when delivering your email to the email addresses on your list. Most email services that encounter a soft bounce automatically retry to send the email several times until it finally delivers successfully.
However, if it is not able to send it after a certain number of attempts, it will be changed to a hard bounce by your email service.
What is a hard email bounce?
A hard email bounce is an email that has permanently been blocked from being delivered by your email service. There could be many reasons for a hard email bounce. But, it commonly occurs when your subscriber recently changed their email address and canceled the one you have for them.
However, it is highly recommended to quickly remove any email address affected by a hard bounce notice from your email service.
When it comes to your email marketing campaigns, you should always pay close attention to the results of each one to ensure that you didn’t get any bounced emails.
Either way, if you find any soft bounces, you should take a look to be sure that you are cleaning up your email subscriber list. And, if you happen to find any hard email bounces, you definitely need to delete them from your list.
We came up with a strong list of factors that can contribute to why one or more of the emails sent out as part of your email campaigns get hard bounced. Unfortunately, many of them are completely out of your control, but you need to recognize them when analyzing the results of your email campaigns.
6 factors that can cause an email to bounce
- The Recipient’s inbox is full
- The subscriber is blocking your email account
- Recipient’s machine is Out of Office
- The email server is overwhelmed
- Invalid email address
- The email file size is too large
1. The recipient’s inbox is full
If your recipient’s inbox is full, your email will definitely not be successful. This is one of the most common causes of getting a bounced email after sending out your campaign. Many of the most popular email services on the Internet are careful to evaluate the quality of the email campaign.
The services always report the delivery results. But if any of the recipient’s email inbox is full, it will not receive your email being sent out with your campaign. As a result, this factor will lead to a bounced email if it happens to one or more addresses from your email list.
» MORE: Best Email Marketing Service for Bounces
2. The subscriber is blocking your email account
The ability to block specific email addresses to avoid receiving emails is part of most email systems. Unfortunately, this can be a problem for email marketers who rely on being able to send out their emails using an automated system.
For any reason, a person can block any email addresses from being able to send emails to their inbox, and if your email address happens to be blocked and you have them in your campaign, it will be bounced.
However, it isn’t likely that this kind of thing would happen since most of your recipients are subscribers and should be willing to receive your emails.
» MORE: Best Automated Email Marketing Software
3. Recipient’s machine is Out of Office
Many of the most popular email systems have several different tools built into their email programs that include useful functionalities. One of the most common is an automated answering system.
The “Out of Office” tool is a very common and useful tool that allows you to convey a short message to the person sending an email.
Unfortunately, most email marketing automated systems flag recipients with an “Out of Office” message and bounce the email as undeliverable, and it becomes blocked eventually.
» MORE: Best Email Marketing Software for 10,000 Contacts
4. The email server is overwhelmed
Server hardware varies among email service providers. Therefore, it is not out of the realm of possibility that, at any time, a server could become overwhelmed at some point.
This could easily bounce one or more of the emails that you sent out. Unfortunately, this is completely out of control, and you have no recourse if it happens.
5. Invalid email address
Another common cause of bounced email is having an invalid email address in your email system. Inevitably, you will have some problems with subscribers entering their email address incorrectly when they sign up.
Unfortunately, this is unavoidable, and you need to be cognizant of that. If you notice bouncing, you need to be ready to remove them and move on.
» MORE: Best Looking Email Marketing Software
6. The email file size is too large
Most popular email clients have limits to the size of files that they will accept. So, if you consistently send out large emails as part of your marketing strategy, you are taking the risk of being bounced.
Since most have file size limits around 20+ MB, you need to be careful not to have too much content that will bring your file size up to that limit.