What is a soft bounce?
A soft bounce is an email that fails to reach its destination, but the reason of that failure is not permanent. The email might get delivered successfully at a later time. Reasons for a soft bounce can include an invalid email address, a full mailbox, or a server that is temporarily unavailable.
What are the most common causes of soft bounces?
There are many reasons why an email might soft bounce, but the most common reasons are:
- The recipient’s mailbox is full and doesn’t have capacity to accept any more messages.
- The recipient’s email address is invalid or no longer in use due to some reason.
- The email server is temporarily unavailable or experiencing high volumes of traffic due to which the services are affected.
- The email message contains a virus or other type of malware because of which the delivery is blocked.
- The recipient has manually blocked or unsubscribed from receiving emails from the sender.
What can you do to prevent soft bounces?
There are a few things you can do to prevent soft bounces from happening in your email marketing campaigns. One is to make sure your list is regularly updated and contains only subscribers who have voluntarily opted to receive your messages. You can use special tools made to clean your list for doing this efficiently. Checkout some of those tools here.
You should also segment your list by demographics and interests so that you can send more relevant and targeted content to each segmented group.
Test your email content and subject lines before sending them out to ensure they are as effective as they can be. You can also use an email marketing service that tracks bounces and provides feedback on why messages were bounced, so you can make changes to improve deliverability in the future.
How can you tell if an email has bounced?
There are a few ways to tell if an email has bounced. The first is to check your email server’s logs. This will tell you the number of emails sent, delivered, and bounced. However, this method doesn’t tell you which emails bounced or what was the reason of the bounce.
You can also use an email bounce notification service. These services will track of your bounces and notify you when an email has bounced. They will also tell you why the email bounced.
Make sure you check your email list for bounces. This is the most time-consuming method, but it will tell you which emails bounced along with the reason.
What should you do if you receive a soft bounce?
If you receive a soft bounce, the best thing to do is to try resending the email to the same email address, but at a different time. If that doesn’t work, then you can try sending the email to a different email address if you have that with you. If that still doesn’t work, then you can try unsubscribing the email address from your list.
What are the consequences of having too many soft bounces?
Too many soft bounces can have a number of consequences for an email marketer. First, if a recipient’s mailbox is full, the email will bounce back as a hard bounce. This can cause the email marketer to be marked as a spammer.
If a recipient’s mailbox is constantly rejecting messages due to soft bounces, the email marketer’s IP address can be blacklisted, which will cause rest of the marketer’s emails to be blocked by that provider.
When a large number of recipients are bouncing messages back to the email marketer due to soft bounces, it can indicate that the content or subject line of the emails is not resonating with recipients and needs some change for improvement.