What is a soft bounce email: To learn it, you need to go through this discussion thoroughly.
Are you familiar with email bounces? If not, then you need to know it first. After that, you will learn about email soft bounce and hard bounce and their differences. Basically, email bounces happen whenever an email marketing platform or ESP (Email service provider) fails to deliver an email to the recipient’s email inbox. But is an email marketing platform the prime suspect for email bounces, including soft email bounces? No, they’re not, and to learn why and how to prevent it, we will have an in-depth discussion on the matter.
In this blog, we will talk about soft bounce email meaning, causes, and possible preventions. Let’s begin!
Table of Contents
- What is Email Bounce?
- What is a Soft Bounce email?
- What is a Hard Bounce Email?
- Soft Bounce Email Reasons
- Soft Bounce Email Impacts
- Soft Bounce Email Prevention and Solution
- Wrap Up
What is Email Bounce?
Email bounce meaning; delivery failure to the intended recipient. There are a few types of email bounces, but two main types need attention.
Two main types of email bounces
- Soft email bounce
- Hard email bounce
💡To learn about Email bounce rate, read: Email Bounce Rate: Ways to Prevent High Bounce Rates
What is a Soft Bounce email?
So, what is a soft bounce email? A soft bounce email is an email that was sent successfully but couldn’t make it to the recipient’s email inbox due to some temporary causes. Simply put, a soft bounce email is an email that was sent successfully, but for some reason, it bounced back and couldn’t make it to the receiver’s mailbox. Just like it sounds “soft,” -the bouncing issues are mild/soft. It’s a short-term delivery failure, some of which can be overcome. It mainly involves technical problems or errors from the recipient’s server.
What is a good soft email bounce rate?
A good soft email bounce rate is usually less than 2%. This means that the majority of emails are sent to their intended recipients without the influence of short-term difficulties.
What is a Hard Bounce Email?
Before diving into more details on soft email bounce, let’s briefly learn about hard email bounce so you can know the basic difference. A hard bounce email is the opposite of a soft bounce email. Email hard bounce is a solid delivery failure that comes with unsolvable issues. Frankly, hard bounces in emails are exactly as they sound- “hard.” Unlike soft bounces, they are permanent delivery failures of emails to the intended recipients.
Hard vs soft bounce email
Now that you’re aware of both: what is a soft email bounce and a hard email bounce, let’s distinguish them for better understanding.
| Hard bounce | vs | Soft bounce |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent delivery failure. | Delivery failure state | Temporary delivery failure. |
| Serious issues like blocked domains, invalid email addresses, etc. | Causes | Mild, vague issues like a large file or email size, recipient’s mailbox-full, etc. |
| Negative impacts are much more. | Negative impacts | Less negative impacts. |
| No solution. Problems are irrecoverable. | Solution | Problems are recoverable/solvable. |
Let’s elaborate on the main discussion for a better understanding of what is a soft bounce email! We’ll now go over the reason, impacts, preventions, and solutions regarding email soft bounce.
Soft Bounce Email Reasons
Soft email bounces happen due to some mild issues that are mostly resolvable. Let’s learn some possible reasons or causes behind email soft bounces.
Lack of space in the mailbox
Where would the new email land if the recipient’s mailbox is full? Nowhere, right? Hence, the lack of space in the mailbox will cause email soft bounce. And this “Mailbox-full” issue comes from the recipient’s side. So, there is no need to blame yourself if your email soft bounce occurs because of this.
Recipient’s server related issues
Any server-related issues from the recipient’s end could result in an email soft bounce.
For instance,
- Server overload: If the server is overloaded then it will cause delivery failure.
- Server down: The server can be down sometimes, which will also result in a soft email bounce.
- Technical server errors: The recipient’s server might be facing some technical errors, which will lead to an email bounce.
- Server under maintenance: The recipient’s server can sometimes be under maintenance to fix technical issues, leading to an email soft bounce.
Remember, these server related issues aren’t from the sender’s side. So relax!
Spam filters
The recipient’s email provider’s spam filters can temporarily mark any email as suspicious. So, if the recipient’s email provider takes your emails as spam, this also leads to a soft email bounce. Therefore, you must be well aware of sending bulk emails without spamming your recipients.
Too large sized email files
If your email file size is too large, then it can cause an email soft bounce. This issue is from the sender’s side. So, keeping the files’ sizes in check is important.
High email bounce rate
A high bounce rate can cause soft email bounces. How? If you have a high bounce rate, ISPs (Internet service providers) may notice that you’re sending to a low-quality mailing list and may be spam. Hence, a high bounce rate can create temporary barriers like delivery failure.
Server blocked
If your server temporarily gets blocked or restricted by ISPs, then it can cause soft email bounces. Yes, depending on the sender reputation, ESPs can blocklist your IP address or domain. They can put you on the email blacklist, too. And if it happens, they will not deliver emails from your IP address or domain.
High spam complaints
High spam complaints can cause soft bounce in email. Spam complaints raise a red mark for email service providers. Some ISPs, such as Yahoo, note in their bounce messages that your email is temporarily deferred due to user complaints. If their spam filter flags your email as spammy, and if you don’t take action to reduce it, then the spam complaints will get higher day by day, leading your email to bounce softly -delivery failure.
Over-sending emails
If you over-send emails, meaning if you send too many emails, then it can cause email soft bounce. Sometimes, over-sending emails can trigger spam filters and put you in the red zone of soft email bouncing.
Lower audience engagement
If you have a lower audience engagement, then it can cause a soft email bounce. Some ESPs take poor/lower user engagement as evidence of not including high-quality email content. This, in turn, might often create soft email bounces.
Soft Bounce Email Impacts
Now that you are well aware about what is a soft bounce email, let’s go through some of its impacts.
- High email soft bounce rates can make it more troublesome for your emails to get delivered. Yes, it will affect your deliverability. Future emails may be prohibited or routed to spam folders if email service providers (ESPs) identify your sender’s reputation as unauthentic or untrustworthy.
- Soft bounces can lead you to miss or lose opportunities. It can keep crucial communications from reaching customers, resulting in wasted opportunities for sales, customer interaction, and brand promotion.
- If you don’t reduce your soft email bounce rate and if it continuously occurs at a higher rate, then it will undoubtedly hamper the sender’s reputation.
Soft Bounce Email Prevention and Solution
So what are some possible preventions and solution to reduce it? Let’s findout!
Provide a good email customer journey
The main key to reducing soft email bounce rate is ensuring a good email journey experience for the customers and subscribers. Ensuring a better email customer journey means properly maintaining everything that will make your emails standard and engaging enough. Thus, all the reasons that can cause an email soft bounce will be gone at a greater level.
Increase audience engagement
As mentioned earlier, you need to increase audience engagement to reduce email soft bounces. The more your audience engagement is, the less you’ll be red flagged by the ESPs. And to increase it, follow the guidelines below:
- Create engaging email content. Include all the essential parts of an email and make them engaging enough to keep recipients hooked from the very opening lines to the end of your email.
- Make sure you’re sending relevant, personalized emails as these are highly aimed for engagement boost.
- Send dynamic emails because these are highly aimed at increasing engagement and providing a smooth email customer journey.
Wait for a bit
Wait a day or two to see if your email gets delivered, as soft email bounces are temporary. If, even after waiting, you see no result, then resend email or contact the recipient.
Verify your email address
Make your email address authentic to avoid the wrath of spam filters. Get a blue checkmark and verify your business email, as it will prove your authenticity. Hence, there is almost no chance of being flagged as untrustworthy or marked for spam.
Some more areas that need attention:
- Update your email list. Keep active subscribers/contacts and remove inactive ones. Maintain a good email list.
💡Learn more about the email list:
- How to Build an Email List for Free: 30+ Proven Ways
- Avoid the Awful Shortcut of Buying Email Lists at Any Cost!
- Review your email content and the recipient’s email address attentively. Check if there are any typos and fix it.
- Use double opt-in. Send confirmation emails to new subscribers to confirm their willingness to receive your business email newsletters.
- Reduce hard bounce rate. Find out the technical issues that are causing hard email bounces and try to fix them.
- Check your email deliverability regularly and work on reducing the rate if it’s high.
- Monitor your sender reputation by measuring your email bounce rates for both soft and hard bounces. This way, you can keep track of it and work on lessening the rates, which will keep your sender reputation intact. Use an effective email marketing tool like MailBluster that provides email campaign reports from where you can check the email bounce rates; see the following image.
💡For further details, read: How can I view the bounce report of a campaign?
- Lastly, respect your recipient’s decisions. It’s okay if you get no response from some recipients; accept it respectfully and remove them from the email list. Also, remove those who complain and cause email bounces along with inactive subscribers.
Wrap Up
While the email bounces are bad, let’s end this discussion with some positivity regarding soft email bounces. Wondering what can be positive about something that causes a negative impact? The fact that it’s a soft bounce and not a hard bounce is actually beneficial for you. Because having a soft email bounce means your sender reputation is still quite good as its negative impacts are less, you have mostly a good email list, and, more importantly, the issues are solvable, unlike a hard email bounce! See, that’s all positive, no? What is a soft bounce email, its reasons, prevention, and solutions have all been thoroughly discussed in this blog. Implement the ideas, use our effective email marketing tool, MailBluster, review email bounce reports regularly, and work keeping the soft bounces low.
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