Email marketing is a reliably effective form of marketing in the modern world. By creating a robust email marketing campaign, you can reach an audience on different levels of engagement. It is more affordable than other marketing channels, and it is easy for beginners to get started with. Email messages can be highly targeted, they can reach a worldwide audience, and they are a great way of driving revenue.
If you are looking to expand your marketing efforts, it is a good idea to launch some productive email campaigns that will deliver measurable results. Email marketing services offer many options to measure the success of your email campaigns. There are some important metrics that you should pay attention to. One of them is a hard bounce rate.
What Is a Hard Bounce?
An email bounce is when an email can’t be delivered to the email server. This can have different causes, and email servers usually give a reason when the sender is notified of the failure.
A hard bounce is when a permanent error causes failure. This can happen if the email address is invalid or doesn’t exist, or if the email server has blocked the delivery for some reason. A firewall or email filter may also cause a hard bounce.
Hard bounces are different from soft bounces, which are when emails are returned due to temporary errors. These may be caused by full or inactive inboxes or too large email messages. Soft bounces are usually easy for email marketing software to deal with.
The Best Ways to Avoid a Hard Bounce
When websites are experiencing many hard bounces during a marketing campaign, its effectiveness is limited. This is why it is recommended to maintain a framework of best practices in your data hygiene.
Hard bounces can be caused by missing or inaccurate data. For this reason, all organizations should carry out thorough audits and uphold regular regimes of information checking. It is best to have a policy in place for cleaning data and ensure that email bounces are avoided.
Here are some other measures that can prevent a hard bounce:
- Monitor the delivery of your emails by using your email marketing software to see bounce rates, email opening, and response rates.
- Use a leading email service provider with a good reputation.
- Verify your domain, so you have permission from the server to send emails from your domain.
- Use email management choices in your emails so your customers can update their details by themselves.
- Test your emails before you send them to check they are effective for high numbers of recipients.
- Look at a database of spam emails to make sure the domain of your website is not added.
Hard bounces are always a hazard in email marketing, but if you follow the right steps and introduce improved data hygiene, you can minimize them. Then you can get back to leading a successful email marketing campaign.
