Q. What is bounce?
A. There are two types of bounces, hard bounce and soft bounce.
Q. What is hard bounce?
A. Hard bounce means the email address is an invalid one or it does not exist.
Q. What is soft bounce?
A. Soft bounce means the email is bounced by major ISPs.
Q. Bounce rates
A. For a clean list, hard bounce rate should be lower than 3%. If it is high, emails might be rejected by ISPs.
In general, soft bounce should be lower than 3%. If it is higher than 10%, indicated that emails are bounced by ISPs because of different reasons.
Q. Major reasons of soft bounce
A. Soft bounce might be caused by the following three situations:
- Excessive user complaints
- Blacklisted by ISPs or Anti-spam organisations
- Exceed sending quota that ISPs required
Q. How to avoid high hard bounce rate?
A. Collect new users through double opt-in policy, which means sending confirmation email to users before sending EDM to them. This is the most effective method.