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In email marketing, bounces occur when an email fails to reach the recipient’s inbox. Bounces are categorized into hard bounces and soft bounces, and handling them properly is critical for maintaining your sender reputation, ensuring deliverability, and optimizing campaign performance.

1. What is a Hard Bounce?
A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure. This means the email cannot be delivered due to an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address.

Common causes of hard bounces include:

Typo in the email address (e.g., [email protected])

The domain doesn’t exist

The email account has been deleted

How to handle hard bounces:

Immediately remove hard-bounced email addresses from your list.

Use double opt-in forms to verify addresses during signup.

Run email verification checks before importing large lists.

Monitor bounce rates — consistently high hard bounce rates can damage your sender reputation and lead to blacklisting.

2. What is a Soft Bounce?
A soft bounce is a temporary issue preventing delivery. The jordan phone number list recipient’s email address is valid, but the message couldn’t be delivered at that time.

Common causes of soft bounces include:

Recipient’s inbox is full



Message size is too large

Email flagged as spam by recipient’s server

How to handle soft bounces:

Retry sending the message a few times (most email marketing platforms do this automatically).

If a soft bounce persists for several attempts (typically 3–5), consider treating it as a hard bounce and removing or reviewing the contact.

Monitor trends — a high volume of soft bounces may indicate issues with email content, sender IP, or domain reputation.

3. Best Practices for Managing Bounces
Use a reputable email service provider (ESP) with automatic bounce handling features.

Regularly clean and validate your email list.

Implement engagement-based segmentation: focus on contacts who consistently open or click your emails.

Keep your content clean and compliant with email best practices to avoid spam filters.

Authenticate your domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to improve deliverability.

Conclusion
Effectively handling hard and soft bounces helps maintain a healthy email list and improves campaign results. Proactively managing these issues ensures that your emails reach engaged recipients, protects your sender reputation, and enhances the overall success of your email marketing efforts.