What is a hard bounce?

Hard bounces are permanent email delivery errors that you might experience when sending an email marketing campaign.

From this lesson, you will learn:

• what hard bounces are,
• what they mean to your campaign,
• what actions you need to take to reduce your hard bounce rate.

Bounces in general

Bouncing emails are email delivery failure notifications. Receiving a bounce email means your email wasn’t delivered to the recipient. A high email bounce rate can damage the reputation of your email sending account.

There are several possible reasons for not being able to deliver emails. Some of them are temporary reasons, and some are permanent. 

The difference between hard and soft bounces

While soft bounces visibility What is a soft bounce? Soft bounces are temporary email delivery errors that you might experience when sending an email marketing... Read more » mean temporary delivery errors, hard bounces are permanent errors. You can learn more about the differences in our lesson about the difference between soft and hard bounces.

A permanent error means you cannot deliver an email to the recipient’s email address at all. The only thing you can do is remove the emails from your list that cause or might cause you hard bounces.

The main reason for hard bounces

There are several reasons for hard bounces. However, most of the time, a hard bounce occurs when the recipient’s email address doesn’t exist because the email account was closed, never existed, or was created for fraud visibility The damage temporary emails cause The damage temporary emails cause Read more » . 

Even if the email address existed at some point in time, emails go bad over time because email accounts can be closed. From the delivery failure notification email, you can find out the exact reason for your hard bounce, or you can read more about it here visibility Why emails bounce back? Technically email bounces are delivery failure notification emails. From the notification email, you can f... Read more » .

The effects of having a high hard bounce rate

Having a higher-than-normal hard bounce rate have a very similar effect to a high soft bounce rate. For example, having a high hard bounce rate will cause you an ever-increasing soft bounce rate. The only difference is that a high hard email bounce rate has a harder impact on your business visibility High Email Bounce Rate Will Kill Your Campaigns Email marketing tools emphasize the importance of bounce rate for a good reason. A high bounce rate is a c... Read more » .

Having a high hard bounce rate raises the question rightly so, whether your recipients are real subscribers. 

• You will deliver fewer emails because of your increasing bounce rate. 
• Most of your emails will land in spam folders. 
• Ultimately you will not reach your recipients, causing your business severe damage. 
• Your email account will be suspended or closed due to your high email bounce rate, putting your business at risk.

How to reduce the hard bounce rate?

As you can see, hard bounces have a severe effect on the success of your email campaigns, as well as on the profitability of your business.

To reduce your hard bounce rate, you need to remove invalid emails from your email lists regularly. To understand hard bounces better, you can read our lesson about the typical reasons for hard bounces. 

Conclusion

Hard bounces are permanent email delivery errors. Having a high hard bounce rate will severely affect your campaign and your business. 

The main reason for having a high hard email bounce rate is that the email addresses you are emailing don’t exist.

To eliminate your hard bounces:

• Remove all emails that have hard bounced.
• Remove all emails that will hard bounce.

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