Bounced Emails
When viewing your reporting data for campaigns or automations, at some point, you'll see a percentage of Bounced emails. Anytime an email bounces, that means that the receiving server rejected the email. But that could be caused by a few different things!
There are two types of bounced emails:
Your bounce rate is a big part of overall deliverability. Continuously sending to email addresses that bounce can negatively affect your sender reputation, so your goal should be to keep this number as low as possible.
Hard Bounces
A hard bounce means that the email cannot be delivered for a permanent reason, for example:
- the email address is fake or invalid (misspellings happen more often than you'd think!)
- the domain does not exist
- the contact is not accepting emails
- the account has been closed
Contacts within your account that have registered as a hard bounce will immediately be added to your suppression list so they cannot be sent another email.
Soft Bounces
A soft bounce means that the email cannot be delivered for a temporary reason, for example:
- the contact's inbox is full
- the email is too large
- the contact's email server is overloaded, experiencing delays or is offline
We will continue trying to deliver to a soft-bounced contact a few times before it is considered a hard-bounce and added to suppression.
Viewing Your Bounced Emails
To view the bounced emails, locate your campaign or automation reporting data. Go to Domain Breakdown to see the number of bounced emails, by domain.
You are also able to view the specific emails that bounced.
Troubleshooting
While there's no way to specifically tell what the bounce reason is (and most of them are outside of your control as a sender) the most common kind of soft bounce is actually Blocked Due to Content which means the email itself was caught by a junk filter for spammy content.
Additional Resources
- The Marketing Automation Hustle Podcast: An Insiders Tour on Email Deliverability (and Delivery)
- 3 Reasons Your Emails Are Going to Spam (& What You Can Do About it)
- Your Guide to Sendlane Deliverability
Additionally, if you hit any roadblocks you can always get in touch with our team of email marketing automation experts right here.