What Happens When an Email Bounces Back?

It can be frustrating when you’ve put time and effort into designing an email campaign, and upon sending it to your subscribers, you receive notifications that some of your emails bounced. This article will help you understand what happens when an email bounces, options to fix it for both the sender and recipient, and email engagement best practices to prevent high bounce rates. 

What Does It Mean When an Email Bounces Back?

When an email bounces back, it means it wasn’t accepted by the receiving domain. Email bounces can happen for various reasons, and it is a part of managing your email list for email marketing campaigns. There are three main types of email bounces, which are:

• Soft bounce: Soft email bounces usually happen when a recipient’s inbox is full, there’s a server error, or they have auto-replies turned on. Soft bounces are usually temporary and tend to resolve on their own, since most email service providers (ESPs) will try to resend them after a short amount of time. 
• Hard bounce: Hard email bounces happen when it is impossible for the email to be sent. This usually occurs when an email is sent to a fake email address, an invalid email address, or if the recipient has blocked you.
• Blocklisted bounce: Blocklisted email bounces typically occur during email campaigns when ESPs detect your content as spam, when you send bulk emails to a large list of subscribers, or if your engagement rates have been consistently low for a long time. The potential of being blocklisted due to low engagement is why engagement metrics are so important for email marketing. 

If you’re wondering how to manage your email list to keep bounce rates low, AudiencePoint can help. AudiencePoint offers a tool called ListFit that helps analyze email subscriber activity, so you can identify when subscribers have become inactive or remove any invalid email addresses from your email list. 

AudiencePoint can also help improve your engagement metrics by helping you improve send times, identifying what types of emails subscribers are most engaged with, and segmenting email campaigns. This helps prevent blocklisted bounces that can be caused by low engagement rates. 

Why Are My Incoming Emails Being Rejected?

It’s frustrating when you’re trying to receive an email from someone, and it keeps getting rejected. If the sender is receiving a “message rejected” notification, it is usually due to the content appearing as spam, their email/IP address being marked as spam by ESPs, or them being blocked by the recipient. 

The first step is checking to see if you blocked them. If they aren’t blocked, either the content needs to be fixed to not look like spam, or they must investigate why their email/IP address is being marked as spam. Most “message rejected” notifications will provide options for the sender to look into why this is happening. 

Why Are Emails Sent to Me Bouncing Back to the Sender?

Along with having incoming emails being rejected, another problem that can happen is emails sent to you bouncing back to the sender. The most common causes of this are your inbox being full, the servers being down temporarily, or having auto-replies turned on. Checking each of these aspects can provide an easy fix to the problem.

How Do I Stop Emails from Bouncing Back?

Email bounces usually happen due to errors on the sender’s end. If emails you are sending are bouncing back, there are several fixes or ways to prevent this from happening in the future. The best ways to stop or prevent email bounces are:

• Use email marketing best practices: One of the most important things to do to avoid high bounce rates is to use email marketing best practices like providing value in every email, managing send times and frequency, using double opt-ins when having people sign up for your email list, and making sure your subject lines don’t look spammy. 
• Use an email sender software: Tools and software are available for email marketing that help companies with extensive email lists send bulk emails while maintaining high deliverability rates. These tools are good options for bulk email marketing campaigns. 
• Track engagement metrics: Tracking engagement metrics and optimizing your email campaigns is essential to maintain low bounce rates. AudiencePoint’s email insight software can help by giving you actionable insights from email campaigns that you can use to improve subscriber engagement rates. 
• Clean up your email list: Removing email addresses from your list that hard bounce and trying to re-engage subscribers that have been inactive for a while are good ways to clean up your email list, recover engagement rates, and reduce bounce rates.

Implementing each of these aspects will help you improve bounce rates and prevent email bounces in the future. 

How AudiencePoint Can Help You Tackle Your Email Marketing Needs

AudiencePoint can help tackle your email marketing needs by providing detailed data tracking and insights from your email marketing campaigns. Insights from AudiencePoint will help you improve send times, know when subscribers are most likely to convert, find best practices for sending re-engagement emails, and effectively send segmented email campaigns. 

All these valuable insights and tools are easy to implement into your email marketing strategy, so you can improve engagement and prevent high bounce rates. If this sounds like it would be useful for your business, you can contact us to learn more about how AudiencePoint can help you.