Hard bounce vs. soft bounce: What's the difference?

Key quotes:

• "Emails have been a time-honored way of corresponding with people for reasons both professional and personal."
• "As part of your email marketing campaign, you want to get your marketing collateral out to as many people as you can, who are a part of your mailing list."
• "An email bounce is what happens when the emails you send out don’t reach the recipient’s inbox for whatever reason."
• "Also known as a non-delivery report, when a server rejects your email, it sends you a bounce in accordance with RFC 5321."
• "By knowing the differences between them, you can learn how to avoid and also fix email bounce back issues."
• "Hard bounces are what happens when one of your emails become permanently undeliverable to an address."

Key quotes:

• "Compare the self-reported bounce rates of two popular email marketing services, MailChimp and Constant Contact."
• "The list of criteria provided to score emails as SPAM is always getting longer and longer."
• "If your monthly industry hire/separation rate is 4.5%, and you don’t email a particular list for 3 months, then potentially 12.9% of your contacts may have left their company by the time your next email blast goes out."
• "Most email services will attempt to resend messages that soft bounce."
• "Hubspot, for example, will attempt to resend emails that have soft bounced for up to 72 hours until the message is either successfully delivered or it fails permanently."
• "A hard bounce occurs when an e-mail message is returned to the sender because the recipient’s address is invalid."

Key quotes:

• "It’s essentially the percentage of visitors who enter a website and then leave after initial contact (hence ‘bounce’), rather than continuing the journey into your website.In essence, your bounce rate helps you determine the effectiveness of a critical ‘conversion’ generating page on your website — the entry page."
• "While web analytics tools define bounce rate as the percentage of single-page sessions, ClickTale analyses the bounce rate on the visitor level and differentiates between the types of bouncers, based on visitors’ actual Engagement Time."
• "This metrics of Hard, Medium and Soft bounce rate provides a unique insight into how your visitors truly interact and experience a page, making bounce rate not only a qualifying metric, but also an actionable one."
• "Soft Bounce: “Yes It is The Right Site, But I Can’t Find What I Want“ Soft bounce visitors are those who typically remain on the entry page longer than just a few seconds, and show plenty of engagement across the web page; scrolling down further, clicking on more items, reading and viewing additional content."

Key quotes:

• "A soft bounce means the email address is valid but didn’t reach the recipient’s inbox for one or more of the following reasons: Typically, email marketing companies and service providers will continue to attempt sending your email for two-three days before considering it a hard bounce."
• "Fashion and retail, for example, typically have a higher unsubscribe rate than other industries because people sign up for email lists to take advantage of a sale or promotion and immediately unsubscribe after they receive their first email."
• "Email open rates vary across industries and are higher or lower depending on the type of emails you send."
• "When measuring clicks, you’ll gain more insight into how your content is performing by measuring your CTR as opposed to your click rate."
• "To measure how well the content of your email is performing, you’ll want to understand the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email out of the people who opened it, which is your CTR."
• "You’ll gain more insight into how your content is performing by measuring your CTR as opposed to your click rate."

Key quotes:

• "In order to improve delivery rates and click-through rates, it’s important to understand what “bouncing” is and the different types of bounces that you might experience when engaging in email marketing."
• "In both cases you’ll get a notice that the email bounced."
• "Within each notice is information that will inform you about what type of bounce it is so that you can take appropriate action."
• "The important thing to understand about a hard bounce is that it cannot be changed, or recovered, and is permanent."
• "The only thing to do when you get a hard bounce is to remove that email from your list and block them from being able to rejoin your lists with that email address or domain."
• "These two types of bounces are important to learn about because it will help you avoid deleting people for no reason."