...There are two types of email bounces:
👉 A soft bounce
👉 A hard bounce
Here's my finest anti-bounce checklist:
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💌 Email deliverability
🧐 Questions you might have about deliverability
What is email bounce, and how do I prevent myself from it? 🔍
What is email bounce, and how do I prevent myself from it? 🔍
lemlist's best practices to avoid email bouncing at all costs
Ena Mandic avatar
Written by Ena Mandic
Updated over a week ago

Heeeey lemlister! 👋

Here's the thing...

...There are two types of email bounces:

Overall, an email bounce is any email message rejected by a recipient's mail server and returned to the original sender.

In-depth here are the two types you can encounter :

👉 A soft bounce

A soft bounce in email marketing refers to an email that gets as far as your recipient's mail server but bounces back undelivered before it gets into the inbox

Unfortunately, it wasn't delivered. 😢 Numerous reasons can explain for this email bounce :

  • mailbox was full

  • server was down

  • message was too large for the recipient’s inbox

  • message was blocked due to content

  • message does not meet the recipient server’s policies

  • DMARC requirements for authentication

  • anti-virus requirements

  • the email cannot be relayed between email servers

  • the email cannot be relayed for unknown reasons, etc.

👉 A hard bounce

The kind of bounce happens when the email is permanently rejected because the email address is invalid or the email addresses don’t exist.

Now that you're familiar with email bounces types, you might want to check why this bounce rate is high.

Here's my finest anti-bounce checklist:

Let's cut to the chase, if you check out these articles, I bet bounced emails won't have a chance.

👉 Custom Tracking Domain - make sure you set it up thanks to this article on how to set up a custom tracking domain

👉 Deliverability check - thanks to our Email deliverability checklist

👉 Typical cold email mistakes to avoid at all costs - and its related checklist

👉 Email validation - you can use Bouncer to help you clean your list of leads and check for bounces.

👉 Check the health of your domain - contact your provider's and host's supports for the info. You can check your domain's health status - there are many online tools to check (ex. mxtoolbox). Once your health report is done, forward it to your provider's and host's supports, so they will give you notice on how to set it up properly and keep your deliverability safe. Here is the article where we explained both Domain Reputation and Domain Authentication.

👉 New Domain - if you're using a new domain, your chances to have an email bounced are increased. No worries though: our deliverability booster is here for you!

👉 SPF and DKIM records - if you wonder if you have to set their record, find the answer here.

👉 Email subject title - this one you should definitely keep unique from one campaign to another (also, avoiding stressful subject names and anxiogenic subjects such as COVID-19 is a safe bet).

👉 Sending a high volume of emails which is pretty unlikely to happen since if you follow our recommendations, you won't send more than 250 emails per day to keep your domain both healthy and warmed up.

Now my lemlister, you know why your emails might end up in spam or bounce. Make the best out of this knowledge! 🤓

🤗 And if you still want to improve your knowledge, find besides two carefully picked articles you could use:

Enjoy ❤️

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