Bounced Emails

Bounced emails may be the bane of Internet marketers looking to build their lists and reach more prospects, but they are not an insurmountable obstacle to success.  There are many reasons emails sent out may bounce, and there are several steps an entrepreneur can take to minimize their occurrence.  Both new Internet marketers just starting their first email marketing campaign or experienced entrepreneurs facing the bounced email wall can benefit from knowing the cause of bounced emails and methods to remedy the situation.

Two Types of Bounced Emails

There are two types of bounced emails: soft bounce and hard bounce.  There are different ways of handling both and the easiest to deal with is the soft bounce.  Basically this is a temporary problem in that the email was undeliverable at that time.  This can be due to the intended recipient having a full or busy inbox, a network glitch, or the account or domain being temporarily down.  Repeated attempts usually reach the recipient in time.  After several attempts at delivery, however, these bounced emails become classified as hard bounces.

A hard bounce is more of a problem for a marketer.  Hard bounces are the permanently undeliverable emails that result in lost potential customers.  Caused by invalid email addresses, the sender’s server being blocked or emails being filtered at the source, hard bounces are usually remedied best by simply removing the email from the list to maintain an accurate list of current customers.

Preventing Bounced Emails

While running an email marketing campaign, there are a few maintenance steps that will help reduce bounced emails as well as increase the quality of your mailings to your subscribers.  The first among these is to send a copy of your newsletter or other mailing to yourself.  This allows a marketer to check the links, graphics, and format of the mailing to make sure everything is perfect.  One good way to end up on a subscriber’s ignore list is to send them something they can’t read or make use of.

Checking emails to make sure they’re valid from the beginning can help streamline the list and prevent it from being clogged up with useless emails.  There are two ways to do this.  Requesting a confirmation email during the subscription process is a common method.  Another would be to use email verification software periodically to filter out bad email addresses and domains.

A final measure to make sure emails are up to date would be allowing subscribers to edit there email addresses manually as needed.  Since people occasionally change email addresses, this allows marketers to keep in contact, otherwise the change could result in a lost subscriber and a bounced email.