Increase Delivery Rates With Active Bounce Management
What are bounces and how can you minimize them?
What are bounces and how can you minimize them?
If an email address in your list ceases to be valid, you remove it from the list. Simple enough, right? There are more subtle aspects of bounce management that you might not be acutely aware of, however. We hope this column sheds some light on them.
A bounce is a notification that your message, for whatever reason, didn’t make it to the recipient. Ideally, these bounces take the form of SMTP (define) codes, defined as a standard in RFC821. Using these codes, ISPs can communicate the reason for the bounce. Not everyone follows this standard, however, and accurate bounce handling may involve some keyword review of the replies.
Regardless of the bounce message’s exact wording, there are two types of bounces: hard and soft. Depending on whom you talk to, they might have more technical definitions; but here is the gist of what they mean.
A hard bounce means either the receiving server purposely rejected the message or the receiving server doesn’t exist. Examples of hard bounces are:
A soft bounce typically denotes a temporary error with delivery and may be any response other than a hard bounce. Examples of soft bounces are:
Why Process Bounces?
It’s important to properly process bounces for a couple reasons. You don’t want to pay for email messages sent to nonfunctioning addresses. If you don’t process bounces correctly, a mailing list’s natural churn will result in large portion of dead addresses on the list.
Monitoring bounces can help show a potential delivery problem. Perhaps an email domain that represents a significant portion of your list has stopped responding. Perhaps your messages are being rejected. By monitoring bounces after every campaign, you can quickly correct any irregularities.
Most important, ISPs look at bounce information when determining whether they’re being targeted by a spammer. Spammers’ email lists are of very poor quality. If an ISP detects a large percentage of invalid email coming from one IP, the mail stream may be identified as spam and blocked.
Minimize Bounces
Here are some tips to help effectively deal with or minimize email bounces:
Until next month, keep on deliverin’.
Want more email marketing information? ClickZ E-Mail Reference is an archive of all our email columns, organized by topic.