Email Bounce: What is it and how do you handle it?

What is an email bounce?

An email bounces when the recipient’s mail server rejects the message and returns it to the original sender.

There are two types of bounces: soft and hard bounces.

Soft Bounce

This is when the email does exist, but for a handful of reasons, it wasn’t delivered to your contact. Here are a few:

• Inbox is full
• Server is down
• Message and/or attachment is too large
• The email was blocked due to content
• DMARC is not setup
• Email was delayed

To prevent a soft bounce, make sure to set up your Gsuite domain properly as some soft bounce factors are related to it!

Hard bounce

The email address is invalid or doesn’t exist. This is the worst that can happen because it means there’s no chance of reaching them unless you contact them another way.

In its email sequences, LaGrowthMachine allows you to analyze your conversions and to have a few more details in the Logs section:

Additionally, you can immediately see the response of your leads in the tool:

Soft bounce or hard bounce, it is essential to study the bounce of your emails. Let’s see why.

What’s the risk of an email bounce?

A bounce often happens when you’re trying aggressive strategies. For example, you bought a list of emails, you’re sending emails to contacts you’re unsure of, and so forth…

A high bounce rate, especially a hard bounce rate, is an indication for service providers that you’re not a domain to be trusted.

This is why bounced emails are the enemy. Once your reputation is damaged, there’s no going back. You’ll need to start from scratch with a new message, from the beginning to the end of your email, or wind up in the spam folder forever.

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How can I avoid an email bounce?

Verify your technical setup

First, you can use an email checker like Hunter.io to verify that your email list is accurate and up to date.

Then, there are technical setup components that you should take into consideration:

• Have you set up your GSuite domain properly?
• Did you set up your tracking domain?

You can set up this part directly on LaGrowthMachine’s interface and greatly improve your deliverability:

Check the source of your email

Then, there is the question of where the email comes from. In LaGrowthMachine, this will vary depending on the source of the email.

When using LaGrowthMachine to enrich emails, LGM only provides you with an email we’re able to verify so long as you haven’t activated catch-all emails.

This is the safest approach but sometimes may yield a low enrichment rate. Learn what the catch-all feature means and why sometimes you may choose to activate it.

If you’re using outside sources to find emails, LaGrowthMachine will not verify their authenticity. You’ll have to do it yourself and you might do it by using email validation services such as Zerobounce.