What’s The Difference Between Hard Email Bounces and Soft Bounces?

Real estate email marketing terms definedIXACT Contact is the only real estate CRM that comes with Email Campaign Reporting; a feature that helps you to identify your hot leads and gives you key insight into how many people opened and forwarded your email and clicked on its links. It also tells you which emails hard bounced and which ones soft bounced so you can clean up the email addresses in your database if necessary. A common question we get asked is “What’s the difference between hard and soft bounces?”

Here’s the deal…

Hard Bounces versus Soft Bounces

Hard bounces refer to emails that can’t be delivered due to permanent reasons. The causes include an invalid email address or email domain or the inability for the email recipient’s server to properly accept the email.

Be sure to check the Campaign Reporting area of IXACT Contact to view all your hard bounces and delete the email addresses where hard bounces occurred. If you continue to send emails to addresses where the email hard bounced, you can get penalized by email service providers (such as Gmail and Windows Live). When this happens, the emails you send can go straight to the recipient’s spam folder.

Soft bounces refer to emails that can’t be delivered due to temporary reasons. The causes include a full inbox or the email file being too large. With soft bounces, the majority of email providers will try to resend the email over the course of a number of days.

Check the Campaign Reporting dashboard in IXACT Contact to see which emails soft bounced. Don’t delete these email addresses right away as they’re not invalid, like hard bounced ones. But if the same email addresses continue to soft bounce, it’s advisable to remove them from your database.

I hope this provides you with some good insight. Do you have any other questions about email deliverability or what IXACT Contact’s Email Campaign Reporting can track? If so, please leave a comment below!

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