When running your email campaign do you process and handle your hard bounces?

"What are hard bounces?", I hear you cry.

Hard bounces are caused by email addresses or domain names that no longer exist, or they're unrecognised by the ISP - most likely due to DNS (Doman Name Service) issues. Unlike soft bounces, which are produced by a temporary issue with the recipient's inbox (e.g. mailbox full, out of diskspace etc). Hard bounces indicate the list of addresses used in the email campaign are of poor quality or are not maintained.

If you don't remove the "Hard Bounced" email addresses from your mailing list it could lead to your IP Address being Blacklisted by a number of blacklisting sites and ultimately affecting all of your sent emails.

So the golden rules of email marketing.

1. Process your hard bounces and remove the email address from your campaign list.
   
   It's worth investigating why it's a hard bounce if it genuinely is a company you want to contact. Maybe the domain name has changed, or maybe the recipient no longer works for the company and you will need to find a different address within the company
   
   
2. Process soft bounces. Check the error message of the bounce, it's not always a mailbox full message. It could be a soft bounce due to content spam-filtering so you may want to consider tweaking your campaign to avoid spam filters and also to not affect your sender reputation.

Outbound SMTP Server

outMail is an authenticated outbound SMTP service that you can use to improve your deliverability of your email campaign. For more information click here.

About Prolateral

Prolateral Consulting is in business to put your organisation back in control of your own Information Technology, specialising in information and messaging security, computer forensic services, and disaster recovery planning.

Contact Info

Prolateral Consulting Ltd
Luton, Bedfordshire, UK
Tel : +44 (0) 8450 763760
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