What's the difference between hard and soft email bounces?

These are terms concerning the deliverability of emails and the most crucial marketing metrics you should be tracking. Generally, when an email bounces it means that it was sent, but wasn't delivered in the inbox.

What is a hard bounce?

A hard bounce usually means a permanent bounce. This means that the email wasn't delivered to that address because:

• the email is invalid
• the domain name doesn't exist
• contains a typo
• the email has been deactivated (ex. someone leaves a company)
• the mail server won't accept emails

Tip: Keep your email list clean by creating a smart segment with event data ➡ has hard-bounced email. This will list the hardbounced contacts which you can delete.

Hardbounced contacts will also have a red cross ❌ in their Consent tab in the Contacts app. To prevent unwanted sends/costs, Loopify will never send communication to hardbounced contacts. 

What is a soft bounce?

A soft bounce means a temporary bounce. A bounce that can be classified as temporary indicates that while the delivery of the message was not currently successful, you may succeed to deliver another email to that address at a later date. After a soft bounce, the system will automatically try to re-deliver the communication shortly. If that also fails, the contact will be marked as hardbounced. While there are many reasons an email address can soft bounce, the most common reasons why this could happen are:

• no more space on the email account
• the server is currently down
• the message was too large for the recipient’s inbox

To sum up, Hard bounces ➡ permanent deliverability failures. Soft bounces ➡ temporary deliverability failures. That's pretty much it. Not as complicated as it first seems, but definitely of importance.