Summary
Experts and marketers across a diverse range of platforms overwhelmingly agree that persistently emailing addresses that continue to soft bounce is detrimental to sender reputation and email deliverability. The collective guidance emphasizes the importance of proactive bounce management and diligent list hygiene. Repeatedly sending to soft bouncing addresses indicates underlying problems such as full mailboxes, domain issues, or abandoned accounts, and can lead to lower engagement rates, increased risk of being marked as spam, and potential blacklisting by ISPs. The broad recommendation is to monitor bounce rates, implement automated suppression of consistently soft bouncing addresses, and maintain a focus on data quality to ensure successful email marketing campaigns.
Key findings
- Reputation Damage: Continuously emailing soft bouncing addresses damages sender reputation.
- Deliverability Reduction: Ignoring soft bounces leads to decreased deliverability and higher likelihood of emails landing in spam.
- List Hygiene is Key: Maintaining a clean email list by removing consistently soft bouncing addresses is crucial for effective email marketing.
- Proactive Management Needed: Proactive bounce management and a focus on data quality are essential.
- ISPs Monitor Bounce Rates: ISPs use bounce rates as a key metric to assess sender quality.
Key considerations
- Soft Bounce Tolerance: Establish a clear soft bounce tolerance policy to determine when an address should be suppressed.
- Automation: Implement automated systems to identify and suppress repeatedly soft bouncing addresses.
- Data Source Cleaning: Use bounce data to inform and improve data collection and cleaning practices at the source.
- Risk Assessment: Understand the different types of soft bounces and their associated risks to tailor bounce management strategies.
- Monitoring and Reporting: Regularly monitor and report on bounce rates to identify and address deliverability issues proactively.
What email marketers say
17 marketer opinions
Experts and marketers across various platforms agree that persistently emailing addresses that soft bounce is detrimental to sender reputation and deliverability. The consensus is that while soft bounces might initially seem temporary, repeated occurrences signal issues such as full inboxes, domain problems, or abandoned mailboxes. Continuing to send to these addresses can lead to lower engagement rates, increased risk of being marked as spam, and potential blacklisting by ISPs. Therefore, maintaining a clean list by monitoring and removing addresses with recurring soft bounces is essential for email marketing success. Strategies for managing soft bounces include setting up automated unsubscribes, implementing sunset policies, and adjusting sending frequency based on bounce types.
Key opinions
- Reputation Impact: Sending to consistently soft bouncing addresses negatively impacts sender reputation.
- Deliverability Issues: Ignoring soft bounces leads to decreased deliverability and higher chances of emails landing in spam folders.
- List Hygiene: Maintaining a clean email list by removing repeatedly soft bouncing addresses is crucial.
- Automated Management: Automating the process of unsubscribing soft bouncing addresses is recommended.
- Risk Factors: Different soft bounce types have varying risk factors and should be handled accordingly.
Key considerations
- Bounce Tolerance: Setting a soft bounce tolerance policy, which defines how many times an address can soft bounce before being suppressed, is important.
- Sunset Policies: Implementing a strong sunset policy helps remove persistent soft bounces and unengaged recipients.
- Data Source: Use bounce data to identify and fix the sources of bad data within your CRM or database.
- Manual vs. Automated: Determine whether a manual or automated approach to managing bounces is more suitable for your resources and ESP capabilities.
- Bounce Type: Consider the type of soft bounce when determining a suppression strategy, as some may indicate more severe issues than others (e.g., mailbox full vs. temporary server issues).
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks suggests using hard and soft bounces to inform where bad data is coming from and fixing it at the source, and updating the opt-in status or deleting bad addresses in an internal database/CRM.
14 Jan 2025 - Email Geeks
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks explains that default soft bounce tolerance is how many times on separate sends an email can soft bounce before the address is made inactive. Suggests the importance of setting a soft bounce tolerance policy, even a high one.
9 Aug 2024 - Email Geeks
What the experts say
2 expert opinions
Experts from Spam Resource and Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins) concur that emailing addresses with persistent soft bounces negatively impacts email deliverability. Proactive management of bounces, including soft bounces, is essential for maintaining good list hygiene. Ignoring these soft bounces leads to deliverability issues and damages the sender's reputation. Furthermore, bad data, including addresses with soft bounces, degrades deliverability, making a focus on data quality critical for successful email programs.
Key opinions
- Proactive Management: Proactively managing soft bounces is essential for list hygiene.
- Deliverability Impact: Ignoring soft bounces leads to deliverability issues and a damaged sender reputation.
- Data Quality: Bad data, including soft bounces, degrades deliverability.
- Automated Unsubscribes: Implementing a system to automatically unsubscribe addresses with consistent soft bounces is recommended.
Key considerations
- Bounce Monitoring: Implement robust monitoring of soft bounce rates to identify problematic addresses.
- Data Hygiene: Focus on data quality and implement processes to ensure accurate and up-to-date email lists.
- System Implementation: Implement a system for automatically unsubscribing addresses that consistently generate soft bounces after a reasonable number of attempts.
Expert view
Expert from Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins) explains how bad data, including addresses with soft bounces, degrades deliverability and that a focus on data quality is critical for successful email programs.
6 May 2023 - Word to the Wise
Expert view
Expert from Spam Resource emphasizes the importance of proactively managing bounces, including soft bounces, as part of maintaining good list hygiene. Ignoring soft bounces can lead to deliverability issues and damage your sender reputation. They recommend implementing a system to automatically unsubscribe addresses that consistently generate soft bounces after a certain number of attempts.
14 Feb 2023 - Spam Resource
What the documentation says
4 technical articles
Email marketing documentation from Amazon SES, Mailchimp, SparkPost, and Oracle Responsys uniformly advises against continuously emailing addresses that generate soft bounces, as this practice negatively impacts sender reputation. These documents emphasize that ISPs utilize bounce rates as a key metric for assessing sender quality, and high rates of soft bounces can lead to emails being marked as spam. They all recommend monitoring bounce rates and implementing suppression strategies to remove consistently bouncing addresses, which is vital for maintaining optimal deliverability.
Key findings
- Reputation Impact: Repeated soft bounces negatively impact sender reputation.
- Deliverability Risk: High bounce rates lead to emails being marked as spam.
- ISP Metrics: ISPs use bounce rates to assess sender quality.
- Suppression Strategy: Suppression of consistently bouncing addresses is recommended.
Key considerations
- Bounce Monitoring: Implement tools to actively monitor both hard and soft bounce rates.
- Threshold Definition: Define a clear threshold for the number of soft bounces that trigger suppression.
- Automated Processes: Automate the process of identifying and suppressing repeatedly soft bouncing addresses.
- Reputation Management: Prioritize sender reputation management by proactively addressing bounce-related issues.
Technical article
Documentation from Oracle Responsys advises managing both hard and soft bounces to ensure optimal deliverability. Sending emails to addresses that repeatedly soft bounce can harm your sender reputation. Implementing processes to identify and suppress such addresses is vital for maintaining high deliverability rates.
8 Feb 2022 - Oracle Help Center
Technical article
Documentation from SparkPost clarifies that continuously sending to addresses with soft bounces can hurt your sender reputation. While soft bounces are temporary, repeated occurrences indicate a problem. Monitor bounce rates and have a strategy for suppressing those contacts.
19 May 2022 - SparkPost Documentation
