BEST PRACTICES
FoxBound Knowledge Base / Best Practices / Bounce Codes
Last updated on Dec 11th, 2019
Prospecting takes time, and time is money. This guide it’s essential for you to understand why your emails aren’t making it to your prospects’ inbox.
Let’s begin by defining what is a bounced email.
Simply put, a bounce message is an automated reply from the prospect’s email server notifying you that the email was not delivered.
In outbound sales, delivery correlates directly with replies. Replies correlate with conversions. And with conversions directly linking to pipeline and hitting quota, you could say that it’s kind of a big deal to lower bounce rates. If you need more of a reason to worry about it, consider that bounced emails negatively affect your IP reputation. This correlates to how emails get blocked, flagged, or blacklisted.
Let’s talk about what you can do to monitor your email address.
Check your spam score. This is a numerical rating (0-10) that takes several elements into account. There are two primary ways emails can get blocked. The first is automatic email filters and the second is an email being manually marked by the recipient as spam. Both affects your spam score. So a good place to start is to use free sites available like https://www.mail-tester.com/ to understand if your emails are at risk.
Soft bounces versus hard bounces are the two categories of bounce messages. A soft bounce (which starts with a “4xx”) which in most cases can be fixed doesn’t affect your spam score as much as a hard bounce. This is why it’s important for outbound sales reps to use reputable data sources to maximize deliverability. In today’s day and age, employees change jobs more frequently, which means an increase in data degradation that currently averages to 24-36%. That means that ¼ of your email will hard bounce due to bad data.
A soft bounce is a temporary issue related to the prospect’s server. The email address may be unavailable or full. The prospect’s server could have insufficient storage or issues processing the delivery. The good thing with soft bounces is that they will eventually be fixed. But be patient because five consecutive undeliverable attempts will turn to a hard bounce.
On the flip side, a hard bounce (starting a with a “5xx”) will never turn into a soft bounce. These errors are permanent and cannot be fixed.
Nevertheless, some email deliverability errors are in your control and others are not. So let’s dig into common reasons why emails bounce that are in your control.
There are some factors out of your control. Even if you do everything in your power to follow the guidelines above to ensure emails are received and your messaging resonates with your audience. That said, note that an acceptable bounce rate is between 2-5%. Anything over 5% suggests a significant problem that you will want to resolve.
It’s important to understand bounce codes to solve delivery problems. The traditional SMTP bounce reasons are three-digit codes (550), and the enhanced SMTP bounce responses are three-digits separated by decimal points (5.1.1).
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