Hard Bounces vs. Spam Bounces

When performing cold outbound campaigns, unfortunately, bounces will come about from time to time. Bounced emails can be frustrating, not only because an email did not make it to a lead, but also because we may not know what exactly went wrong with this lead. This frustration led us to re-visit our labeling convention for bounces and we know label our bounces as either a "hard bounce" or a "spam bounce", in this article we will go through each of these bounces and what to do when we see them come about. 

Hard Bounces: 

Leads are labeled as "hard bounces" if we send them an email and the email does not make it to the end user. If we find that the majority of our leads are “hard bounces”, it means that we had the incorrect email information on this lead. When a new lead is entered into Amplemarket, we take the information that we do have on this lead and try to find an email address that belongs to them. Once we find this email address we send it a virtual ping to ensure that it is valid. If the email address has not been validated but we are still confident it belongs to the user you are uploading, it will be entered as a “guessed email”. The wide majority of our bounces will come from these guessed emails, so if we would like to eliminate these bounces we can do so when setting up our sequences. On the ‘lead source’ page of the sequence set up, there will be a ‘data quality’ drop down where we can select ‘max quantity’ or ‘max quality’. The ‘max quality’ option refers to the fact that ‘guessed emails’ are not included which should give us a lower bounce rate since our other lead emails are ‘verified’. If you notice a high amount of ‘hard bounces’, please consider starting sequences with the ‘max quality’ option.

Spam Bounces:

A lead is labeled as a "spam Bounce" because our domain or email address is automatically being sent to spam due to deliverability issues, or the end user has strict email settings that block emails regardless of their content. One tell tale sign that your email has been blocked from the lead’s end is the industry that this lead belongs to. Many industries such as Pharmaceuticals, Fintech, banking, healthcare, etc. have strict regulations that block incoming emails from getting to the end user so no employee can fall into a phishing scam or click on any links with viruses attached. If we find that our leads do not belong to one of these industries, we may want to take a look at the emails we are sending and make some alterations so they are more deliverable. Please follow the steps in this guide from our help center to see how we can improve our deliverability. https://amplemarket.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405819178637-10-essential-steps-to-improve-email-deliverability. 

If you have any other questions about bounced emails, please reach out to support@amplemarket.com