In this article, you'll learn everything you need to know about bounced emails—what they are, the types of bounces, and how Manychat helps you manage them effectively. Understanding and reducing email bounces is essential to maintaining a healthy deliverability rate and ensuring your campaigns reach their intended audience.
What are bounced emails?
Bounced emails occur when an email isn’t successfully delivered to an email address or is rejected by the contact's email provider. A high number of bounces can negatively impact your deliverability rate, which in turn affects the success of your email campaigns.
Types of bounces
Manychat identifies two types of email bounces, which are handled differently based on their nature:
Hard bounce
A hard bounce happens when an email cannot be delivered for a permanent reason. Examples include:
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The contact’s email address doesn’t exist.
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The email server has permanently blocked delivery.
Hard bounces indicate invalid email addresses that cannot be resolved, requiring them to be removed from your contact list.
A hard bounce occurs when an email cannot be delivered for a permanent reason. The two main reasons are that the contact's email address doesn't exist or that the email server for the address has permanently blocked delivery.
Soft bounce
A soft bounce occurs when an email cannot be delivered due to a temporary reason. This can be caused by the contact’s mailbox being full or the mailbox server being temporarily unavailable.
Bounce rate and how to avoid bounces
Email services have strict limits on bounces, unsubscribes, and abuse complaints. Manychat enforces these limits to protect your sender reputation. If your bounce rate becomes too high, it may result in warnings or even account suspension.
Common causes of high bounce rates:
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Email audiences going cold from prolonged inactivity.
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Sending to email addresses that were improperly entered or imported.
Tips to minimize bounces
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Keep your contacts’ information updated: Regularly review and update your contact list to remove outdated or invalid email addresses.
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Reconfirm inactive contacts: If you haven’t sent a campaign in a while, reconfirm your list to ensure your emails reach engaged recipients.
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Use email cleaning services: Tools like email validation services can scan your list for invalid addresses. Please note that there are many services, and their accuracy may vary and is never 100%.
How does Manychat handle bounces?
When you send an email campaign with Manychat, we automatically track its delivery and handle bounces as follows:
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Hard bounces: Manychat opts out hard-bounced addresses from your contact list to prevent further attempts to send emails to these invalid addresses.
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Soft bounces: Contacts with soft bounces remain opted-in, allowing for future delivery attempts. You can tag and monitor these contacts to manage their status.
💡 After sending a campaign, you can tag and view:
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Contacts with a soft bounce (email remains opted-in).
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Contacts with a hard bounce (email is no longer opted-in).