What is Hard Bounce?
In email marketing, a hard bounce is defined as an email that cannot be delivered due to an invalid address, a nonexistent domain, or a server blocking the recipient. Monitoring hard bounces is crucial to maintaining list hygiene, protecting a sender’s reputation, and sustaining high deliverability rates. All emails marked as hard bounces either need to be deleted or corrected to avoid adversely impacting the overall campaign results.
This could happen due to typographical errors, abandoned accounts, or obsolete domains.
Related terms: soft bounce, bounce rate, email deliverability, and subscriber validation.