Mastering Soft Bounce Management: Keep Your Emails in the Inbox

Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for engaging customers and driving meaningful business results. But imagine crafting the perfect email campaign, only to have a significant portion of your messages never reach inboxes. Frustrating, right? The culprit could be poor list hygiene, which can harm your sender reputation, lower deliverability rates, and negatively impact campaign performance.

A critical aspect of list hygiene is understanding and managing email bounces effectively. While most email service providers handle hard bounces automatically, soft bounces present a unique challenge that requires a more nuanced approach. To tackle this, Braze has introduced new soft bounce filtering capabilities, providing marketers with powerful tools to identify, track, and resolve temporary delivery failures. By implementing a strategic soft bounce management strategy within Braze, you can boost deliverability rates, protect your sender reputation, and ensure your messages reach the right audience.

Understanding Bounces: Hard vs. Soft

Bounces occur when emails cannot be delivered to the intended recipient, but not all bounces are the same. There are two types of bounces:

• Hard bounces occur when an email cannot be delivered due to permanent issues such as invalid email addresses or domains. Industry best practice suggests keeping hard bounce rates below 0.5%.

• Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures caused by issues like full mailboxes, temporarily unavailable email servers, or temporary mail blocking. A healthy soft bounce rate typically stays below 2%.

  
  

Braze automatically manages hard bounces by suppressing these addresses after a single failed deliverability attempt, which aligns with industry best practices. However, soft bounce management requires a more nuanced approach, and Braze has recently enhanced its platform capabilities in this area.

Measuring Your Soft Bounce Rate in Braze

Understanding your soft bounce rate is essential for optimizing email deliverability. While Braze's Email Performance Dashboard (Analytics > Email Performance) provides key deliverability metrics, it primarily displays the Delivery Rate and Hard Bounce Rate. To calculate the Soft Bounce Rate, use the following formula:

Soft Bounce Rate = 100% - (Delivery Rate + Hard Bounce Rate)

To further analyze bounce trends, check the Braze Message Log (Settings > Message Log) where you can review detailed bounce reasons returned by mailbox providers. Identifying patterns in soft bounces helps to refine your segmentation strategy and improve inbox placement.

Implementing Soft Bounce Management in Braze

The new Braze soft bounce filter in the segmentation area provides a starting point for managing soft bounces. You can create audience filters based on the number of soft bounces within the last 30 days and then use these filters to exclude recipients from campaigns or trigger re-engagement efforts.

Campaign-Level Approach

Want to see immediate improvements? Add a filter to your campaigns to target users who "has not soft bounced" or "has soft bounced less than X times in 30 days." This one simple step alone can significantly improve your campaign performance!

Strategic Long-Term Approach

For more advanced soft bounce management, leverage Braze Canvas to create a longer-term approach. This approach is particularly helpful for high-volume senders or those with longer sales cycles.

1. Create a segment: Define a rule such as "has soft bounces more than 2 times in 30 days".

2. Build a Canvas: Use the segment as the target audience and run the Canvas daily.

3. Update user profiles: Include a User Update step to either:

   • Mark the user as "unsubscribed" from email.

   • Create a custom attribute to track bounces or flag the user as "undeliverable".

4. Filter messaging: Use the “unsubscribed” status or custom attribute to filter recipients from future campaigns.

This more sophisticated approach offers several advantages:

• Extends management beyond the standard 30-day window.

• Provides value for less frequent senders or those with longer sales cycles (such as B2B businesses)

• Creates opportunities for A/B testing to measure the impact of soft bounce management.

Maximizing Braze's Capabilities

By leveraging Braze's segmentation filters for soft bounce management alongside the platform's automatic hard bounce handling, you can:

1. Obtain more accurate and valuable metrics

2. Focus email efforts on users who can actually receive your messages

3. Improve overall channel performance

4. Protect your sender reputation

5. Enhance inbox placement rates

Email deliverability isn’t just a technical issue—it’s the key to a successful email marketing strategy. As we’ve shown, implementing a strategic soft bounce management strategy offers several advantages. In the short term, it improves delivery rates and provides more accurate campaign metrics. And over the long term, it enhances sender reputation, ensures better inbox placement, and increases engagement rates. By leveraging Braze’s expanded capabilities along with some advanced soft bounce management strategies, you can ensure your messages reach the right audience and drive meaningful engagement.

For more insights on email deliverability, check out:

• What You Need to Know About BIMI and Email Authentication

• Boosting Your Email Game: A Guide to IP Warming and Reputation Management