Deliverability
What is a good bounce rate and how do I fix a high one?
Bounce rate is the clearest measure of data quality, and it is one of the fastest ways to damage a sending domain. Providers read a high bounce rate as evidence you are sending to addresses you have no legitimate relationship with.
Hard and soft bounces
A hard bounce means the address does not exist. It is permanent and the address must be removed and never retried.
A soft bounce is temporary: a full mailbox, a server problem, a message too large. These can be retried within reason, though repeated soft bounces to the same address should end in suppression.
What rate is acceptable
Under two percent is healthy. Between two and five percent means your data needs attention. Above five percent is actively dangerous, and above ten percent will damage the sending domain quickly.
What a high rate is telling you
Almost always that the data is old, bought, or scraped without verification. Business email addresses decay quickly as people change jobs, so a list built eighteen months ago is substantially dead.
It can occasionally indicate a technical problem such as broken authentication, but data quality is the usual culprit.
How to fix it
Stop the campaign before continuing. Verify the list, remove every hard bounce permanently, and rebuild from sources you can stand behind. Then restart at lower volume while reputation recovers.
Leadhaus verifies contacts before sending and suppresses hard bounces automatically, which is why bounce rates on managed campaigns stay low without client intervention.
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