Practising what I preach, I’m doing a spot of email list cleaning this morning.

A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender because it is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn’t exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient’s mail server has blocked your server. I just take it to mean that the person has moved on and is no longer at that company.

Apart from the usual movement and activity I’m noticing a sharp increase in the hard bounces for three areas:

• Hotels – particularly high end ones such as the Ritz Carlton and the Westin
• Advertising Agencies
• Eastern European sounding names – the pretty smart girls you’d meet at business networking events are all gone

I also noticed a couple of names who I know are still working at the same place.  Closer inspection revealed that the companies concerned had undergone a rebrand and name change.

Tip: if you are planning to rebrand your company, make sure you send an email out to all your contacts informing them of the name change.