All You Need To Know About Email Bounce Rates
Bounce rates play an important role in your email marketing strategy. The lesser the bounce rate, the better.
So what exactly is a bounce rate? How do we use this parameter to achieve a successful email marketing strategy?
What is a bounce rate?
A bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox successfully.
Two types:
A bounce rate has two types, namely “hard” and “soft” bounce. Let us look at them in more detail.
A soft bounce occurs when an email can’t be successfully delivered to the recipient due to the following reasons such as:
- Server issues at the recipient’s end
- A temporary problem with a valid email address
- An inbox that is full and has used up its complete capacity, preventing delivery of fresh emails
- Email file is too large
What happens in such cases?
The recipient’s server will usually hold these emails and try to deliver them at a later stage. Alternatively, you can resend your email message once the problem is solved. By the way, we do this automatically if you use Cloudy.Email to send you emails 🙂
A soft bounce is a temporary issue and therefore, need not be of much concern. Hard bounces, on the other hand, are extremely worrisome and need to be fixed at the earliest.
What is a hard bounce?
Here, an email cannot be delivered to the recipient permanently. This can occur due to:
- An invalid, fake, nonexistent or closed email address
- Email domains that are not real
- Additionally, if the recipient’s server does not accept mails, it will result in a hard bounce.
In such cases, your email will not reach successfully to the recipient, which in turn will have a direct impact on your reputation as an email sender, because internet service providers look at bounce rates to assess your credibility.
Therefore, you should immediately remove such hard bounce addresses from your mailing list. Failing to do so will make you look like a spammer, affecting your delivery rate significantly.
Again, Cloudy.Email will automatically remove hard bounces from your list. So you don’t have to worry about them. It will be marked on your list. So you don’t send emails to the bounced addresses again.
A hard bounce is a vital sign that you are having a low-quality mailing list.
At Cloudy, we work closely with Amazon Web Services and accept the industry acceptable rate for hard bounces which is a max of 5%.
What can be done to reduce hard bounce rates?
Firstly, it is important to keep your email list up to date.
Observe — It is imperative for you to look out for faulty emails that have constantly failed to receive emails. Removing such email addresses is the most effective way to reduce hard bounce rates. Guess? Cloudy.Email does this for you.
Use double opt-in list signup to prevent dysfunctional email addresses from entering your list. This way, a member will have to click on the activation link sent to his/her mail address in order to confirm their registration.
Ask members to enter their email addresses twice for repeated confirmation. This will greatly reduce the risk of typos that can occur while typing an email address.
Give the members an option to unsubscribe from your mailing list if they do not wish to receive any further emails from you.
Give your members an option to update their preferences.
Send regular emails. If you do not send emails for a while, there are high chances of your subscribers forgetting about you and marking your email as spam, resulting in a higher bounce rate. If a considerable number of subscribers mark your email as spam, this is will have a direct effect on your deliverability and could lead to you being blacklisted.
Clean up your database regularly. Check your mailing list to delete obvious typos in email addresses or those that are obviously fake, like fdadashfhas@kshdskh.com for example.
Although this may seem like a time-consuming task, it is definitely worth it in order to safeguard your reputation in the eyes of the internet service provider. You can also make use of several software programs such as Cloudy that can help clean up your database and remove faulty ones.
Do not use third parties to purchase additional email addresses to send your mails to. This not only increases the risk of you sending emails to fake or nonexistent email addresses but will also increase your bounce rate, making your emails to be marked as spam.
Using the aforementioned steps can significantly reduce the bounce rates of your emails, in turn, helping you reach a much larger audience who are genuinely interested in the content of your emails. The lower the bounce rate, the more successful your email marketing strategy is.
We hope you liked this post. Please, share with us your experience with email bounces and how you are fighting against them.
Pssst… If you are looking for email marketing software that not only handles bounces for you but guarantees high open rates at low cost, then check out Cloudy.Email.
