Email bounce rate is a very discussed term when comes to email marketing. The success of email campaigns depends mostly on the deliverability of the email. Email bounce rate is a representation of how many emails didn’t cut through the campaign.
Now we know where the email bounce rate is involved, let’s learn more about email bounce rate and how can you cope with it and run successful email marketing campaigns.
What is Email Bounce Rate
Email bounce refers to a situation where a server can’t deliver the message to the recipients. The definition of email bounce rate points to the percentage of failure on email deliverability. That means the percentage of total email bounce is called email bounce rate.
When an email can’t be sent to a recipient, we are calling it a bounce. When we count these numbers in percentage, it is being called email bounce rate. So email bounce rate is not a tough to understand the term at all.
There are two kinds of email bounces out here – soft bounce and hard bounce. Let me elaborate on what these two terms mean.
What is a Soft Bounce in Email
When an email experiences a soft bounce that means it is because of temporary delivery failures. The receiver is more responsible for this kind of issue.
Most of the time soft bounces occur because the recipient’s inbox is full. Large email can result in a soft bounce too.
What is a Hard Bounce in Email
Just by looking at the name, we can guess the nature of hard email bounces. A hard bounce means a permanent delivery failure. The causes of hard bounces are mostly straightforward.
If an email is sent to an invalid or expired address it is likely to result in a hard bounce. And yes, an outdated domain name on the email address can results in hard bounce as well. A hard bounce means the recipient won’t ever receive the email.
The Reasons for Email Bounce
A lot of factors can lead to an email bounce. But there are some known and common issues that keep happening over and over again in most cases. Let’s find out the prime reasons why an email may bounce.
Invalid Email Address
This is the most obvious one. If you end up sending an email to an address that literally doesn’t exist, there is no way that your email can reach the recipient cause there isn’t any.
This kind of issue can happen because of many reasons. In most cases, typos are the main culprits. There is more. If a person left a company, his email is abundant too. That means it’s gonna bounce really HARD. That’s an email bounce joke btw.
People are getting smarter day by day. Or should I say clever? So many people use generated temporary addresses to sign up here and there. And then comes the nuisance of email bounce rate.
Mailbox Is Full
You can compare a mailbox with a house. If your house is full, you can’t install any more furniture. Similarly, mailboxes have their limits too. Meaning that mailbox can eventually get crowded and hence be unable to receive a new email.
Undeliverable Email
Your sent email can result in an “undeliverable” status. This happens because of an email server being busy, overloaded, or sometimes temporarily unavailable. If a server went non-existent or remains overloaded or under maintenance, your email is likely to bounce.
If it seems to bounce multiple times repeatedly on the same address, it can be a permanent server shutdown. That means the email server is gone for good and won’t add any value to your email list.
Aggressive Spam Filters
As you all know, 84% of all email is SPAM. SPAM filters getting better at detecting spam emails. These filters basically filter out unwanted messages and save users from a messy and spam-filled inbox.
Lately, every email server is getting very aggressive at what they do. If you don’t construct your email like a genuine conversation, spam filters can count you as another word bot.
Most of the email addresses use similar servers and hence there are the same spam filters involved. So, your email bounce rate goes up ridiculously.
Policy Filtering
Just like every other service, email follows a strong policy as well. Like if you ask for credit card data on your email, it is gonna trigger the policy filter and throw your email out of the window.
If your email doesn’t meet policy criteria, it will be blacklisted by the filters. Unconventional special characters, non-Latin characters, trigger words like credit cards, and even unnecessary attachments can cause a high email bounce rate.
Why Email Bounce Rate is Important
Email bounce rates are one of the most important (but often overlooked) metrics when it comes to email marketing. A high bounce rate generally means that your emails aren’t reaching their intended audience, and as a result, your open and click-through rates will suffer. Ultimate results are wasted time and resources.
Conversely, a low bounce rate signifies that your messages are reaching their intended recipients and that your email marketing efforts are resonating with your audience.
Email marketers use email bounce rate as a metric to measure the health of their email lists and determine whether they need to take action to improve their campaigns. In order to keep your bounce rate low and improve your email marketing results.
Average Email Bounce Rates
A detailed study by MailChimp revealed statistics about the average email marketing campaign. This comprehensive report presents valuable data such as average open rates, average click rates, hard and soft bounce rates,s and even unsubscription rates per industry.
The analysis by MailChimp states that 21.33% is the open rate for all industries. The same data shows that 0.40% of emails face hard bounces and 0.58% of all emails faces soft bounce. That means half of a percent of all emails results in an email bounce.
How to Calculate Email Bounce Rate
Email bounce rate is no rocket science. To calculate email bounce rate, first, divide the total number of bounces by the total amount of delivered emails. Then multiply your result by 100. Voila! You now know your email bounce rate.
So the formula of email bounce rate calculation is:
Email bounce rate = (total email bounces / total delivered emails) x 100
If you use a campaign management tool for email marketing then it is possible that the tool provides you the email bounce rate and other statistics after every email campaign.
What is a Good Email Bounce Rate
We already get to know that the average email bounce rate is less than half a percent across all different industries. But email bounce rate varies from campaign to campaign and industry to industry.
Having less than a 1% email bounce rate is considered to be a good email bounce rate for any campaign. That means less than 1 of your emails bounces out of every 100 emails.
You can afford a 2% or less bounce rate no matter what industry you are operating in. But be noted that more than 2% of the email bounce rate is an alarming one. You should definitely take some actions for improvement if your email bounce rate goes up to 2%.
How to Reduce Email Bounce Rate
When a subscriber willingly submits an email to get valuable information from you, it is your duty that your email finds its receiver correctly. If an email bounces, it’s a lost game for both you and your subscribers.
First of all, a big margin of email bounce rate can impact your sender’s reputation. Then there is a low success rate of your email campaign. Overall, a high bounce rate is not the news you would like to hear on a good day.
Let’s fix that. We researched and found some of the proven methods that can drastically reduce the email bounce rate. Let’s reduce those goddamn bounce rates.
Ask For Permission First
The best way to reduce the email bounce rate is to establish permission-based email marketing. This means, you ask a user to subscribe and they have to confirm the subscription onwards.
This kind of double opt-in-based email marketing can help you avoid invalid and non-existent email addresses from being added to your list in the first place. If there is a verification process involved in the subscription system, then it ensures the interest of users to your mail subscription.
Clean Email List On A Regular Basis
Once your email list is crowded, it is important to perform a clean-up on a regular basis. inactive, invalid, and expired emails will add nothing to the table but a high bounce rate. That’s why it is very important to clean up your email list on a regular basis.
You either verify and clean inactive emails one by one. Or we recommend using an email list cleaning service. With this kind of help, all you have to do is upload your email list and the email list cleaning service will provide you with an email list cleaner.
You can save a great amount of both your time and resources by performing a clean-up on a regular basis. A high bounce rate because of a clattered email list is a pure nuisance. Make sure not to have any.
Don’t Be A Spammer
We already learned about the aggressiveness of today’s spam filters in email servers. So it is a crucial point to not act like a spammer when sending an email. Just check your email’s spam folders and you will get an idea of how many emails get listed as spam because of its spammy nature.
Even if your email reaches the recipient, you won’t get any results out of this. Because spam folders in inboxes are rarely checked or even opened by the users. So don’t be a spammer when running an email campaign. Maybe test the spamminess of your email address first via third-party services before reaching out to subscribers.
Write Quality Emails
So you learned not to be a spammer. But what to do to not look like one? Oh yeah, that’s correct. Make sure to make your email quality full and professional in the writing process. You can even get help from professionals.
When sending an email, don’t just send it for the sake of it. Analyze the email and ask yourself if you would’ve opened this email if it landed in your inbox. This eradicates the need of thinking about where the email will land.
If your email seems legit when judging from a user perspective, then you are good to go. Writing a quality email is extremely important to reduce email bounce rates.
And one more important thing. Make sure to format your email with clean codes. Always keep your email minimal and clean. Complex coded emails may seem problematic to an email server and can cause a hard bounce. So keeping it simple is the way to go here.
Never send emails from a freebie service
Your email address shows how serious you are about your services, newsletter, or whatsoever. Especially when we are talking about emails related to sales and marketing here, never should we ever free email services like gmail.com or yahoo.com.
First of all, running an email campaign from a free service has limitations. Then most of your emails are likely to get declined as these freebie services are meant for personal or business use, not for running email campaigns.
After that, it looks very unprofessional to run an email campaign from a freebie service. I mean who would buy a product from someone who can’t even ensure the quality of their email and use a gmail.com email address to send updates.
Most of the free domains provided by Gmail, Yahoo, etc can’t even pass the DMARC policy regarding the subject of email protection. Then comes the hard part. You guessed it right, a hard bounce.
So how can you send emails by avoiding freebie services? Well, the solution is fairly simple. All you have to do is set up a custom domain name for your email address. Just buy a domain from any domain provider and use an email service that comes with any domain.
You can also purchase G-suite subscriptions via Google domains for a domain name. This way you have to face fewer hassles as Gmail is automatically set up by Google domains. Nice!
Never Ever Alert the Dreaded Spam Filter
We already knew that our mail shouldn’t make us look like spammers. But wait, there is more you need to know about spam filters. You should never ever be alert to the dreaded spam filter. If you do, your current and next campaign are in trouble, mate.
So how not trigger this stubborn dreaded spam filter? Actually, it is easier to solve than it sounds. First of all, try the most to build an organic email list. Try to avoid buying email lists. If you have to do it anyway, make sure to perform a clean-up of the purchased list.
Growing your list organically is a prior key to success in email campaigns. If you buy an email list, you’ll be signing a pop song to a crowd that came for a rock n roll concert. Meaning a purchased email list will make your email end up to people that are not even interested in your service.
You should also never cheat with your subscribers. If they signed up for the monthly newsletter, don’t send them newsletters weekly or daily. Also, consider using email automation to keep new subscribers in the loop who are expecting a mail from you anyway.
Use Verified Domain
Want to establish your email address as a legitimate one and build credibility easily? I bet you will like what’s coming next. If your email address is verified, no email bounce is about to happen until you do something terribly wrong.
You can use any of the three primary methods to verify your email address. These methods are DMARC, DKIM, and SPF. This is the easiest way to reduce bounce rate by improving the email deliverability rate.
A custom domain is essential to verify your email address. No matter what kind of email marketing tool you use, you can always take the privilege of having a verified email address.
A/B Split Testing
A/B Split Testing is a proven method that works in pretty much any campaign. Basically what you do in A/B Split Testing is to send two copies of the same email to your subscribers. Then you measure which copy did better and keep progressing with that.
For instance, you can try altering subject lines to test open rates on different ones. Then you can obviously alter email content if you are ready for a broad experiment.
This is an initial process of email marketing. Performing this action can help you understand which format works better with your email list and take action accordingly. This can drastically reduce the email bounce rate.
Be consistent
Develop a consistent mailing schedule. Your subscriber may forget that they’ve signed up for your newsletter if you don’t keep sending them emails on asked basis. Sending email in a scheduled manner benefits both your subscribers and you as a marketer.
First of all, your subscriber builds a habit of receiving your email on a regular basis if you remain consistent with your mailing schedule. On the other hand, you earn credibility by sending emails in time and so your sender’s reputation goes up.
Get personal
Don’t be afraid to get personal with your email. An email that sounds personal may offer better results than your expectation. If you don’t want to get into personalized email right now, you can start A/B Split Testing to find out what works better for your subscribers.
So many email servers share the same filters. So sending the same email to so many emails can trigger spam filters. This is where personalized emails can rescue your email campaign and reduce the email bounce rate.
If your email is personalized, it will interest the users to open the mail. This interaction results in a positive impact on your email list.
Segment Your Subscribers List
Segmenting email for different kinds of subscribers is a good idea. This is yet another step in a personalized email campaign. Don’t just flood each of your subscriber’s inboxes with the same email.
Differentiate types of your subscribers into different categories. For instance, you can separate the most active subscribers and send them a different newsletter as they’re more likely to respond better than others.
Then you can channel the list of active subscribers accordingly and target them with a personalized email to get into the flow again. This can help reduce the bounce rates a lot.
Run re-engagement campaigns
It is a very good idea to clean out your email list to make it worth your time and resources. You can run a re-engagement campaign for inactive users. You can either provide them the options to stay subscribed or even unsubscribe.
This way, your email list might get sorted but you will end up with a list of people that are actually interested in your services. This kind of marketing tactic ensures a low bounce rate and makes the marketing campaign an easy success.
Monitor email bounce rate
The best lessons come from experiences – this is a no-brainer logic. This applies to email marketing campaigns as well. You will have a detailed report on your email marketing campaign every time your run a campaign.
This report can help your subscribers and their intents for your brand. You will never know how your subscribers are going to react to your email until you run the campaign. So the debut campaign can be a hit and miss but the lessons from it are very valuable.
With the detailed reports of your email marketing campaign, you get to know about email open rates, delivery rates, bounce rates, and so many important statistics. You can analyze these data and construct your next campaign accordingly.
This way you can get better with every campaign you run. So try to learn from the experiences that come with being an email marketer and wisely implement the outcomes to your next email campaigns.
Conclusion
Email bounce rate is a key factor in the success of email marketing campaigns. Taking it lightly can impact negatively both your time and resources. So, analyze every email campaign report and take action accordingly.
If you don’t take enough steps to reduce the email bounce rate, you will eventually end up with an email list with zero engagement at all. Focus on your email bounce rate, try to find out the issues, and then plan, then implement your solutions.
