Email bounces may seem innocuous at first — we’ve all experienced them at some point. You send an email and then you get a message back saying it bounced. However, ignoring this issue can lead to major problems. High bounce rates are indicative of low email deliverability rates. In other words, the number of emails that reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Inevitably, this will cause your email marketing campaigns to fail.
In this blog post, we’ll dive into more about what email bounce is and what you can do to stop it.
What Is Email Bounce?
Email bounce occurs when the mail server of a recipient rejects your message for a specific reason. These bounces directly correspond to the domain reputation of the sender.
Whether you send your emails through your own SMTP server or via an email service provider, all of your messages are subject to the SMTP configuration of the recipient mail server. This same server will decide whether to accept or reject the incoming email.
To reach the intended inbox, an email needs to successfully pass several phases of checks and confirmation. It is the job of the recipient’s mail server to notify the sender’s server whether it will accept the mail or not. If it is accepted, then the message is considered as sent.
Emails that are returned to their senders and have not been accepted by the mail servers of the recipients are what we call email bounces.
In this article, Smart Insights provides a detailed list of email marketing metrics. You can see different rates behavior per industry — this including bounce rates.
Types of Email Bounces
The following are the types of email bounces that have been distinguished by the email marketing industry:
– Soft bounce: A soft bounce is when a message receives a temporary failure to deliver that happens for several reasons. These reasons can include sending to a full mailbox, the server of the recipient is offline, the email has been deferred, or the email is quite large.
– Hard bounce: A hard bounce is when your email experiences a permanent delivery failure. Hard bounces occur when the email address of contacts are not valid or are no longer being used. Normally, the domain name of the address does not exist anymore or all registered mail servers have been shut down. A hard bounce can also happen when the email address has been misspelled.
– General bounce: A general bounce happens when the mail server is unable to deliver the message without a clear reason.
– Transient bounce: This is the type of bounce indicating that a mail server cannot deliver your message temporarily but will keep retrying. You need not perform any action with transient bounce emails while it is doing so. If the failure persists, the transient bounce becomes a hard bounce instead.
– Blocked: A blocked label indicates that the email server of the recipient has blocked the sender’s message for various reasons. This could be because they suspect it to be spam or that the message contains a suspicious attachment.
Why Do I Have a High Bounce Rate?
There are several causes that could be linked to an email marketing campaign having a high bounce rate. It could be because of the following:
Your List Is Not Formatted Correctly
If you did not set up your list the right way in your .csv, .xls, or .txt file before uploading to your email marketing platform, you might experience a high bounce rate when you send by bulk.
That’s why it’s essential to check to ensure that all domain names are correctly spelled in the email list and that each address is separated into individual contacts.
Sometimes quotation marks may be present on one side of the email address but not on the other, which would cause the file to everything within a line into a single column.
Your List Is Not Permission-Based
Ask yourself whether you’ve used your mailing list before or was it just the first time? If you notice that several email addresses returned as bounces during your first delivery, it could be because of the way these addresses were obtained.
A list that has been compiled from various sources without proper verification has a high chance of containing fake contacts.
To avoid experiencing a high email bounce rate, it’s best to stick with a permission-based contact list. One great way of doing this is by adding an opt-in form for contacts who are interested in subscribing to your email campaign.
You’re Using an Old Email List
Another common reason why email marketers experience high bounce rates is when the addresses in their list are no longer valid. It could be that contacts within the list have already stopped using their addresses and started using new ones.
There’s not much you can do about it when this happens. These people are not using the same email addresses and have already become unreachable. That’s why it’s crucial to stay in contact with your subscribers regularly so that they will remember you.
Doing this correctly would result in a higher probability of them signing up to your newsletter in case they decide to change email addresses later on.
How To Solve Email Bounce
There are several techniques you can employ to keep your bounce rates low.
Incorporate Double Opt-In Capability
Double opt-in is perhaps one of the top techniques that can help email marketers develop a valuable mailing list. Whenever a user registers with your newsletter, you can have an email sent out automatically to their inbox so they can verify their account.
With this approach, you can rest easy knowing that your contact’s email address is authentic and that they are truly interested in being a subscriber.
Maintain Good Email List Hygiene
As hinted above, having a stale mailing list can lead to a lot of problems particularly when the email addresses are no longer being used. That’s why updating your list periodically is vital.
When you can maintain a clean email list, you can make sure that the addresses in it are active and healthy. Scheduling an email marketing campaign using a clean list can improve your deliverability and reduce email bounce rates.
Send Emails on a Regular Basis
Keeping your email subscribers engaged is a crucial aspect of any email newsletter campaign. A regular flow of messages between two accounts helps assure the receiving server that your emails are of good quality.
Furthermore, the recipient’s server will also take note of this constant email activity which makes your IP address less prone to experiencing email bounces.
Avoid Spamming Your Subscribers
Although it’s a great idea to keep your subscribers engaged, this doesn’t mean that you should spam them with email content as well. People who feel that your emails are becoming spammy would most likely unsubscribe, or even worse, report your messages as spam.
Here are some pointers that can help you avoid sending spam-like content to your target audience:
- Avoid using words in your email content that could trigger spam filters. Certain words like “free” and “off” are blacklisted by some email service providers which could result in your messages being seen as spam-like by these entities.
- Avoid placing links excessively in your messages. Adding a significant amount of links in emails can be seen as an act of phishing, resulting in the receiving server bouncing emails back to the sender.
- Avoid using bold, all caps, and exclamation marks. Content that has numerous characters that are bold or capitalized can be seen as spam-like by email service providers.
Monitor Your Sender Reputation Score
Your sender reputation score is a value that domains provide to your IP address to check whether your email activities are ideal or not. Having a low sender reputation could result in more email bounces, messages heading to the spam folder, or even being blocked.
You should keep an eye on your sender reputation to see if your emails have a good chance of reaching their destinations.
Conclusion
Email marketers spend most of their time ensuring that their email campaigns reach their intended destinations successfully. That’s why it’s important that you know what causes bounces in email and how you can avoid them.
Following the tips provided above should give you a good head start in making sure that your email marketing efforts aren’t wasted due to email bounces.
