As discussed previously in the first part, bounced emails have a negative effect on your sender reputation as well as your ability to land emails in your recipient’s inbox. Having a high email bounce rate can be a problem as it will lower the effectiveness of your overall email marketing campaign.
As an email marketer, you want to make sure that your bounce rate stays low. When you can work on improving your mailing bounces, your open and click-through rates will increase.
Besides staying within a healthy bounce rate, you should also consider the types of bounces you experience. There are two types of a bounce email, namely:
- Soft bounce: This type of bounce is normally caused by an overloaded mail server, the recipient’s inbox is full, or the email is too large for the recipient.
- Hard bounce: This type of bounce describes permanent email delivery failure which could be caused by sending a message to the wrong email address or an outdated domain.
It’s important to keep in mind that both hard and soft bounces can cause problems with email deliverability.
Tips To Avoid Experiencing Bounced Emails
If you notice that you have a higher-than-normal email bounce rate or just want to keep your percentage low, then follow these tips to minimize the chances of experiencing bounce emails.
Leverage Double Opt-Ins
When you get people to subscribe and opt-in once again to confirm their email addresses, you’ll see fewer users placing false information or driving your mail to inactive accounts. This is simply because a double opt-in sends a confirmation email to the recipient upon signing up. These users only get added to your mailing list after they’ve clicked on the confirm button.
The first confirmation message has to reach them before they can verify their email address. This helps ensure that the email address they’ve given is correct and is capable of accepting further emails.
Keep Your Email Lists Clean
As you progress with your email marketing campaign, your mailing list will start to grow. This also means increased chances of encountering issues with recipients such as old accounts being inactive. Just like in real life, you’ll need to maintain and keep your list clean to ensure that only active and healthy email addresses are present.
You can start by removing all inactive users — like those who haven’t opened any of your emails in a while. Another option would be to perform a retargeting campaign to identify inactive accounts or people who no longer want to receive any of your emails.
Keep Your Email Lists Segmented
When you segment your mailing list, you ensure that your subscribers only get the data that they want and need from you. This helps you avoid being blacklisted or having your email sent directly to their spam folders.
An excellent technique to segment is by basing users according to their engagement. You can group together those accounts that are the most active and deliver more messages to them than the less-active ones.
Active email subscribers are the ones more likely to engage with your messages. Furthermore, segmenting your list according to engagement also makes retargeting campaigns possible, so you can re-engage dormant accounts later on to reduce your email bounce rate.
Make Sure Your Messages Don’t Appear as Spam
Spam emails account for approximately 45.1% of email traffic nowadays, which is why most people are wary of these shady messages. Although your emails may be genuine, email providers have key qualifiers that help them identify spam and you could unintentionally be falling into them.
To avoid spam filters, you don’t want to use broken images. You should also use copy in your messages that won’t trigger spam detectors. You can do this by avoiding the following phrases:
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- Big bucks
- Act now!
- $$$
- Free offer
- No catch
- Make money
- Free offer
Perform A/B Tests on Your Emails
Not all emails are made equal, and some can have a higher performance than others. If you don’t test your messages, you can’t tell which of them are doing better than the rest.
That’s why it’s important to A/B test your emails. You can test key elements such as the email content, CTAs, and subject lines to find out which features and phrases bring out more responses from your subscribers.
Sending two different emails to separate subscriber groups and seeing which one will perform the best is a great way to measure and modify what works and what doesn’t.
Create Relevant Opt-Ins for Your Subscribers
One of the best ways you can get people to join your email list is by asking them to sign up for an opt-in. This opt-in could be anything that provides value to them such as an ebook, demo, checklist, or any other freebie that will push them closer to making the desired action.
To ensure that these subscribers are engaged, you should design your opt-ins to be focused on your target users. When you provide them content that aligns with their needs, the chances that they’ll be more open to future emails from you increases.
No More Bounced Emails
Bounced emails are often overlooked nowadays. As a marketer, you should make sure that your email bounce rate stays low to increase the chances of your emails reaching their intended destinations.
Both soft bounces and hard bounces can hurt your email deliverability, which is why it’s important to ensure that your mailing list consists only of active and engaged users.
By following the tips provided in this post, you can minimize bounced emails and drive more opens, click-throughs, and sales to your business.
Bounce Your Way to a High Inbox Placement
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