As we all know, email marketing is one of the finest and most profitable online email marketing strategies these days, but on the other hand, it is not that easy either. Creating a perfect campaign requires a lot of effort, but still, in the end, there is no guarantee of 100% success rate. The primary reason behind the failure of any email marketing technique is the email bounce rate.
Bouncing emails is entirely frustrating. If any of your email bounces, that particular customer will never receive your email again. Plus, higher email bounce rates can hurt email deliverability. That is why it is essential to monitor the bounces proactively. Here, we will discuss the various types of bounces, why they happen, and the effective ways to reduce them.
Bounces are typically the inevitable part of your email marketing, but still, you have opportunities to understand the reason behind it and reduce it. In simple words, the email bounce rate is the percentage of the emails that come back to you. There are two different kinds of bounces:
These are caused due to the temporary delivery issues going on with the customers. The reason behind soft email bounce are:
This means permanent delivery failure. The reason behind hard email bounces are:
There are various reasons behind the bouncing of emails, such as:
The email bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of hard bounces by the number of emails you have sent. For example, if 5 of your emails get bounced back out of the 100 emails you sent, your bounce rate will be 5%. Depending on your industry, a reasonable email bounce rate ranges between 2% to 5%, and anything above 5% is a trigger alert. A high email bounce rate indicates poor delivery of emails to your customers, or you can say that your marketing campaign will fail. Therefore, in such cases, working on your email lists is recommended.
There was research done in 2018 on various kinds of industries to understand the average bounce rate; below are some of its highlights:
If you are facing the bounces more than the average bounces and you would like to reduce this number, then you have come to the right place. Here is the list of ways that can be used to reduce the number of bounces and increase the deliverability of your emails:
The email content plays an important role in the success of your email marketing campaigns. Just consider yourself as a reader of a marketing email, so:
The answer is No. Therefore, it is essential to focus on the content of your mail. Ensure it is short, sweet, and straight to the point. Else the recipients are either going to delete it or spam it. And if it gets marked as spam, that will affect the sender's domain reputation.
It is one of the most efficient email marketing tips that you should always use an authenticated domain server for sending marketing emails. The three primary email authentication methods are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, which should be performed on your domains. Using these methods impacts the delivery rates directly and also prevents sending negative security alerts to the customers.
The primary benefit of using double opt-ins in your emails is that it reduces the number of fake sign-ups to your website, as this feature asks them to enter their email address. Once any customer clicks the double opt-in button, it gives you a confirmation about a new subscriber.
The first step of an email marketing strategy is getting a professional email domain to send emails to the customer's list. Using free domains like "gmail.com" or "yahoo.com" can instantly increase the chances of being marked as "Spam" by the recipient. Sending emails from your domain, like "[email protected]," verifies that the sender is legitimate, and the customers start trusting your business.
One of the most effective email marketing tips to reduce bounces is maintaining the hygiene of your email address database. Therefore, it is said that regular clean-up of the email lists is required. Also, you can refer to some tools for building up the email list that can help you get more customers and fewer bounces.
Regular cleaning of the email lists ensures that it has valid and active email addresses. With this clean-up, you will also learn about your email's soft and hard bounces so that you can remove those invalid email addresses.
Statistics prove that almost 53% of global marketing emails are just spam.
So you should ensure that your emails do not fall under this category, and to make this happen, avoid using too big or too small images and avoid using the words like:
Showing up regularly in the customer's inboxes increases their interest in your business, and they start opening and engaging with your marketing emails. This also keeps your subscribers list active and fresh.
While making the email lists clean up, you get to know if there are any hard bounces on your emails. Before you send any following marketing email, remove that hard-bounced email. Moreover, they are invalid or incorrect, thus, there is no point in keeping that.
Another critical email marketing tip is to get the customer's email address verified beforehand, as it helps in reducing the email bounce rate to an extent.
To maintain email deliverability, you should always be on top of preserving email performance. Keeping track of whether the email is delivered helps you find the reasons for bounces.
Your emails are essential for your prospects, so ensure they are relevant to the customers' interests. Using images or emojis and compelling subject lines attracts the reader to your email.
There can be situations where the customer could have changed their email address or any other contact details. It would be best if you asked them to update their information frequently in your emails so that you can avoid any bounces.
Emails are the first phase of a marketing campaign, and email bounces are the second phase. However, the email bounce rate should be at most 2%. All the ways mentioned above of lowering bounce rates are doable. Remember that bouncing is a continuous process, so cleaning up the email list every six months is a mandatory tip.
And remember, never buy an email list; that is not worth it. Even if the bounce rates are healthy, there are plenty of email marketing tips mentioned that you should follow to make your campaign successful, like segmentation of email list and good quality content.
Vaibhav is the founder of smartlead.ai and smartwriter.ai, cold outreach and personalization platforms used by Stripe, GaryVee, Meta, and 16000 other businesses using SEO. Before this, he exited an AI business analytics business & bootstrapped his software consultancy, which built 55 funded startups that, in total, have raised $200M & generate >$14M in Monthly Revenue. He posts actively about SEO, growth marketing, and product.