Your email marketing campaign is one step closer to success if the emails reach your target audience. However, bounce back emails often reduce the rate of success.
The concept of email marketing is you persuade your audience to buy or subscribe. They get your newsletter in the inbox, open it, and read it. If the value proposition is good, they act on the callouts like View Products, Add to Cart, Checkout, etc.
Everything looks streamlined and smooth until you see the email delivery error messages like “Temp failed / Rejected”, “Spam/Phishing”, “Message not delivered”, etc. This hurts your email marketing campaign’s success rate.
Importance of Email Delivery in Email Marketing
If you cannot convey your message to a lead, do not expect the lead to become a customer anytime soon. Everything else, like open rate, click rate, add to carts, subscriptions, etc., comes second.
Here’s why email delivery rate is vital:
#1. Reach The Audience
A high email delivery rate ensures that your emails actually reach the intended audience. This allows you to effectively communicate your message.
#2. Maximizing ROI
When your marketing emails reach more leads, the chance of conversion increases. For example, when a SaaS product’s email marketing conversion rate is 3%, you get 3 sales when your email reaches 100 qualified leads.
Due to bounce-back emails, say your campaign could reach only 50 leads. What sales count do you expect? Do the math!
To help you out, it’s 1.5. So, the return on investment (ROI) reduces dramatically when the email bounce back rate increases. You got that right! Email bounce back rate is also a metric for email marketing. I shall explain it later.
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Bounce Back Email: What Do You Need to Know?
When the email service providers are unable to deliver an email for any reason, they send you an email delivery report. It outlines the issues due to which the email client was not able to deliver your email.
The above image gives you a glimpse into an email bounce message from the email client. This email was not delivered by Gmail due to the address issue, which is a soft bounce. More on this later in this article.
In most cases, these failed delivery email communications are automated and come from a no-reply address. This is known as email bounce back or bounced email in the email marketing ecosystem.
The bounce back emails contribute to the complexities and bottlenecks in email marketing. According to a recent market study done by Constant Contact, the average email bounce rate combining all industries is 10.09%. Independent writers, artists, and performers have the least bounce rate, which is 5.80%. Whereas the legal services industry has the most bounce rate, which is 15.69%.
The Reasons Why Emails Bounce Back
Here is why your newsletters, promotional, and abandoned cart recovery emails never reach the leads, prospects, or customers:
- The leads’ mailbox is full and cannot accept new emails at the moment.
- The email servers of the recipients are offline or going through a temporary downtime.
- There are content, link, attachment, etc., filtering system within the recipients’ email server that stops your emails from reaching the inbox of your audience.
- You did not appropriately configure the DNS record of your email server for the email clients and ISPs.
- There are no such email recipients in the email servers or domains where you send marketing emails.
- The recipient’s email server has misconfigured settings, leading to delivery failures.
- Your IP address or email server has a poor reputation. Hence, ISPs and email service providers are blocking your emails or sending them directly to the spam folder.
- Your email is too large to be handled by limited email size quotas for many free email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook.
Different Types of Bounce Back Emails
Soft Bounce
This email bounce type is mostly irreversible, hence known as a soft bounce. The most common email delivery failures that fall under this type are:
- Email service provider or IT admin is using content blocking
- The recipient’s inbox is full
- A Gmail user ran out of free cloud storage quota, which is 15 GB
- The email server is undergoing maintenance
Hard Bounce
When you cannot reverse the email bouncing issue, it is known as a hard bounce scenario. These email delivery failures are examples of hard email bounces:
- The email address is invalid, fake, or disposable
- Your IP was blocked by the ISP or email service provider
- The user left the domain and deactivated their email address for good
- ISPs doubt you as a spamming email marketer
- The MTA is unable to match the email address to a user on the domain
How to Calculate the Email Bounce Back Rate
Here’s how to calculate the bounce back email rate:
Email bounce rate = (the number of bounced emails/ the number of sent emails)x100
If you sent 100 emails, and 20 of those bounced, the email bounce rate for the campaign is 20%.
The Impact of Bounce Back Emails in Email Marketing
- Bounced emails consume valuable business resources like time, effort, and money.
- A higher bounce back email rate hurts your reputation as an email marketing brand and sender.
- Bounced email data skews the campaign analytics by interfering with other metrics like open, click-through, and conversion rates.
- A bounced email means missed sales, conversion, and engagement opportunities.
- Bounce back email rate is negatively proportional to your email marketing ROI.
- Email service providers and ISPs may block you as a sender for a lifetime.
- A higher bounced email rate means the lead you created or bought is of substandard quality.
Now, let’s explore ways to reduce the rate of email bounce back.
Do Not Send Spammy Emails
Make sure to avoid the spam filter by avoiding the usage of certain words. Do not do anything that makes an email server detect your marketing emails as spam.
Always Use a Clean Email List
It is quite normal for your email list to become crowded with inactive emails. To avoid the risk of bounce back emails, you need to clean up your list regularly to keep the active subscribers only.
Segment the List
You should segment the list and create different categories for highly-active and inactive subscribers. You can always push for higher conversion for the highly active subscribers, while sending win-back emails to the inactive users is a great way to re-engage them.
Use a Paid Domain for Sending Emails
Many organizations make the mistake of sending emails from free domains like Gmail and Yahoo. However, the best practice is to send emails from a paid business domain because it increases your credibility.
Always A/B Test Emails Before Sending
Before sticking to one style of email, you need to perform A/B testing. Your target should be testing out all the major elements to find out which one is preferred more by the recipients and using that for all the emails.
Ensure Relevant Opt-Ins
If you want to get engaging subscribers, you need to create hyper-focused opt-ins. Businesses have to share the most relevant content with the users so that they share their active email addresses and open emails regularly.
Ask Subscribers for Active Emails
To reduce the bounce back rate of your emails, you should be sending them to the active email address only. Asking your subscribers if they use any other email regularly is a great way to confirm this.
Ensure to Sign-Up Real People Using Captcha
Are you signing up real people for your emails? It is a crucial point because signing up bots will not benefit you. Use a reliable captcha system to ensure no bot or spam account is signing up for your email list.
Free Hard Bounced Email Addresses From Your List
Every email list contains some inaccurate or inactive email addresses that are bound to be bounced. These are called hard-bounced email addresses, as the emails never reach the address. The ideal approach is to remove such emails from your email list immediately after getting bounced. Thus, you can keep your bounce back rate low.
Be Regular in Sending Emails
Do you send emails to your subscribers only once in a while? In that case, do not be surprised if they fail to remember that they subscribed to you and consequentially block you. Make sure to send the emails regularly so the subscribers open your emails regularly and actively interact with you.
Use Email Verification Tools to Reduce Email Bounce Back Rate
Expert email marketers use state-of-the-art email authenticity checker tools to scrub their email list of garbage email addresses. Your lead provider or email finder tools may not be efficient in detecting disposable emails, fake emails, spam emails, etc. Hence, you need to use email verification services, APIs, or add-ons to scrub the emails automatically or yourself.
Most of these tools utilize the following technologies to cleanse your email list:
- Domain record checker
- Email deduplication
- Catch-all email checker
- Temporary unavailability detection
- Email verification APIs
- Role account detection like @billing, @sales, etc.
- Create a detailed SMTP response chart
- MTA validation
- Greylist domain detection
- Spam trap detection
Now, we will explore top-notch email verification tools for email marketing.
#1. DeBounce
DeBounce helps you validate the list of prospective customers and leads of your email marketing campaigns. It offers a three-step process to cleanse your email list. You upload the email database on DeBounce.
Its systems will scan the list for deactivated, spammy, and invalid email addresses. Then, it lets you download a scrubbed email database for your marketing campaigns. The online tool ensures full security and confidentiality of your email list. Some of its major features are:
- Minimize email bouncing
- Checks and removes disposable emails from the list
- Checks for catch-all domains email addresses
- Anti-greylisting technology
- Deduplicate the list of emails
- DeBounce API to integrate the service into your own SaaS products
#2. ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce helps you to start your email marketing campaigns by investing time, effort, and content creativity on real leads and customers instead of bots and phonies. You can increase the ROI and open rate by using its email verification services that deliver 99% accuracy. It also offers the following email marketing intelligence services:
- Email Finder to find new leads and prospects
- Email Activity Data report tells you about the most active and engaging subscribers or leads
- Email Score service to get an AI insight into your marketing email database
- Email Testing Tools for email server testing and inbox delivery
- Email Server Blocklist Monitor to track data on real-time blocking of marketing email domains
#3. Clearout
Clearout enables you to block spam and fraudulent email leads in two ways. First, it uses the Verify at Capture solution to stop spam emails from entering the marketing email database. It has its own solutions for LinkedIn email leads, B2B email finder, etc., so you only get qualified leads.
Secondly, it offers you a bulk email validation tool. You need to upload your email database as an Excel or CSV file, and the tool will cleanse the input. There is a Clearout for Sheets add-on for Google Sheets, so you can scrub the email list yourself.
#4. MyEmailVerifier
MyEmailVerifier brings you a bulk email verification system. Here, you can clean or validate your marketing email lists. When the master email list is free from spammers, fraud emails, fake emails, and disposable emails, you automatically reduce the bounce rate up to 99%.
It comes with APIs and other integration technologies, so you can integrate the tool with your favorite email database tool, email client, email service provider, and spreadsheet apps. Its other products include real-time email verification and automatic third-party email list cleansing.
Looking for more tools to verify emails of your leads? Check out this expansive list of email verification tools.
Final Words
So, now you know what causes your marketing emails to bounce back. You also learned the different types of bounce back emails. What more is, you now have the knowledge to battle email bounce back and enhance the email delivery rate of your email marketing campaign.
Check out this ultimate comparison of Omnisend vs. Mailchimp to pick the right online email marketing automation tool for your business or agency.
