Bounce rate is a key metric in email marketing . If it’s too high, it could cause serious damage to your email campaigns and even your sender reputation. In this blog post, we’ll help you understand what email bounce rate is, what causes it, and how to keep it under control so you can enjoy high email deliverability .
What is email bounce rate?
Email bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that were sent but not successfully delivered to recipients' inboxes . More specifically, this rate tracks messages that were rejected by recipients' email servers but returned with an automatic bounce message to the sender indicating a delivery error.
Note : The bounce rate will not take into account emails that were marked as SPAM and rejected at the network level without any feedback being sent to the sending server. You can refer to the article on How to prevent your emails from becoming spam for more information on the topic of spam.
In email marketing , bounces aren't just minor hiccups. They're more like signals, telling you that something isn't right. It could be anything from a typo in the email address to a problem with the content of the email or the recipient's mail server.
Therefore, recognizing and understanding your email bounce rate is crucial. It goes beyond making sure your messages are getting through. More importantly, it helps maintain your sender reputation, taking your marketing communications to the next level.
Now, keep in mind that not all of your marketing messages will be delivered or convert, and that’s normal. (You can check out our article on email deliverability to get a deeper understanding of the email journey and the different obstacles in its path.) However, if the bounce rate is too high, your business will suffer.
How does email bounce rate affect your business?
A high bounce rate bogs down your marketing efforts and can damage your sender reputation with email service providers. It can even lead to more deliverability challenges and further reduce the reach of your email campaigns.
As an email hosting service provider, over the years we have had clients contact us looking for the reason why their messages are not being delivered. And we know how frustrating this can be, as it affects your operations as a business. Sometimes the reason for the bounce is simply an incorrect email address. Other times the reason can be more complex.
Let’s first clarify how high email bounce rates can affect your business, so you know what you can deal with if corrective measures are not taken.
Low conversion and engagement rates
When your emails bounce, they don’t reach the intended recipients and this naturally leads to lower open and click rates, which means reduced engagement with your content. If your emails aren’t getting through, this means fewer people are seeing and interacting with your content. This drop in engagement consequently leads to fewer conversions, which in turn affects your bottom line.
Waste of resources
Every email that bounces is a waste of time, effort, and money . You should know that even if you’re following all the best practices, there will still be messages that bounce, so be prepared. However, you should strive to keep that count as low as possible. In practice, high bounce rates mean that you’re not maximizing the ROI of your marketing efforts because a portion of your audience isn’t even receiving your messages. You’re essentially pouring your expensive marketing efforts down the drain.
Biased analytics
Bounce rates can skew the accuracy of your campaign analytics. This is because metrics like open rates and conversions can’t accurately reflect your audience’s behavior if a large number of emails never reach their destinations. Even if your other metrics look great, you shouldn’t leave bounce rates unattended.
If you ignore bounce rate, it can lead to incorrect interpretations of the performance of your email campaigns. This, in turn, could lead you to make ill-informed business decisions – not seeing the full picture can lead you to invest in the wrong areas.
Damaged sender reputation
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) track the number of bounces you generate in an attempt to prevent spam . The higher your bounces are, the more ISPs and ESPs will assume that you are buying mailing lists or scraping emails. Therefore, they would start punishing you by marking your emails as spam, and this can damage your sender reputation. That eventually results in reduced deliverability.
To better understand how spam filters take bounce rate into account, read our blog post How to Prevent Your Emails from Becoming Spam .
Restoring a good sender reputation is difficult, so it's best to focus on denmark whatsapp number data avoiding such an outcome.
Potential for blacklisting
Continuing to send messages to email addresses that bounce consistently can not only trigger spam filters with email service providers, but can eventually get your domain and/or IP on a denylist . This means that the recipient's email servers will start rejecting all of your messages as spam at a network level, further reducing your email deliverability.
As you can see, keeping your eyes on the prize without considering the potential negative outcomes and failing to take action can cause a lot of harm to your business. Therefore, in order to take steps to minimize bounce rates, it is necessary to better understand their nuances.
Types of email bounces
When it comes to email marketing, not all bounces are created equal. You have two main types to look out for – hard bounces and soft bounces . Understanding the difference between these can help you improve your campaign’s overall results.
Hard bounces
A hard bounce is a permanent delivery error. Hard bounces occur when you send marketing emails to:
Email bounce rate: What is it and how to reduce it?
-
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Wed Dec 18, 2024 3:06 am