Email marketing is a rewarding online marketing strategy, but it’s not easy to master!
It takes a lot of effort and hard work to plan and carry out an authentic email marketing campaign. One of the biggest obstacles to a successful campaign is a high bounce rate. Imagine how disheartening it can be if you discover that some of your audience didn't even receive the email since it bounced right after you sent it!
Marketers are trying to fight high bounce rates and are having a hard time in doing so as the reason behind increasing bounce rates and its solution is not always clear.
What Is email bounce rate is and what are its major causes:
Email bounce rate measures the percentage of recipients who did not receive your message as it was rejected by their server.
There are two types of bounces that you can face: soft bounce and hard bounce.
Soft bounce refers to the temporary failure in the delivery of your email caused due to reasons like
no space in your recipient’s mailbox,
server issues,
your message could be too big to be received, etc.
Such factors don’t require fixing and neither are they in your hands.
Hard bounce refers to the permanent failure in the delivery of your message to an email address caused due to reasons like
incorrect domain names,
invalid email addresses,
subscriber’s mailboxes that are no longer active.
Hard bounces are a bigger problem and require attention since they cannot be resolved with subsequent emails.
Any email that does not reach its intended address is useless in terms of persuasion or information, lowering the effectiveness of your email campaign. A high email bounce rate can harm your reputation and, in the worst-case scenario, prevent you from sending emails at all.
A bounce rate under 2% is considered a standard rate. Anything between 2-4% requires attention and efforts to bring it down. A 5% or above rate is serious and can be extremely damaging for your campaigns and should immediately be taken care of. Hence, it is very crucial to check on your email bounce rate and work to keep it low at all times.
How To Reduce The Email Bounce Rates
Verify Your Email Authenticity:
Email authentication is important to save yourself from email fraud, low deliverability, and getting tagged as spam. Especially when you use third-party ESPs to deliver your messages. During the process of delivering the emails, the servers check the legitimacy of your emails by determining their relevance and if the source of the email is secure or not. SPF, DMARC, and DKIM are three fundamental ways of authenticating your emails.
Hence by authenticating your emails you will save yourself from a negative reputation and high bounce rate.
Avoid Free Sender Domains:
. A professional domain is a must-have for email campaigns as using free email addresses such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc increases your chances of being categorized as spam, which can harm your email sender reputation and raise your bounce rate.
Instead of using free sender domains, it is better to use your company domain to pass the DMARC policy check. Using your company’s domain for sending out emails increases your credibility as a legitimate business and keeps your newsletters out of the spam folder.
Ensure Your Email doesn’t Appear to be Spam:
If you're not paying attention, you might end up as spam. Spam filters are designed to determine whether or not your email appears to be spam. The difficult aspect is that, because spammers' strategies vary all the time, the filters must update as well.
It implies that you cannot simply set your emails and forget them. You must ensure that the content & the templates used are up to date and don’t have any features that make it appear to be spam. Otherwise, it can increase your email bounce rate significantly.
Obtain Your Email List The Right Way:
Make sure you get your email addresses the right way. If you buy a list of email addresses, you'll run into a lot of issues, such as dealing with outdated and inactive addresses and getting marked as spam by people who have never heard from you before, and it's not worth the risk.
Using an opt-in strategy and organically growing your email lists with your content and marketing activities is far more effective. Every individual on your email list should have given you their email address voluntarily, knowing what they will get in return.
You can gather email addresses in a variety of ways, such as by including an email signup form on your blog or website, and through social media platforms as well.
Regularly Update Your Email List:
Relying on your initial email blast to clean your email list is a major mistake. It's an injustice to both your business and your ESP. Furthermore, if you do not clean and update your email list, you risk being blocked and tagged as spam.
It's time to update your list if it's been a while. To begin, separate the recipients and use a high-accuracy email validation tool to detect invalid, inaccurate, dormant, and suspicious email addresses. You will enhance your deliverability and open rates, as well as reduce your email bounce rate significantly, by filtering out such contacts.
Consider Adopting The Double Opt-in Method:
There is always a debate regarding the use of single-opt-in and double-opt-in methods. Well both of them have their advantages. But if you want better results it is better to go with the latter. The upper hand of using double-opt-in is that you will know if the email address is coming from a real and monitored inbox as double opt-in requires the users to confirm their subscription to your email. This will help you generate a high-quality subscriber list avoiding the chances of facing bounces.
Companies that have previously experienced low open rates or abuse complaints should adopt the double-opt-in method for better campaign performance.
Use Segmentation:
Email segmentation may aid with personalization, which is crucial for the success of your email campaigns. When you segment an email list, you divide it into smaller, more meaningful chunks. This allows you to adapt your email marketing to the exact wants, challenges, and preferences of your target audience. Creating email content that is relevant to your audience lowers your email bounce rate while increasing open rates and conversions.
You can segment your list depending on the factors such as gender, geolocation, age, profession, purchasing history, page views, etc
Produce High-Quality Content:
Your email marketing strategy's nerve is content. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Nobody will like to open an email that does not immediately grab their attention and engage them.
The quality and relevance of your email content impact how servers will interpret your message and whether it will be classified as spam. Thus, any component of your email newsletter, from the subject line to the text and graphics, must be engaging, entertaining, authentic, and direct.
Avoid Spam and Improve Website Security:
Mail servers consider the quality of your content, historical user involvement methods, and other reputational considerations as well. Hence it is advisable to link your website content with your email content to lower your mail bounce rate. For instance, while promoting your brand, its products, or services, ensure that your CTAs and links direct customers to the appropriate pages.
Most importantly, keep your website secure. The use of SSL certificates is crucial for increasing brand visibility and client confidence. Browsers will tell customers that your website is not safe if it does not employ HTTPS. Customers who do not wish to jeopardize their data security will most likely leave the transaction, stop opening your emails, or even mark them as spam. This will result in a higher bounce rate in the long run.
A/B Test Your Campaign:
It's not easy to create an email that's both entertaining and converts straight away. Your target audiences have a variety of interests, issues, and habits. Some emails do better than others, which is unsurprising. The idea is to do A/B tests on important components of your email content to see which ones resonate the most with your subscribers.
A/B testing, in the context of email, refers to the creation of two variants of a campaign and comparing them. The process's complexity varies. To evaluate open rates, you might manually develop and send email alternative subject lines. Most email service providers, on the other hand, allow you to automate this procedure and acquire key insights faster.
You can run an A/B test on subject lines, Content, Visualizations, Emails containing and excluding images, etc.
Analyze Your Email Campaigns
You should never rely on your instincts when it comes to email marketing. Only by tracking the performance of your efforts can you make informed judgments, reduce bounce rates, and increase open rates.
Create a tracking schedule first. Tracking email performance on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or campaign-by-campaign basis should be done. This will help you to track your progress, compare outcomes, uncover improving patterns, and uncover new trends.
Second, you should outline your email marketing goals. This will help you decide what you want to measure and which metrics to use to show how well your efforts are performing.
To wrap up:
Now, it must be clear that email bounce rates can occur due to so many reasons and there is no particular way of keeping it low. We all know that prevention is better than cure, to have the upper hand you should keep a check on your bounce rates and focus on avoiding them from the very beginning rather than trying to fight it after it goes out of your hand.
By keeping the above points in mind you will surely be able to maintain a lower bounce rate and carry out successful email campaigns.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
