Whether you’re doing email marketing campaigns for sales, digital marketing, recruitment, or fundraising, your email bounce rate is one of the most important metrics to watch. When an email you send bounces, it impacts more than just that email’s chances of being read.

A high bounce rate reduces the likelihood of future emails reaching their intended recipients.

It’s fine if some emails bounce, but if you’re getting a lot of bounced emails, it might be time to reassess your email marketing strategy. Let’s get this party started with a crucial definition.

What Is Email Bounce Rate?

Remember sending an email and then seeing a “Notification undelivered” message in your inbox a few minutes later? Your mail has just bounced, as indicated by the notification. When the intended recipient’s email server is unable to transmit the message, it is referred to as a bounced email.

The email bounce rate is derived by dividing the number of bounced emails by the number of emails sent. While bounce rates vary by industry, the average bounce rate is roughly 1.06 percent across all industries.

If your bounce rate exceeds 2%, it’s a sign that your email marketing list isn’t as “healthy” as it should be.

What Causes Your Emails to Bounce?

Emails might bounce for a variety of reasons. Bounced emails are divided into two categories by most email marketing experts: “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces.

A hard bounce is an email never received by the recipient’s email server and returned to the sender. Hard bounces occur for three reasons:

1. The email address or receiving domain is invalid: It’s possible that the address was misspelled or that the intended recipient just provided an invalid email address.
2. The email server blocks incoming emails: It’s possible that the email server was set up to reject emails from specified addresses or domains.

On the other hand, a soft bounce is an email that is returned to the sender after being accepted by the recipient’s mail server.

Three common causes of soft bounces are listed below:

1. The size of the email message is excessive: This is dependent on the recipient’s server’s limit. Most older systems have meager storage limits, but other cloud-based email services offer significantly more.
2. The email server for the recipient is unavailable: the server may be down for maintenance, or the network connection may be down.
3. The addressee’s mailbox is overflowing: According to one study, the worst days for email bounce are Friday and Saturday, with 0.8 percent of all emails bouncing on those days. This is most likely due to a week’s worth of email accumulating in inboxes, including your marketing communications from the previous week.

Here are a few things you can do to enhance your email delivery rate and lower your bounce rate for your social media marketing.

1. Begin with a well-designed sign-up form.

You must first obtain contacts before you may send an email to them. Using a sign-up or web form is one of the most acceptable ways. They allow users to provide their personal information and their email address. Make sure you have a solid captcha system to prevent bots or machines from signing up.

2. Use only double opt-in contacts to reduce email bounce rates.

Double opt-in contacts are used by any reputable email marketer in digital marketing

3. Before you try to send it to it, clean up your contact list.

Many bounces occur because your contact list is outdated. If your list is old (more than six months since you sent it), many of the addresses will have been stale, closed, or otherwise inactive, resulting in a high number of No Mailbox bounces.

Correcting apparent spelling errors is another simple correction. For example, generic addresses like noreply@something.com and info@domain.com should be removed.

4. Use the first campaign to ‘clean’ your list, not ‘clean’ your list!

You’re doing them a disservice by using your ESP as a list cleanser. You risk having your account suspended if you send to a bad list, but you also put yourself at a significant disadvantage because you harm your own sender’s reputation.

If you harm your sender’s reputation, recipient servers may reject your message, causing your next email marketing campaign to be blocked.

Spending a little time making your list as good as possible before sending it will save you much time afterward when you’re trying to restore the harm to your sender’s reputation.

5. Inquire about new information.

It’s simple to include a request for updated information or to confirm the information in your emails, especially if you’re sending transactional mail. By altering the contact’s email address before it becomes invalid, you may be able to avoid the bounce in time before your social media marketing campaign.

6. Check your sender’s domain.

We assure everyone who thinks this sounds technical and intimidating that it is not. It’s simple to implement and can result in a lower bounce rate.

A domain that has given Elastic Email authority to send email from it is known as a verified sender domain. The emails are sent from Elastic Email servers, but the “From” address is set to your domain.

7. Make that your email does not appear to be spam.

This may seem apparent, but it might creep up on you if you’re not paying attention. Spam filters are designed to determine whether or not your email appears to be spam.

It implies that you cannot simply “set it and forget it.” You must ensure that your template is up to date and that it does not have any features that make it appear to be spam. Your email bounce rate could be significantly reduced as a result of this.

You can use tools like mail-tester.com to keep on track or figure out what adjustments to the structure, wording, links, or content will prevent your emails from being marked as spam. This will greatly benefit your social media marketing.

8. Consider sending mail regularly.

Your digital marketing subscribers are less likely to forget that they are committed to receiving mail from your company or organization if your distribution schedule is constant.

We hope the notifiers we have mentioned here will help you reduce the bounce rate significantly.