6 valid solutions to reduce your email bounce rate!

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There are times when we put enormous efforts to prepare a good email marketing campaign but still cannot judge the reason for its failure. 

When I was an amateur in email marketing, I believed a great deal was enough to increase sales. I devoted 75% of my time in creating good content and appealing designs for the email and the remaining time was focused on getting leads and estimating the profits I might earn.

To my surprise, the majority of my emails did not even reach the prospects then how could I expect them to make a deal with me!

For the first few months, I kept on sending emails, assuming they were being received but probably the content or the deal was not good enough. I did A/B testing for the content, the design but all in vain.

Talking to experienced marketers I realised I had been completely ignorant towards “Email bounce” a crucial factor to decide the success/failure of email campaigns.

Email bounce signifies the non-deliverability of an email for several reasons. It is notified by an automatic message of delivery failure that originates from the recipient’s mail server. The bounce message provides important information to identify the reason for delivery failure, like

•         Reason for the bounce
•         Date & time of bounce
•         The mail server that bounced it
•         The RFC code, according to which hard bounces are depicted by 5XX code and soft bounces are depicted by 4XX

Types of Email Bounce – Soft, Hard & General bounce

Soft bounce indicates that the email address was valid and reached the recipient’s inbox, but bounced due to one of the following reason-

•          Mailbox was full
•         The message was too large for the recipient’s inbox
•         The server was down

It’s better to retain such email addresses in your list as the soft bounce is due to temporary reasons. But if your messages are consistently bouncing you might want to reconsider.

Mailbox providers, such as Gmail, monitor the bounced messages after which they return undelivered emails back to the email service provider. A high bounce rate calls for an immediate hygiene process to be undertaken before starting or resuming any email marketing campaign. By hygiene process I mean,  using an email verifier to check the validity of email addresses to ensure their existence and validity.

 Hard Bounce shows a permanent rejection which generally occurs when-

•         Email address doesn’t exist
•         The email address is invalid

Such email addresses should never be on your email marketing list.

With the help of an email tester, the email addresses tend to bounce permanently, can be easily tracked and hence avoided.

General Bounce occurs when a prospect/ recipient doesn’t receive the email because of the technical limitations of the server. Receiver’s firewall settings may restrict your emails in some cases. This type of email bounce is safe and doesn’t affect your email account and sender reputation.

Prime steps to reduce your bounce rate

1.   Authentication– Email account authentication is vital to maintain sender reputation which directly helps in lowering the email bounce rate. The authentication is of 3 kinds

•         SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
•         DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)
•         DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance)

Once authenticated, the receiver’s server easily verifies and establishes the genuineness of your email account. Once that’s done all your future emails get a clean chit which ultimately reduces your email bounce rate.