9 Ways to Reduce Your Email Bounce Rate

What is an email bounce rate?

An email bounce rate represents the percentage of emails in a campaign that cannot be delivered to the intended recipients. The undeliverable emails bounce back to the sender.

There are two types of email bounces: soft and hard.

• Soft bounce: Soft bounces are temporary delivery issues, such as a full inbox, server error, or an email that exceeds size limits. These bounces are typically less problematic for marketing teams. You usually don’t need to remove the contacts from your email list unless the delivery issues persist.
• Hard bounce: Hard bounces indicate permanent delivery failures caused by invalid email addresses, expired domains, or spam filters. Contacts with hard bounces should be removed from your list immediately to avoid damaging your sender reputation.

A high bounce rate negatively impacts engagement and email deliverability — crucial performance indicators for any email marketing campaign. “A really high bounce rate can ruin your sender reputation,” said Nicolas Palumbo, marketing director at Diversity Employment. “Then your emails will be flagged as spam, which is obviously horrible, or even blocked, which is even worse.”

How to reduce your email bounce rate

Christy Saia-Owenby, founder and CEO of MOXY Company, emphasized the importance of monitoring and reducing a campaign’s bounce rate. “A bounce rate above 2 percent is concerning, and over 5 percent is problematic,” Saia-Owenby said. “Reduce it by using verified lists, authenticating domain records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and cleaning invalid addresses to avoid landing in junk boxes.”

Consider the following tactics to reduce your email marketing campaigns’ bounce rates. 

1. Scrub your email list regularly.

Building a quality email list isn’t enough. You must maintain it to ensure your messages reach legitimate inboxes. “List hygiene maintains data quality, which ISPs consider when determining if emails are spam,” said Jessica Materna, director of product and partner marketing at Litmus. “Clean lists improve deliverability and increase engagement by reaching interested subscribers.”

Some email addresses on your list will inevitably become inactive over time. Subscribers may switch to a different email address, and business associates may move to new companies. These contacts are bounces waiting to happen. By systematically scrubbing your email list, you can keep your bounce rates low.

Materna advises removing hard bounces immediately and deactivating addresses after three consecutive soft bounces. Also consider removing emails from subscribers who haven’t opened a message in several months. You can scrub your list manually or use third-party services like NeverBounce, which automatically verifies email addresses and identifies valid ones worth keeping.

2. Ensure emails aren’t spammy.

Marketing emails should be engaging and professional, not obnoxious and aggressive. Statista found that spam accounts for nearly 47 percent of emails sent around the world, and email service providers have taken steps to reduce the barrage of fake inheritance letters and weight-loss pill advertisements flooding inboxes daily. These efforts could mean your business’s insightful email newsletter may get flagged, even if it’s not technically spam.

Follow these tips to avoid spam filters:

• Triple-check for broken images and other formatting problems.
• Avoid copy commonly used in spam, such as “100% satisfied,” “free,” and “act now.”
• Include business information, such as your company’s address and phone number, in the email footer.
• Use sentence case and contacts’ first names in subject lines to appear less imposing.

3. Double your opt-ins — and make them count.

An opt-in email marketing strategy ensures that you’re marketing to consumers who’ve expressed interest in your offerings while abiding by digital privacy laws. Deploying a double opt-in strategy, however, will also help keep spam accounts and bots at bay, helping you combat high bounce rates.

With a double opt-in strategy, contacts must confirm their email addresses through an initial email they receive automatically upon registration. That extra step ensures the email address they provided is correct and can accept your company’s correspondence. You also may want to remind the subscriber to add your marketing email address to their contacts to prevent spam filtering of your emails.

4. Segment email lists by engagement.

Email service providers analyze various metrics to identify junk mail, including your email open rate (the percentage of sent emails that were opened) and click-through rate (the percentage of recipients who clicked a link within the email). They aren’t the most important factors, but those engagement metrics still play a key role.

Segmenting email lists by engagement is a great practice for marketing departments and businesses alike, because it can help you effectively target your efforts. To do it, identify which contacts have the highest engagement rates with past email campaigns and send future emails to those people first. That strategy is an easy way to avoid ending up in the spam folder.

5. Send campaigns consistently.

Staying in touch with the people you care about is the cornerstone of any relationship, and email marketing is no different. If you send newsletters or product announcements sporadically or inconsistently, subscribers may forget who you are and why they signed up to receive your emails in the first place, making them more likely to unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam.

Regular, meaningful campaigns encourage contacts to anticipate your content, ultimately increasing your open rates. (Don’t overdo it though; too many emails will feel intrusive.)

6. Do not buy email lists.

Purchasing contact lists is never recommended, because it almost always increases bounce rates. Whether they come from trade show organizers looking to monetize attendees or a service that offers curated, industry-specific B2B targets, the promise of instant success from a sea of strangers is really just a bait-and-switch.

The contacts on these email lists never opted in to your marketing campaigns and will likely mark your communications as spam. If too many recipients mark your emails as spam, your entire domain may be blocklisted, which is an extremely challenging and costly problem to overcome. The risks of buying email lists far outweigh any possible rewards. It’s simply not worth it.

7. Use your own domain.

Sending messages from a branded email address legitimizes your business and can help you avoid spam designations. Free Gmail or Yahoo accounts may be acceptable for personal correspondence, but professional communications should always come from a company email address.

Most website providers can integrate emails with popular service providers such as Google, offering a streamlined way to connect with subscribers without setting off junk-mail alarms.

8. Conduct A/B tests.

A/B testing can help determine how your emails resonate with subscribers. In an A/B test, you send two slightly different versions of the same email to select contacts. Based on the results, you send the version that garners the most engagement to the rest of your contacts. A/B testing variations can include subject lines, text links versus buttons for your call to action, and different positions for the lead content.

A/B tests are particularly helpful in reducing bounce rates, because they may reveal which emails are perceived as spammy and, better yet, what your audience enjoys engaging with the most.

9. Invite contacts to update their information.

This seemingly obvious tactic is often overlooked among email marketing strategies, but it could make a world of difference. People change their email addresses for various reasons. Some may gradually transition from one address to another, creating an opportunity for businesses to stay in touch.

A message with an “update profile” form enables subscribers to inform your company of any changes in their contact information, including their email address. You can then amend that data in your master contact list, preventing a hard bounce.

How do you calculate bounce rate?

Bounce rate is fairly easy to determine, even if your company doesn’t use email marketing software. Use this equation to determine your campaign’s bounce rate as a percentage:

(Number of bounced emails / number of emails sent) x 100

If your email newsletter goes out to 10,000 contacts and 15 emails bounce, for example, your bounce rate would be (15 / 10,000) x 100 = 0.15 percent.

What is a good email bounce rate?

Even the best email marketers occasionally experience a bounced email, but consistent bounces, whether soft or hard, are worth noting. Acceptable bounce rates vary slightly among industries, but they ideally would be less than 2 percent. Bounce rates between 2 percent and 5 percent are a potential red flag, and anything above 5 percent is a definite cause for concern. A high bounce rate may indicate an issue in the email acquisition process or the sending infrastructure, so it’s essential to investigate and address the problem promptly. 

Email bounce rate is a small but crucial metric

Maximizing digital marketing ROI is essential, and email campaign metrics are crucial performance indicators. Bounce rates, although only one small piece of the puzzle, are still imperative to analyze. They serve as key health indicators for your email list, leading you to the data insights you need to ensure your future campaigns’ success. Consider this data the low-hanging fruit of your email marketing strategy, and use the techniques above to address your soft and hard bounces consistently and effectively.

Jennifer Dublino contributed to this article.