If compared with the many digital marketing techniques available, email marketing brings the highest return on investment. It’s possible only if the emails you send reach the right recipients. If emails don’t hit the inbox, the campaign’s bounce rate grows. Even the best email marketing campaigns fail to deliver results if the bounce rate is relatively high. A high bounce rate may hurt the sender's reputation and lead to email ID blacklisting.
Types of Email Bounces
Based on the causes that lead to a bounce, we can divide the bounce rate into two categories:
Soft Bounce
Soft email bounces occur when emails fail to hit the inbox due to several temporary issues. It happens if the recipient’s email inbox is full, the recipient’s email server is temporarily down or the email sent is too large.
Hard email bounces
Hard email bounces may occur when emails are not delivered to recipients’ inboxes due to many reasons including inactive or invalid email addresses, outdated email domains, blocked sender ID or changed email address(es). Technically, hard bounces are tough to fix if compared to soft bounces. Hard bounces denote a permanent delivery problem y that is pretty difficult to address.
How to Minimize Email Bounce Rate?
You can do several things to control and reduce your email bounce rate. I have listed a few tried and tested methods to lower email bounce rates and maximize the ROI of your email marketing efforts.
1. Measure Your Current Bounce Rate
Calculating your existing bounce rate is the first thing first to do to control the damage. The bounce rate of an email marketing campaign is the total percentage of your emails that don’t get delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Not all the bounce rates are alarming. Following is the benchmark you can consider to determine if the given bounce rate is good to go. A bounce rate is said to be excellent if it’s 1% or below. However, if it’s over 5%, it requires immediate attention.
2. Clean Your Email List
To reduce the hard bounce and improve the inbox delivery of your emails, do regular cleaning of your email list. Remove the email IDs from the list that are non-existent, broken, or outdated. As time passes, email IDs go inactive or some of the users lose access to it. By removing these stale, non-existent, and disengaged audiences, you can considerably increase the quality of your email list. It also helps in keeping your bounce rate low.
3. Use Double Opt-Ins
Opt-in is a sure-shot way to get an accord from interested recipients. It ensures the quality and authenticity of the email lists. People who subscribe to your list with opt-in have a direct interest in your product and services. These are the audiences who will be more likely to engage with your emails. In email marketing, there are two types of opt-ins:
Single opt-in
This is the standard practice where a user shares his email ID with you by submitting it on a sign-up form. In most cases, the form has a Captcha system to weed out bots and spam accounts.
Double opt-in
A double opt-in takes two steps to confirm a user’s subscription. After the first opt-in, the recipient receives an email authentication. It asks the recipient to confirm that he wants to be added to your email list. When the new subscriber confirms the second opt-in, he is added to your email list. Double opt-ins are the best tool to reduce the bounce rate. They can considerably cut the number of invalid emails on your email list.
Consistent Sending Schedule
Getting new subscribers on board is the first step of a new relationship. You have to spice it up with a consistent flow of email communication to remind them that you care. If you don’t reach out to your recipients consistently, they will simply forget you. It can leave them wondering who you are and why you’re sending this communication to them. There are different ways to fresh up your communication:
- Send a Welcome email as soon as the recipient joins your email list.
- Engage your audience with automated emails
- Following up with subsequent emails on a pre-defined consistent schedule
Follow Email Segmentation Best Practices:
As your email list keeps growing, it becomes harder to find the right audience for your email campaign. The reason is that not all of the recipients in the list need the same content or frequency of communication. This is where email segmentation comes into action.
It helps marketers segment emails into sub-groups and delivers highly personalized and tailored content to grab the attention of your intended audience. Different criteria can be chosen to segment the email list such as engagement level, demographics, interests, and buying behavior of the audience.
Create and Send High-Quality Emails
The content of the email being sent is the most important element of the email. You need to make sure that the emails are truly worth reading. Merely sending the bulk emails won’t fetch any results. A high-quality email has a perfect copy and email design. Stale and poor-quality emails may lead to a higher bounce rate and poorer campaign performance.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.
