Bounced emails are amongst the worst things that an email marketing campaign can encounter. Every bounced email means that another potential customer doesn’t get the perfectly designed email you’ve sent, and subsequently, it means that you’ve lost a potential customer. Additionally, the fact that a high bounce rate will affect your email’s deliverability means that your overall campaign will take a hit, as well. Making sure your emails neverbounce is an important part of running a successful email marketing campaign. In this post, we will look at the difference between hard and soft bounces before exploring six steps you can take to ensure your emails neverbounce.
Hard Bounces vs Soft Bounces
Email bounce backs occur when an email you sent is rejected by their intended receiver’s email server. The term “bounce rate” refers to the measurement of the percentage of your recipients who didn’t receive the email you sent out.
Email bounces can be separated into two categories:
- Your receiver’s mailbox is full
- Your receiver’s email server is down/crashed
- Your email itself is too big
Hard Bounces: these emails will never be delivered. These issues are caused by permanent problems on the intended receiver’s side. These can include:
- The email address is fake/invalid
- The domain name doesn’t exist anymore
- The mailbox is not active anymore
Reasons to Ensure Your Emails Neverbounce
Here’s a little bit of truth: ensuring your emails neverbounce – that is, that they have a 0% bounce rate – is very hard to achieve. However, you can ensure that you have a very, very low bounce rate and you should. Why, though?
There are many reasons to work hard to keep your bounce rates as low as you can. A low bounce rate is a clear indication of a high-quality email campaign that has a mailing list composed of active, engaged subscribers. On the other hand, a high bounce rate is an indication of problems in many aspects of your campaign, like your email list management and perhaps how you acquired your email addresses. Email marketing is hard and you need to avoid many possible traps and pitfalls.
Additionally, you should be aware that a high bounce rate will affect your email deliverability, too. A consistent high bounce rate will lead to you getting a bad IP reputation and you will more likely than not land on more than blacklist. Basically, your whole email marketing campaign can be brought down by emails that bounce back. So, there is a lot riding on ensuring your emails neverbounce – or to be more accurate, keep bounce rates below 2%.
6 Ways to Ensure Your Emails Neverbounce
We know that you need to keep bounce rates low and we know why. Now, let’s take a look at some important steps that you can take so that your emails neverbounce and your email deliverability is not impacted negatively:
1. Remove Hard Bounces Immediately
Don’t wait, don’t try to fix it. Hard bounces cannot usually be fixed and even if they can, they can never be done on your end. So, when you come across a hard bounce, immediately remove that address from your mailing list and don’t sent emails to that address again. Most email marketing clients will do you the service of automatically removing the hard bounces, but you do need to keep an eye on it.
Soft bounces shouldn’t be removed immediately, but after a certain point, they will be a liability, so at a certain point, emails that are constantly causing soft bounces should also be removed. Again, some email marketing clients will do this for you, but it doesn’t hurt to keep your eyes on the situation.
2. Authenticate Emails
One of the most important steps in ensuring your emails neverbounce is to authenticate your emails. This is the process of assuring the validity of your emails so that your emails are actually delivered into your subscriber’s inboxes instead of their spam folder. The email authentication process is a little complex, but doing it will make your life a whole lot easier.
3. Have a Permission-Based Email List
A permission-based email list basically means having an email list that people aren’t automatically signed onto. You need to have an opt-in system for your subscribers – preferably, a double opt-in system so that they need to doubly verify that their desire to be on your list. When you follow this method, you will have a list of subscribers who want to be there and receive your emails – which means that you will encounter lower bounce rates.
4. Use a Preference Center
A preference center allows your subscribers a little control. By allowing them to choose and control what kinds of emails they want to receive, how often, on what topics and etc, you can ensure your emails neverbounce, increase engagement rates, increase clicks and conversions and more. Having a subscriber preference center can actually go a long way in helping out your email marketing campaign as a whole.
5. Send Regular Emails
This is the simplest method you can use to ensure your emails neverbounce. By sending emails to your subscribers regularly and consistently, you will not only experience a higher subscriber engagement, you will also see less bounces. However, just make sure you don’t overwhelm them with emails and end up getting spam complaints.
How this will work to your advantage is that when you’re consistently sending emails, instead of sending with large gaps in between emails, you will catch bounces sooner. People will inevitably switch email addresses, go over their mailbox quota or one of the many other things that cause a bounce will happen. If you catch them sooner rather than later, you can take the necessary actions and your emails will never bounce.
6. Track Your Metrics
This should go without saying, but you need to always monitor your email deliverability and performance results. Your email marketing client will provide you with a detailed insight into your campaign and you need to make sure that you’re up-to-date with the information. This will allow you to detect high bounce rates, low conversion rates, weak subscriber engagement and other issues when they occur and you can take the necessary action to fix them.
Email marketing campaigns require a lot of strategy and nearly 100% of the time, you will not reach the end of your campaign with the same strategy you started out with. You need to adapt and change your strategy to deal with whatever issue that pops up so that your emails neverbounce and your campaign’s success is ensured.
Bounceless – A Solution to Ensure Your Emails Neverbounce
Here at Bounceless, our aim is to provide a service that eliminates 99% of your email marketing campaign’s bounces. With industry-standard techniques and a complex algorithm that allows us to keep your mailing list lean and mean, our goal is to allow your campaign to soar to success with emails that neverbounce.If you feel that your campaign needs that special touch to perfect your mailing list and cut it down to only the subscribers who will benefit your campaign overall, feel free to Contact Bounceless today.
