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If you are a digital marketing professional, you might be aware of one of the harsh truths of email marketing: at least one-fifth of emails fail to reach their intended recipients.
Why is this important? Emails that bounce can harm your sender reputation and hinder your future email deliverability.
That is why understanding the concept of email bounce rates and working to minimize them is vital for improving the outcomes of your email marketing efforts.
Luckily, there are various methods you can implement to avoid email bounces. In this article, we will be covering the different types of email bounces, how to calculate your email bounce rate, the optimal email bounce rate and, finally, how to reduce it.
Let’s dive in!
What is an email bounce rate?
The email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that do not land in the recipient’s inbox, rebounding as ‘undeliverable.’ It is an important metric used to measure the success of an email campaign (among others, like your conversion rate or click-throughs).
Email bounces: Types
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While every bounced email contributes to your overall bounce rate, there are two distinct types: soft and hard email bounces.
A soft bounce occurs when an email reaches the recipient’s mail server but is bounced back before reaching their inbox. Common causes o soft bounces include a full inbox or a temporary server issue. These issues aren’t permanent and often resolve themselves over time.
That being said, a hard bounce is much more serious. Hard bounces happen when an email is permanently rejected due to an invalid email address, meaning the email will bounce back no matter the amount of re-attempts. This can happen if the email address no longer exists, the email domain is no longer active or there is a typo in the email address.
Continuing to send emails that end up hard bouncing can harm your sender reputation, so you should remove these email addresses from your mailing list ASAP.
How to calculate email bounce rate
The formula for calculating your email bounce rate is simple: divide the number of bounced emails by the total number of emails sent, and then multiply by 100.
Here’s the formula: (# bounced emails / # total emails sent) x 100
As an example, if you send 5,000 emails and 100 bounce, your bounce rate is (100 / 5000) x 100 = 2%.
Average email bounce rate
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The average bounce rate will vary between industries, which is why you should always benchmark against your peers. Here are some industry examples of average email bounce rates from 2023:
- Advertising and marketing: 1.10%
- Beauty and personal care: 0.26%
- Ecommerce: 0.19%
- Food and beverage: 0.30%
- Health and fitness: 0.30%
- IT, tech, software services: 0.90%
- Media, entertainment, publishing: 0.40%
- Real estate, design, construction: 1.40%
- Restaurants: 0.37%
- Travel, hospitality, leisure: 0.50%
What is a good bounce rate for email?
Without considering any particular industry, a bounce rate of around 2% is acceptable.
How to reduce email bounce rate
Image source: Freepik
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s review our actionable tips on maintaining a healthy email bounce rate.
Analyze your email campaigns
SEINō is a tool designed to simplify the process of analyzing your campaigns through its comprehensive analytics and email campaign reports. With it, you can set targets for all metrics and real-time alerts that keep you informed about what’s going on with your campaigns at all times.
Here are other email marketing KPIs you can track with SEINō:
- Open rates and click-through rates. These are the basic metrics that indicate how many recipients opened your email and engaged with the content.
- Conversion rates. Beyond clicks, conversion rates reveal the percentage of recipients who took the desired action after reading your email.
- Complaint rates. Complaints happen when a recipient marks an email as spam or raises an issue regarding content or frequency. A high complaint rate can negatively impact email deliverability and put you at risk of spam classification and penalties by the ESP.
- Transactional metrics. Apart from the basic metrics you can track with ESPs, you should also track transactional metrics, such as overall revenue, revenue per email and session, number of transactions and average order value.
What results can you expect? Take, for example, Glanbia, the world’s largest sports supplement seller. Operating in 13 countries, they were grappling with the challenge of keeping tabs on their email campaign metrics while looking for precise ways to measure their revenue.
SEINō became Glanbia’s email analytics solution, allowing them to dive deep into transaction and revenue levels and offering real-time insights into their email campaigns. The ability to generate detailed reports with SEINō not only saved them around 16 hours per week but also empowered them to optimize and create new email marketing strategies.
Another great example is Temeer Group, a conglomerate of three fashion brands with a presence in over 150 locations. They faced the tedious task of creating exhaustive email reports, juggling between Google Analytics and spreadsheets.
SEINō’s seamless integration with Google Analytics transformed their workflow, eliminating repetitive tasks and providing brilliant insights into subscriber behavior.
Another thing that makes SEINō your biggest ally in monitoring your campaigns is the ability to benchmark all your email campaigns in one reporting view. Our platform consolidates all the data from your email automation platform and Google Analytics in one user-friendly dashboard. No need to create and compare reports manually!
Your chosen ESP is key
Your chosen ESP is responsible for delivering your messages to your recipients’ servers. A good email service provider offers:
- IP address management: the ESP controls the selection of IP addresses for sending emails, determining whether your emails are dispatched from a shared or dedicated IP address.
- Server maintenance: a good ESP ensures the continuous operation of its servers to guarantee that your messages get relayed without a hitch.
- Send reputation improvements: your ESP also has a role in maintaining a positive sender reputation by taking actions such as banning users who misuse their services for spamming.
SEINō integrates with leading ESPs, including:
- Braze
- Kaviyo
- ActiveCampaign
- DeployTech
- Copernica
- MailCampaigns
- Mailkit
- Selligent
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- and many others!
Include a double opt-in
A double opt-in is the process of having a user sign up for an email list and then emailing them a link to click and confirm the subscription. The user is officially added to the list only after clicking this confirmation link. Luckily, most ESPs offer this option anyway.
This method decreases the likelihood of spam addresses in your mailing list. Moreover, because double opt-ins add an extra step for the user, it indicates a higher level of interest in your email content, which often leads to increased engagement on the whole.
Don’t use a free domain email address
This may be an obvious one, but it doesn’t hurt to point out that free domain emails can trigger spam filters, risking your emails being marked as junk. Free domains include Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, Zoho and others.
A custom domain (e.g. [yourname]@[yourcompany].com) has the opposite effect of helping you establish a better sender reputation. Custom domains can undergo authentication protocols like SPF and DKIM, which verify your legitimacy as a sender and prevent suspicious flags.
Image source: Freepik
Verify your domain
Making sure your domain is verified is directly connected to whether or not your emails reach people’s inboxes. In fact, it is a prerequisite for starting your email campaign.
If you have several people within your organization sending emails, verifying the whole domain is easier than authenticating each address separately. If you’re using an email marketing automation platform, you should be able to find a feature that lets you verify your domain through their service.
Don’t spam
Using spam-triggering words or overcrowding your email content with excessive links can trigger spam filters. So, try to avoid overusing capital letters, bold formatting or exclamation points, as these are commonly associated with spam messaging.
Additionally, every ESP sets daily sending limits to manage the flow of emails. Exceeding these limits can also lead to your emails bouncing back. Ensure you track your email sending volume to stay within acceptable sending limits.
You’ll need to consider all automated emails for this, including transactional emails like order confirmations and welcome messages.
Send emails consistently
ISPs want to see a steady and predictable pattern in your email sending behavior, as that signals legitimacy. Email bounce rates can be influenced by the frequency and regularity of your email campaigns.
If your emails are not frequent enough, your subscribers may forget who you are or why they were subscribed to your mailing list in the first place. On the other hand, if they’re too frequent, users may start flagging them as spam.
So, to be consistent, try to have a reasonable schedule for sending emails. Typically, the optimal frequency for newsletters is a maximum of twice a week and a minimum of once a month on average.
Regularly clean your email list
Image source: Freepik
Regularly cleaning your email lists by removing inactive or invalid addresses improves the chances of your emails being delivered.
Inactive email addresses have shown prolonged periods of no engagement: the recipient hasn’t opened or engaged with your emails over an extended timeframe, for example, six months.
Before removing these addresses from your mailing list, consider a re-engagement campaign that can revive interest and interaction from subscribers who have become disengaged.
SEINō uses an engagement model to assess your subscribers’ behavior by gaining insights into their interaction with your business and then segmenting them based on their activity into:
- Promising (for users who are consistently engaging with your email content but not completing their purchases)
- Cannot Lose Them
- New Users
- About To Sleep
- Need Attention etc.
The engagement tab provides a breakdown of these segments, indicating the number of users in each. It gives you a straightforward view of metrics such as Days since the last click, Click frequency, Days in the database and Days between clicks. This information can help you manage your email list and tailor your strategy based on your subscribers’ engagement.
Do email authentication
Email authentication standards protect recipients by assisting ESPs in distinguishing legitimate emails from spam or phishing attempts.
Essentially, this process enables providers to verify whether an email message originates from a reliable source or has been manipulated by scammers.
The three most commonly used email authentication methods include SPF, DKIM and DMARC. A message authenticated by at least one of these methods is more likely to reach the recipient’s inbox.
Without proper email authentication, an ESP’s alert system may be triggered, leading the message to be flagged as spam or bounced.
Provide an unsubscribe option
The unsubscribe page is your final chance to re-engage users or understand why they want to stop receiving your emails. You can use it to offer alternatives better than total disengagement, like adjusting email frequency or content preferences. This can retain some users who might opt for a more tailored email experience rather than opting out entirely.
With these additional options, you can gather data through email marketing reports and analytics to identify the types of content that earn the least unsubscribes.
Conclusion
Your email bounce rate is a major factor influencing the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. A persistently high bounce rate can lead to reduced email deliverability, an increased likelihood of being flagged as spam and potential penalties or suspension from your ESP.
Mitigating these risks is where SEINō comes in. With SEINō's advanced features, you gain near-real-time insights into your email campaigns. Our platform provides automatic alerts, allowing you to respond quickly to any concerning trends. And, through our segmentation tools, you can easily keep track of inactive email addresses and develop reengagement strategies.
SEINō’s comprehensive capabilities ensure that your email marketing strategy remains effective, engaging and free from the risks associated with high bounce rates. Schedule a demo and try it for yourself!
Email bounce rate: FAQ
What is a good email bounce rate? An acceptable email bounce rate typically falls below 2%, but most industries do well with an email bounce rate that doesn’t go over 5%.
Should an email bounce rate be under 1%? While a bounce rate under 1% is considered excellent, the acceptable threshold often extends to 2-5%.
How do I track an email bounce rate? To track your email bounce rate, you can use email analytics tools such as SEINō to gain insights into the number and types of bounces.
What causes email bounces? Email bounces can be caused by various factors, including inactive or invalid email addresses, server issues, content triggering spam filters or exceeding daily sending limits.
