7 Tips to Reduce Your Email Bounce Rate

Email marketing yields the highest ROI among organic marketing strategies. How high? How about a potential return of $42 for every dollar spent. Notice how potential is italicized? Why? Because 90% of companies won’t get close to that result. A big reason for that is a high bounce rate on email campaigns where many of your emails don’t reach your audience's inbox.

A high bounce rate is frustrating for the digital marketer because it indicates that a significant portion of your prospects or customers doesn’t get the email messages that you so carefully crafted. Besides, a high bounce rate can also hurt the overall deliverability of your email campaigns. Hence, you need to monitor and proactively manage your email bounce rate.

This article will help in differentiating between hard and soft bounce rates and show you seven steps that you can take to lower your overall email bounce rate.

Hard or soft bounce?

If you are selling products online, you will need to run email campaigns to market your business. An email bounce occurs when your subscriber’s email server rejects your email. The email bounce rate is a percentage measure of the number of emails that bounced out of all the emails you sent.  The bounce rate is further divided into soft bounce rates and hard bounce rates.

Soft bounces are temporary issues and often happen because:

• The subscriber’s inbox is full
• The recipient’s email server is down
• The email or any attachment is larger than that allowed by the server

Most soft bounces will automatically be addressed next time you run your campaign.

On the other hand, hard bounces are emails that will never be delivered. These emails are returned to your sending server due to permanent reasons:

• The email address is invalid or doesn’t exist.
• An incorrect domain name
• A subscriber’s mailbox is no longer active.

A consistently high hard bounce rate across your campaigns adversely impacts your reputation with platforms like Google and Yahoo. You also risk getting your IP address banned from sending emails. Let’s now look at ways to reduce your email bounce rate.

1. Maintain mailing list hygiene

Start by removing all the hard-bounce addresses from your last campaign, and do not send emails to these addresses. Some bulk email platforms have features that will reduce hard bounces. Next, use an email verification tool to check the validity of each address in your email list.

Maintaining a clean list is not a one-time action but requires a constant review. Over time, the accuracy of your email list will decay as it gets populated with inactive accounts, incorrectly entered addresses, and other domain-related issues. According to statistics, an average email list decays by 20-30% every year. Hence, a periodic tidy-up is in order, and we would recommend a quarterly scanning and cleaning of your list.

Another hygiene practice is to scrub your email list periodically.

Email scrubbing entails removing disengaged users – subscribers who have never opened your emails – from your mailing list. This practice allows you to focus on marketing to people interested in hearing from you and are likely to buy your products and services. Scrubbing your email list periodically also gives you a higher open rate, a significant positive marker for both the email platform and Google, improving your overall deliverability.

2. Avoid buying email lists

Resist the temptation of quickly scaling your email list by buying lists of potential customers who fit your demographics.

Unless you are merging or acquiring another company, you’re unlikely to come across a good-quality ready-made email list. If it's for sale, chances are the email addresses in it have already been sold multiple times. The addresses are now either non-responsive or unqualified for any marketing outreach.

At some point in time, the bought email addresses might have had some value. However, over time the address has probably been spammed to death. Think about it, would you sell or share the email addresses of your subscribers who have voluntarily opted in to your brand? 

Rented and purchased lists are often scraped (read: stolen) from other websites. Buying lists may increase your subscriber base temporarily, but there are high chances that your bounce rate will rise.

3. Verify your email domains

Verifying your email domain enables your emails to clear the security checks of your subscriber's server. All email servers conduct security checks on incoming mails before delivering, blocking, or flagging the mail. The first step in this check is to evaluate if the email domain is legitimate or a spammer using a VPN network.

A verified domain tells your customer's email server that you’re a legitimate sender on your domain. When authenticating your domain, you can choose between three sources you can use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Domain authentication will improve the overall email deliverability of your campaigns while reducing bounce rates.

If you’re using your custom domain to send emails, verify your domain. However, those domains are already verified if you use a third-party email marketing platform like SendInBlue or MailChimp.

4. Avoid spammy content

Spam filters are the gatekeepers of the email domains, and they scan every word and phrase of incoming mail.

Read the emails you send out and ask yourself, “based on the subject line would I open this email, and would I click on the links based on its contents?”If you think about it, know that your recipients will be far more judgemental, assuming the mail hasn’t been tagged as spam. If someone else wrote your email content, say, a freelance email marketer, you should also use a plagiarism tool to ensure the email body was not lifted from other sites.

By consistently sending spammy emails, you run the risk of the spam filters permanently flagging your address or even your domain. When this happens, your emails will start bouncing, and this bounce will be counted as a hard bounce. Spend some time running your emails through a third-party service like Mail Tester to test for spamminess. Ensure that your email does not have any potential spam triggers mentioned above.

According to Dataprot, over 85% of emails sent daily are spam. It is no surprise that the war on spam is getting more intense by the day. Hence, it’s vital to know what you’re up against.

5. Use a double opt-in

Since incorrect email addresses are one of the biggest reasons for a high email bounce rate, a simple solution is to introduce double opt-in (also referred to as permission-based email marketing) to help drastically reduce your email bounce rate.

Simply put, double opt-in is a process of requesting your new email subscribers to confirm their addresses twice.

As a first step, they fill out the opt-in form on your website, and then a confirmation email is sent to their address requesting them to click on a link to verify their subscription. In some cases, a double opt-in may scare subscribers away. 

Digital marketers need to make a head-over-heart decision and remember that those “unreliable” subscribers would have low engagement and could have bounced anyways, thereby raising your overall email bounce rate. Hence, what seems unsettling can help you down the line with a lower bounce rate.

Pro Tip: A double opt-in is of particular significance if you use lead magnets to grow your email list.

Incentivized sign-ups are a great strategy to collect your website users’ contact information. They’re also risky. Double opt-ins are helpful when the user wants to download the lead magnet using a fake email address. In this case, a double opt-in will reduce your email bounce rate because it will eliminate users who have no interest in your emails.

6. Segment and get personal

To keep your email subscribers engaged over a more extended period, you need to provide relevant and engaging content to their inboxes. Your content should reflect and match their interests, wishes, and needs. You should send it in a regular and timely frequency.

You first need to divide your subscriber base into coherent segments with similar interests and needs to achieve this. Then you can address each segment with hyper-personalized and valuable content. Personalization is not only a great customer retention strategy but also improves engagement with your audience.

Another best practice is giving your audience total control over their emails.

To raise overall deliverability and engagement while lowering your bounce, let the subscriber decide how often they want to receive your mails and the content that interests them. You can do this by giving them access to your control center. Then, it’s a simple matter of adjusting your email marketing efforts accordingly.

Segmenting and personalizing your emails gives a dual benefit of a higher chance of clearing the spam filters, getting to the subscriber's inbox, and being opened and read. Email clients flag large batches of inbound messages with the same subject line. Adding personalization by including the subscribers' first name to your subject line reduces your message's chances of being flagged as spam.

Additionally, adding personalization to the subject line may increase the open rates by up to 26% versus generic subject lines. When your email reaches the subscribers' inbox, they are more likely to open it.

7. Don’t use freebie domains

Don’t use free domains like Gmail or Yahoo to send your campaigns. Apart from the technical reasons, running campaigns from a free server looks unprofessional, and chances are, you’ll net a low open score. The technical reason for avoiding free email domains is that they don’t pass the DMARC policy.

Hence, you’re likely to experience a hard bounce for most of your emails. The simple solution is to use a custom domain for your business. Two simple ways of doing this are:

1. Purchase a suitable domain – Prices can vary depending on the popularity of the name you want.
2. Get a Google G-suite account via Google Domains – The benefit of buying G-suite via Google Domains is that it automatically sets up Gmail and email protection features.

Nowadays, using a custom domain isn’t that difficult or expensive. It helps in lowering your email bounce rate and gives your business a professional first impression.

Bonus: Rely on A/B Split Testing

If you want your website traffic to grow, you need to create a growth model. If you want your email campaigns to improve, you need to perform A/B testing.

A/B testing is not directly linked to the bounce rate, but you will want to maximize your campaigns' effectiveness once you cross the bounce rate threshold. That means higher open and conversion rates. Not all emails are created the same, nor do they perform as effectively. Some might give you better results than others. To optimize elements like subject lines, CTA buttons, content, and email copy, you need to run A/B split tests on your campaigns. 

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To run an A/B split test, start by creating two versions of the same mail, each with a different subject line, CTA, and content. Send the two emails and evaluate which one brings the highest engagement results (open and click-through rates). This A/B split test also provides feedback for the next campaign you create. Some key elements to consider while running an A/B test include:

• The length of subject lines
• Word order
• Email content
• Visual content (including infographics, photos, explainer videos, etc.)
• Call-to-actions buttons or text

As you create more campaigns, these elements will become hygiene factors and reduce your bounce rate. You will increase the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Wrapping up

A higher email bounce rate will hurt your overall email deliverability and reputation as a sender. Suppose you don’t pay closer attention to your email bounce rate and deliverability. In that case, you’ll see a decrease in engagement levels, open rates, and click-through rates, possibly leading to a lower number of sales.

Hopefully, the best practices mentioned above give you an understanding of how to create emails that reach your subscribers’ inboxes so you can reap all the benefits you deserve from your email marketing campaigns.

Best of luck with your next email marketing campaign!