Did you know the average email bounce rate falls between 2 and 5%, depending on your industry? In this fast-paced, digitally-driven world, employing an email validator API is crucial to enhancing your email deliverability and avoiding landing in the dreaded spam folder.
As you dive deeper into this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn about the different types of bounces, their causes, and why you should know about them. Moreover, we will explain some of the effective strategies for lowering them. This will ensure your email campaigns reach the right audience every time.
What Is An Email Bounce Rate?
If you’re unsure about the meaning of “hard bounce” in email marketing or how to determine your bounce rate, you’re not the only one.
The email bounce rate represents the proportion of undeliverable emails relative to the total number of emails sent. An email bounce refers to a delivery failure, which can be temporary or permanent.
Imagine trying to surprise an old friend by visiting their apartment. You search for their address in your address book and head over, only to discover they no longer live there. Feeling disappointed, you return home.
This is similar to when your emails fail to reach the intended recipient’s inbox. The bounced emails were sadly returned to you. That is why the email service providers now prefer that the users have an email IP address lookup to maintain a good deliverability rate and keep the sender’s reputation intact.
To calculate your bounce rate as a percentage, use this straightforward formula:
(Number of email bounces / Number of emails delivered) x 100 = Your current email bounce rate
Suppose you send out 5,000 emails, and 100 of them bounce back. To determine the bounce rate, calculate 100 divided by 5,000 and then multiply the result by 100. This will give you a bounce rate of 2%.
What Are The Different Types Of Email Bounces?
Generally, there are three types of email bounces, which we will discuss here to help you understand them better. Let us look at them.
Hard Bounces
A “hard bounce” occurs when an email cannot be delivered to the recipient’s email server despite multiple attempts, usually because the email address is incorrect or no longer exists. In such cases, the email is returned with a failed delivery notification, and no further emails can be sent to that address.
Soft Bounces
A soft bounce occurs when there is a possibility that the email will deliver. Still, it is temporarily unable to do so due to issues such as a full mailbox or technical difficulties. These addresses can receive future emails. Moreover, the email servers will try to send the email again to these addresses.
Pending Bounces
The email server’s temporary problem prevents the sender or receiver from sending emails. The Email Service Provider (ESP) attempts delivery for a certain period of time, usually 2–3 days. The term “pending bounce” refers to this state. If the email remains undeliverable beyond this time, we consider it a “soft bounce.”
Therefore, for any email marketing campaign, managers sometimes use free tools to look up email addresses before they send them to active subscribers’ inboxes.
What Can Cause High Bounce Rates?
A high bounce rate can be detrimental to the success of any website. A bounce occurs when visitors leave a site without interacting with it or clicking on other pages. Here are some of the reasons why this might happen:
Email Bounce
When emails sent to subscribers bounce, it can result in a higher bounce rate for the website.
Email Account
If the intended recipient’s email account is full or inactive, emails won’t be delivered, resulting in bounces.
Intended Recipient
A bounce can result if the email is not addressed to the intended recipient or contains incorrect information.
Double Opt-In
Websites that use double opt-in may experience higher bounce rates because some subscribers may not confirm their subscription.
It’s important to monitor your website’s bounce rate and take steps to address the underlying causes. This can include ensuring up-to-date email addresses, using accurate email information, and simplifying the subscription process. Moreover, you can use the email validator API and free tools to check email authentication.
07 Effective Tips To Reduce Email Bounce Rate
Here are some methods you can employ to lower your email bounce rate. It then depends on whether you’re aiming for optimal results or have noticed an above-average rate of bounces. Let us look at them in brief.
1. Clean Your Email Lists Daily
To eliminate the email addresses that have been consistently hard-bouncing your emails, you can use your email marketing software to sort and remove them automatically. Manually handling this task is not practical, efficient, or feasible. Your software can help you identify the bounced email addresses, allowing you to delete them effortlessly.
Another option is to categorize email addresses that have not opened any of your emails for 4-6 months. These individuals may have lost interest or changed their email addresses, making them inactive subscribers.
2. Use An Email Validation API
Utilizing tools such as an email validator API or Antideo can aid in purging your email lists of addresses that seem legitimate and may have exhibited activity in the past but are spam traps. This can involve eliminating emails with invalid domains, duplicates, or inactive addresses.
By removing such email addresses, you can improve the quality of your email list. Moreover, it will increase the chances of your messages reaching genuine recipients who are more likely to engage with your content. Thus, it will also help in improving the sender’s reputation.
3. Authenticate The Domain With DKIM, SPF, And DMARC
To safeguard its users and itself from malicious viruses or messages, an email server takes measures to verify the authenticity of incoming emails. This involves ensuring that an unauthorized individual has not falsified or spoofed the email to protect recipients from spam and hacking.
The server verifies the email’s legitimacy by confirming that it originated from the sender listed in the “from” field. To establish the authenticity of your emails, you must complete three email authentication procedures:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – It verifies the authenticity of the email server that sends the message.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) – It ensures that the email content remains intact and has not been altered.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) – It takes decisive measures when SPF or DKIM validation fails.
4. Keep Daily Sending Limit In Check
The daily limit on the number of emails that can be sent is present on most email servers. If you surpass this limit, your emails will be rejected due to server restrictions. Typically, businesses send no more than one or two emails per day.
However, anticipate a sudden surge in volume. In that case, it’s recommended that you consult with the account manager at your ESP to determine the maximum number of emails you can send and avoid exceeding that limit. Thus, you can do an email IP address lookup to verify if those emails are going to established accounts.
5. Analyze The Email Campaigns Regularly
It is always best to check your ESP dashboard to analyze which emails get the lowest bounce, open, click, and unsubscribe rates. This analysis will help you understand how your next email marketing campaign should be designed to reduce the bounce rate. Emails bounce due to flagged content, which you can evaluate in your next email campaign.
However, you won’t have access to this data using a free email service like Gmail or Yahoo. Thus, opt for an ESP that provides valuable insights, particularly when emailing numerous people using your custom domain.
6. Be Consistent In Sending Emails
We’ve all likely received an email from an unfamiliar sender. Upon further inspection, we discovered that we had subscribed to their mailing list long ago but had not received any emails.
To avoid such situations, it’s crucial to maintain regular contact with your email subscribers rather than building a list and then going inactive. Consistent communication will encourage recipients to open and engage with your messages, resulting in an active subscriber base that requires minimal cleaning.
7. Use A/B Test Emails
To improve your email performance, experiment with subject lines, email content, and calls to action (CTAs) to assess which phrases and features your recipients react to positively. Conducting A/B testing on your emails involves sending two emails to two subscribers and analyzing their performance.
Moreover, you can determine what elements need adjustments and what generates increased subscriber interaction. Thus, you can refine your email marketing strategy and tailor your messages through this process. However, you can also use an email validator API to help you identify invalid email addresses on the go.
Wrapping Up
Despite often being disregarded, your email bounce rate can significantly impact your email delivery. A high bounce rate can adversely affect your email marketing campaign, leading to poor results. On the other hand, maintaining a low bounce rate can help ensure that your email list remains healthy and engaged.
Following the tips above, you can minimize bounce rates and boost your email, click-throughs, and sales. Moreover, you can also integrate an email validator API into your system or use free email IP address lookup tools to help you send emails to authenticated email accounts.
Punit