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Masooma Memon on June 17, 2021 (last modified on January 12, 2022) • 16 minute read
A high email bounce rate means several of your subscribers arenât getting your emails. Put another way, your message isnât reaching as many eyeballs as youâd like.
Left untreated, the problem only escalates as a high bounce rate impacts your email domainâs reputation. This, in turn, does more damage as fewer and fewer people get your newsletter.
The solution, you ask? Weâve got 9 ways to improve email bounce rate for you. All of these are tactics are expert-sourced and proven to work. So what are you waiting for?
Dig in.
Email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that subscribers from your email list donât receive. In other words, these subscribers donât get your emails as they bounce back to you.
Think of sending emails as sending frisbees to your subscribers.
Each time you throw a frisbee or flying disc their way, subscribersâ inboxes catch the frisbees so the subscribers can get your message. However, an email bouncing back to you is like your email recipient sending back the frisbee to you. Hence, the subscriber never gets it.
Calculate email bounce rate by totaling the number of bounced emails and dividing it by the total number of emails sent. Then, multiple the figure by 100 to get your email bounce percentage.
On average, the majority of folks, around 34%, see an email bounce rate of 2-3%. Some 31% also tend to have an email bounce rate of less than 1%.
If youâre experiencing any higher bounce rates than the average, youâll want to dig into possibly why you are seeing such a high rate. Then, take the corrective steps to bring your email bounce rate down.
There are a lot of reasons why your emails are bouncing back to you. Some common ones are:
Editorâs note: Check if youâre sending way too many emails as that could be overwhelming subscribers resulting in unsubscribes and low open rates. Keep a track of this using this Audience Email Fatigue Dashboard template that gives you a full overview of fatigued subscribers.
Now that weâve listed some potential causes behind why youâre emails are bouncing, here are nine proven ways to reduce your email bounce rate:
To measure the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy, you may rely on Google Analytics to learn how your email campaigns are performing, which content is most popular with recipients, and how you can improve your strategy to bring in more qualified leads. Now you can quickly assess the performance of your email marketing campaigns in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our email marketing experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for tracking the overall performance and success of your email marketing strategy. Itâs simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, itâs free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
To keep email bounce rate to a low, write a newsletter thatâs choke-full of value. Why? Because the more valuable your content is, the more your subscribers will seek it, expecting your newsletter in their inbox and engaging with it each time (or, at least, most of the times) it reaches them.
With subscribers interacting with your emails regularly, the odds of your email bouncing back go down. But first: whatâs a valuable newsletter?
There are two components to this that relate to a reduced bounce rate:
If youâre writing for your subscribers, solving their challenges and speaking their language, theyâre likely to find it relevant and, subsequently, valuable.
In short, âkeep your subscribers engaged by writing quality emails,â Rave Reviewsâ Elliot Reimers observes.
âWhen your audience likes what they read from your emails, theyâll keep opening your emails and interacting with you. That helps ensure that your future emails reach their inbox.â
Reimers summarizes thoughts on a valuable email newsletter structure: âwrite a compelling email subject line, make sure the content is valuable, and donât forget to add a call to action and a hook to your next email.â
Eric Florence from Security Tech adds to this, emphasizing the importance of writing an interesting hook to hold your audienceâs attention.
âStart each of your emails with an attention-grabbing statement. Most readers lose interest in an email within the first few seconds, especially if it sounds just like everything else that finds its way into their inboxes. If you entertain and intrigue someone, they are way more likely to keep reading and your bounce rate will drop in no time at all.â
From an engaging first few lines, jump straight to the meat of the matter.
âGet to the point,â advises Reminderbandâs Christian Nelson. âDonât take a long time to get to your CVP with fluff and too much imagery. Have a compelling headline to grab their attention and make sure to rapidly arrive at the reason for the email to keep them from bouncing.â
This helps sets expectations. For example, James Clearâs fans know that the 3-2-1 newsletter comes out every Thursday. Now if a subscriber doesnât get it on a Thursday, theyâre probably going to notice the absence and dig into the matter.
Pro tip: Regularly poll your subscribers to ask them how relevant they find your content and what more theyâd like to read from you.
Related: The Best Time To Send Email, According to Marketing and Sales Experts
This is crucial.
If youâve put together an email list of people who never opted to hear from you or did so only to get a freebie and you went on to blast them with emails, you bounce rate is going to look ugly.
The solution? Ashley Cummings from Searchlight Content has the answer for you.
âOne of the best ways to ensure that your messages get delivered to the right people is to use the double-opt-in feature. Not only does this protect your account from fraudulent email accounts and accounts that will bounce, but it also ensures that you are reaching people that want to hear from you.â
Permission-based double opt-ins help ensure youâre doing email marketing right â something that Cummings sums up as: âreaching the right audience with the right message at the right time.â
CocoDocâs Alina Clark echoes the same. âThe simplest strategy to reduce email bounce rates is to avoid sending emails to people from whom you have not obtained permission. If someone has registered with you or subscribed to your newsletter, for example, it is assumed that you have their consent to contact them in the future by email.â
Translation: make sure you have your subscribersâ consent before you start emailing them. Itâs for this reason that a double opt-in works so well in helping you grow an engaged subscriber list.
Itâs also why Eden Cheng from WeInvoice thinks âone of the most significant ways to reduce the bounce rate of email campaigns is using a permission-based (opt-in) email list. The easiest way to evade email bounce rate is by neglecting and sending emails to those you have not taken permission from.â
âFor an example, if someone subscribed or registered to your newsletter, then it is allowed that you have their authorization to contact them by sending an email soon in the future,â explains Cheng.
âNevertheless, if your subscriber didnât choose to be on your shared mailing list, the probabilities are higher that you will be on their spammed email option. So, it may result in deteriorating your email reputation and may also simply enhance your email bounce rate.â
To top that, âverifying email addresses before adding them to an email list will help your email marketing efforts,â Clark adds.
OnePitchâs Kendall Aldridge contributes a useful tip too. âAnother way to filter out bot or spam emails is to make sure you have Captcha present on all of your forms, which will help to automatically stop those emails from making their way onto your email lists.â
Speaking of opt-ins, âcreate opt-ins that are hyper-focused to your target audience to ensure you get subscribers that are engaged and there for good reasons,â CocoFinderâs Harriet Chan says.
âFor example, people are more likely to give out active emails and continue to open messages if your content is more aligned.â
A highly relevant opt-in also tells subscribers theyâre going to get more value like the opt-in so they stick around, expecting and interacting with your emails.
But how can you tell an opt-in is going to be valuable? Revisit your target audience persona to study their interests. Better yet, ask them.
Lots of our expert respondents talked about email list hygiene to reduce email bounce rate.
To begin with, Benjamin Sweeney from ClydeBank Media shares, âthe biggest way to reduces bounces is to be proactive about list hygiene. Look for emails address on your list from disposable inboxes like Maildrop.cc mailboxes. These inboxes are used by people to get a lead magnet without having to deal with any of your follow-up messages.â
Make sure you do so on a regular note, âeven if itâs just on a quarterly basis,â OuterBoxâs Alicia Blessing highlights.
Editorâs note: Get a 360-degree view of your email performance with this HubSpot Marketing Email Performance Dashboard Template. By using it, you can get your email open rates, emails sent, email click rate, emails delivered, and much more in one place.
The question now is: who should you remove?
âAs a best practice, itâs helpful to remove contacts from your list(s) that havenât engaged with your emails in the last 6+ months,â elaborates Blessing. âIf a user hasnât opened at least one of your emails in that timeframe, thereâs a good chance that:
Alternatively, remove subscribers who havenât engaged in the past 3 months.
âYou need an engaged audience to make sure that your emails go through their inboxes,â observes David Cusick of House Method. âWhen they start to ignore your emails, not open them, or not click anything, the email algorithm changes and sends your email to the other spam folder or non-priority inboxes.
If they havenât engaged with you in the past 90 days, remove them from your list. They’re no longer benefitting from the value you provide in your emails, and they’re only hurting your open rates and bounce rates.â
Case in point: the Conversion.AI team carefully cleanses their email list regularly. Alex Birkett writes, âWhile it sounds boring, segmentation and regular pruning of your email list is important for email deliverability and hygiene.â
âI like to structure my email automation to be a sort of âchoose your own adventureâ based on intent.â To this end, âI track the clicks on different types of content offers (that escalate in value and intent each email), and then I segment based on the implicit intent of each click,â Birkett explains.
âIf, however, someone clicks on none of these, Iâll keep them on the general newsletter list, but if they donât engage after 3 months, I unsubscribe them (though I always do a re-engagement campaign email before doing so). This helps keep a list of truly engaged subscribers.â
âEmail lists are like plants: you have to prune them!â comments Kristin Ides Hope of KristinIdes.
âDonât get caught up in the vanity metric of how many subscribers you have. What matters is the engagement rate.â Now, to keep subscribers engaged and to make sure they want to get your emails: why not ask them?
Hope makes this point: âto lower bounce rates, send emails to subscribers that havenât engaged with your last three campaigns. The CTA is to tell you (either by a reply or a button click) that they want to keep receiving your content. If they donât open these campaigns, remove them from your list.â
In addition to cleaning your list, consider segmenting it.
âI currently use Klaviyo and have segments set up to my lists for âengagedâ and ânot engaged,â shares Crystal Diaz from Lights On Creative.
âI usually use the definition of âopened at least the last 5 campaigns and still wants marketing.â Creating an organic segment means its constantly changing and filtering out customers, so you get one list that has your most loyal customers. That way, when you send your emails, the bounce rate is nearly 0% because they want to open your emails,â Diaz continues.
That said, segmenting takes works. Webizzâs Isabella Federico talks about it. âEmail segmenting means that you have to focus on valuable content even if this will require more time and more resources. But this also means that you have to produce different valuable contents for your different audience segments.â
This is another good way to lower your email bounce rate simply because it shows you as a credible email sender.
Sharing their experience of this, Chris Kindler from Alight outlines, âMy organization sends promotional emails to thousands of audience members, donors, and volunteers across the country, so we have to accept that there will be some emails that bounce.â
âThat said, making sure we send emails from a quality service provider is key,â Kindler explains. âWhen our IP address and domain are verified, we see much lower bounce rates. When we look good on the back end, itâs unlikely we will come across as spam on the other side. Thus far, this tactic has allowed us to continue growing our readers on a daily basis.â
In this regard, Vinpitâs Miranda Yan suggests you âinvest in an efficient bulk email verification tool that keeps your email address list updated and clears out the spammy, fake addresses on its own.â
âScanning your recipients list once in a while will help you get rid of the addresses that have blocked you which ultimately results in bouncing back of the mails that you sent,â Yan notes. âMoreover, these tools arenât too pricey and come with attractive free trials to test waters before opting for them.â
âA/B tests can assist you to figure out how well your emails are received by your subscribers,â insists Joe Baker from Boots Empire.
âThis implies sending two slightly different versions of the same email to a subset of your contacts, with the version that receives the greatest engagement winning the right to be forwarded to the remainder of your contacts,â Baker points out. âAlternative subject lines, text links vs. buttons for your call to action, and different placement of the lead material are all things you may experiment with.â
So what does split testing help you with? Put simply, A/B tests show you whatâs working and whatâs not, helping you identify what resonates with your audience so you can create relevant content to keep subscribers engaged.
As Baker puts it, âA/B tests can help you reduce bounce rates by revealing which emails are seen as spammy and, more importantly, which ones your audience enjoys engaging with the most.â
This oneâs a hat tip to Laura Cerbauke from Omnisend who opines, âimproving your email deliverability is a fantastic way to reduce bounce rates.â
âAlthough email deliverability involves several elements, a robust deliverability system is the foundation of your email campaign success. Why? Because it ensures that emails get to recipients’ primary inboxes instead of the spam folder,â Cerbauke explains.
âAs a result, it helps improve bounce rates. But if your email deliverability has some issues, most of your emails may end up in subscribers’ spam folders. However, note that email deliverability and delivery rates are two separate metrics.â
To briefly recap, âthe delivery rate indicates the ratio of emails subscribers received. That includes those that landed on both their inboxes, spam folders, and other non-specified folders. In contrast, email deliverability is your ability to ensure that the emails you send get into recipients’ primary inboxes.â
âThus, your delivery rate may be great, but your deliverability may have some concerns that need attention,â writes Cerbauke.
Therefore, an action step for you is to âexamine your email campaign deliverability to find possible issues that negatively impact your bounce rates and rectify them accordingly.â
To reiterate, focus on sharing quality content thatâs relevant to your subscribers, segment and cleanse your email list regularly, and go for a double opt-in to grow an engaged email list of interested subscribers.
Keep in mind, reducing your email bounce rate whittles down to engaging your audience so they are interacting with your emails. Keep an eye on your bounce rate consistently with this email marketing dashboard.
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