Email marketing campaigns hold such tremendous power in today’s digital age. If you are looking to attract more customers, put a word about a new venture, or even simply engage with your clientele, email is the best possible way while keeping a professional touch to it. Unfortunately, due to the bulk of emails being sent out by a single address in a day, there are high chances that at least a percentage of the messages will bounce back.
Email bounce backs are a foe to digital marketing specialists, especially email marketers, and getting ahead of it before it affects your business is important.
What is an email bounce back and how can you identify it?
An email bounce back is essentially a message that shows up automatically when the service provider of the recipient cannot deliver the mail we sent. You can identify whether the message has been bounced or not based on the alert that pops up. For a bounced message, it may include terms such as invalid email address, incorrect account details, marked as spam by the recipient, and so on.
Email bounce backs are important to keep a record of because they adversely affect your marketing strategy. When there are too many instances of bounced emails, your sender reputation is damaged and you will only further see a hike in bounce rates.
Calculating email bounce rate
If you need a quantitative and easily understandable benchmark for your emails bouncing back, calculating the email bounce rate is the best option. Being the number of emails that have bounced dividend by the total number of emails you have sent, this percentage version of the data can help you visualize how much of your marketing strategy is being effective.
For instance, if you have sent out a total of 5000 emails this month and 1000 emails have bounced back, the bounce rate is calculated by:
1000/5000=0.2
0.2*100=20%
So 20% of your emails have bounced back in the particular month. Computing this at regular intervals can help you understand how well your email marketing is going.
Reasons for an email bounce back
An email can bounce back for multiple reasons and Outreach has sorted the most common reasons into the following categories:
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Being flagged as spam
Some emails get flagged as spam by the recipient’s mailbox and any email coming into an inbox can likely go into the spam folder by error. However, some users have their mailbox customized to divert certain emails to spam folders or they may have marked your mail as spam upon viewing.
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Sending to an invalid email
When the address that the email was sent to does not exist or was an invalid address, the email bounces back. In your email list, you may have addresses that have missing spaces or @, there may be invalid characters, or the domain or local portion of the email address may be faulty. While collecting subscriber data, you may also have included fake addresses.
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Mailboxes reaching capacity
Some mailboxes cannot accept any more messages because they are filled to the brim. This is a temporary problem however because once the inbox is reorganized, it can accept new emails. Emails bounced due to full inboxes are retried on their own when there is space.
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Due to undeterminable reasons
Some domains do not give extensive reasons on why an email bounced. When there is no information, it is difficult to determine why your email bounced and to rectify the error. Sometimes, the information given may be in another language or not detailed enough to draw conclusions.
Reducing bounce backs
Emails are used by almost everyone on this globe for multiple purposes. Thus, email marketing holds strong potential on occasions such as trying to promote a business or announcing events. Increasing bounce rates can spell doom for your goal and reflect poorly on your email marketing strategies. Finding ways to reduce bounce rate is critical then.
To salvage your sender score and email reputation, IP warming is the solution. Promoting your IP slowly or warming it up, you can prevent the bulk of emails that you send from going to the spam folder directly. You also need to keep a constant eye on the spam databases to ensure that your address does not end up there. To ensure that your emails are not marked as spam by your recipient, ensure that the email is relevant and track their engagement pattern.
Regularly cleaning your email list and giving due importance to email validation can save your sender reputation multiple times.
Summing It Up
Fixing your email list and reducing your email bounce rates can do wonders for the results of your email marketing. In order to reach out to the customer base that you have built and to stay relevant without losing out to competition, fixing email bounce backs can be significant.