Email bounce rate is a key metric in email marketing . If it is too high, it can cause serious damage to your email campaigns and even your sender reputation. In this post, we will help you understand what email bounce rate is, what causes it, and how to control it so you can enjoy a high email deliverability rate.
What is email bounce rate?
Email bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that are sent but not successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes . More specifically, this rate takes into account messages that were rejected by recipients’ email servers but returned to the sender with an automatic bounce message indicating a delivery failure.
Note: Bounce rate does not take into account emails that are marked as SPAM and rejected at the network level without any feedback being sent to the sending server. For more information on the topic of spam, see the article How to Prevent Your Emails from Going to Spam .
In email marketing , bounces aren’t just minor hiccups. They’re more of a sign that something is wrong. This could be anything from a typo in the email address to a problem with the email content or the recipient’s mail server.
For this reason, recognizing and understanding your email bounce rate is crucial. It’s not just about making sure your messages get through. It’s also about maintaining your sender reputation, taking your professional communications to the next level.
Now, it should be noted that not all of your marketing messages will be delivered or convert, and that’s normal. (You can check out our article on email deliverability for an in-depth understanding of the email journey and the different obstacles in its path.) However, if your bounce rate is too high, your business will suffer.
How does email bounce rate affect your business?
A high bounce rate hampers your marketing efforts and can damage your sender reputation with email service providers. This can also lead to additional deliverability issues and further reduce the reach of your email campaigns.
As an email hosting provider, we have had clients Armenia Consumer Email List contact us over the years to find out why their emails were not being delivered. We know how frustrating this can be, as it impacts their business operations. Sometimes the reason for the bounce is simply a typo in the recipient’s address. Other times, the reason can be more complex.
Let’s first clarify how a high email bounce rate can impact your business, so you know what you could be facing if you don’t take corrective action.
Reduction in engagement and conversion rates
When emails bounce, they don’t reach their intended recipients, which naturally leads to lower open and click-through rates, which means less engagement with your content. If your emails aren’t received, that means fewer people are seeing and interacting with your content. In turn, this drop in engagement leads to a decrease in conversions, which in turn hurts your bottom line.
Wasted resources
Every bounced email is a waste of time, effort, and Buy Email Database List money. It’s good to know that even if you follow all the best practices, there will still be messages that bounce back, so be prepared. However, you should strive to keep this number as low as possible. In practice, a high bounce rate means that you are not maximizing the return on investment of your marketing efforts, because a portion of your audience is not even receiving your messages. It is, in essence, a waste of your expensive marketing efforts.
Distorted analysis
Bounce rates can skew the accuracy of your campaign analytics. This is because metrics like open rates and conversions can’t accurately reflect your audience’s behavior if a large number of emails never reach their destination. Even if other metrics look great, bounce rates are a must.
Ignoring bounce rates can lead to Bulk Database misinterpretations of your email campaign performance. This, in turn, can lead to uninformed business decisions: not seeing the full picture can lead to investing in the wrong areas.
Damaged sender reputation
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) track the number of bounces you generate in an effort to prevent spam. The higher the bounces, the more ISPs and ESPs think you are buying email lists or scraping emails. As a result, they will start punishing you by marking your emails as spam, which can damage your sender reputation. This results in a decrease in your email deliverability.
