5 Email Bounce Metrics to Pay Attention to

Nowadays, there are more digital platforms available to speak to your target audience than ever before. There are more traditional advertising routes to take, such as billboards, TV and there are also digital marketing avenues such as online banners, social media – to name but a few. 

One of the most personal ways to speak to your target audience is still via email, and it’s also a less intrusive way of communicating. Creating an email list as part of your marketing strategy means you have a personal platform where you can speak directly to your target audience without the noise that surrounds marketing campaigns in other modern mediums.

Of course, it’s all good and well to have an impressive number of email subscribers under your belt but this doesn’t mean much if your subscribers don’t receive the message you’re sending out. As much as you need to keep an eye on the great returns your email subscribers offer, you also need to keep an eye on your email bounce metrics.

Your email metrics measure the percentage of emails that bounce back from the number of emails you send out. If you send a 100 emails and 2 bounce back, your email bounce metrics are 2% – this is a very good bounce rate. Each industry has its own bounce rate so, but whatever your industry you need to ensure that you keep your bounce rate as low as possible – with 5% being the average and any more is a concern.

You have two types of bounces that can give you an indication of what you can do to curb them. A soft bounce is usually about a temporary issue such as the receiver’s mailbox being full or the receiving server viewing your email as too large. Soft bounce contacts shouldn’t be removed but you should keep an eye on them in the future. A hard bounce is a bigger issue as it could be due to you having the wrong email address or your receiver’s server viewing your email as junk or spam.

To keep your bounce rate at a healthy low, you must remove contacts that keep bouncing your emails as they might hurt your email reputation – which in turn affects your deliverability for future sends.

Ways to improve your email bounce metrics

Businesses undergo bounce rate issues all the time. It can be a concern, but this is definitely an issue that you can do something about.

• Opt for opt-in – The best way to create an email list is by asking the people you intend to email if they would like to receive any more information from you. This is a very engaged audience that wants to receive emails from you about the products or services you offer. When customers register on your site for one reason or another, give them the option of supplying you with their email address. You can ensure the email addresses you receive from your contacts are valid by enforcing a double opt-in. This is when your customers fill in the form with their email address and you send them a confirmation email that requires them to click on a link to your site.
• Routinely scrub your email List – Time changes a lot of things and one of those things may be an email address. Doing a routine scrubbing of your email list can help you keep your good email reputation. You can also outsource your scrubbing needs to a third party.
• Take the spam out of your emails – You don’t want any of your emails to end up in the spam folder because no one reads spam mail. So, make sure you send good quality emails with high-res images and good formatting. Including your contact information in the email footer gives your email credibility and will keep it out of the junk.
• Engage with the engaged – In every email list, there are those passively interested in your content and there are those who are actively interested. By segmenting your email lists, you’re able to share content with those who will engage with it to improve your statistics.
• Don’t buy support – Since email marketing is most effective because the people you’re sending emails to want to receive those emails, buying an email list makes you immediately untrustworthy. An email address is personal and when a stranger sends you an email, you immediately want to block that sender. This will increase your bounce metrics immensely and place you in the no-mail list within domains.

Email marketing is the most cost effective way to do digital marketing but without looking after your list properly you are not going to achieve what you wanted to do in the first place. So, the name of the game is to apply all the points above to your email marketing strategy.