Emails bounced back

Emails bounced back : Emails bounced back are ebbs and flows of email marketing.

Emails bounced back happen for all kinds of reasons that make your emails not land in the inbox and bounce back.

In this article, we discuss emails bounced back that disrupt your email’s deliverability.

Here is why they happen and how you can turn emails bounced back around.

What is ‘Email Bounce Back?’

Emails bounced back is when your sent email is not accepted by your receiver’s email server, hence, it doesn’t get delivered.

Emails bounced back issue from temporary or permanent ones.

To identify the causes of emails bounced back, you need to identify the type of bounce you’re dealing with.

There are two types of emails bounced back: hard bounces and soft bounces.

How Can I Identify an Email Bounce Back Message?

The emails bounced back message will tell you the causing issue and the recommendations on how to fix it.

The emails bounced back message looks like this:

“Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently”.

What causes an email to bounce back?

Emails bounced back come from full inboxes, servers that aren’t responding, inactive or invalid email addresses, or fake email addresses.

Bounced back emails issue from temporary or permanent ones.

To identify the causes, you need to identify the type of bounce you’re dealing with.

There are two types of emails bounced back:

• Soft bounce emails
• Hard bounce emails

How to calculate email bounce rate?

Your bounce rate is the number of emails that have bounced back as a percentage of the total emails you have sent.

Divide the total number of emails sent by the total number of bounces.

Multiply that number by 100.

And voilà! This is your bounces per email.

Example:

if you sent 1500 emails and 250 of them bounced, the calculation will look like this:

250/1500=0.166666667

0.166666667*100=16.6666667

The bounce rate, in this case, is 16%.

What is an Acceptable Bounce Rate?

According to Epsilon’s Email Trends and Benchmark guide (2010), depending on the industry, the average emails bounced back rates are anywhere between 2% and 15%.

If your emails bounced back rates are already within 2% or less, it’s a warning sign.

If your emails bounced back rates increase into the 5% or even 10% range.

You can reduce your bounce rates by:

• Use a double-opt-in
• Keep an eye on sign-ups
• Use a reputable email service provider
• Authenticate your domain

How to reduce your bounce rate

• Use a double-opt-in

Double opt-in for new subscribers is a solid healthy measure.

Double opt-in means you won’t receive invalid or inactive email addresses in your email list for your email marketing.

A double opt-in is when you send an email authentication to every new subscriber and only add them to your email list once they’ve clicked the confirm button or link in your confirmation email.

The confirmation email has to reach your new subscriber in order for them to confirm, which ensures that the email address is correct and accepts emails.

It is highly recommended to use automation for double opt-ins to streamline contact list management.

The best email service providers encourage double opt-ins because it increases the success rate of email campaigns and keeps mail servers healthy.

• Be careful with sign-ups

Use a captcha system to verify sign-ups.

A captcha system quickly identifies bots or spam accounts that sign up for your email list.

Using a captcha system on your signup form will ensure that only valid and active email addresses are signed up to your email lists.

• Use a reputable email service provider

A reputable email service provider should help you authenticate or verify your domain.

Some Email Service Providers integrate with email validation tools like Email Inspector.

Using an ESP for an email marketing campaign without prior verification of your subscribers’ list is risky and can lead your account to get suspended.

Make sure to verify your email list before sending your email marketing campaign.

Otherwise, your sender’s reputation will get damaged.

A damaged sender’s reputation takes a lot of time to recover and will impact negatively, in the future, your email marketing campaigns, as you may face higher bounce rates.

• Authenticate your domain

You have to use a professional domain in your email marketing campaign.

To use free email domains like “@gmail.com” is like jumping off a cliff.

The chances of your email being marked as spam by filters increase multifold.

As a result, your email bounce rates also increase after your email marketing reputation gets damaged.

To prevent that, you have to use your business domain name instead.

Your emails will not pass the DMARC policy check for Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL if you are using a free send-from domain.

Types of Email Bounces

Soft or hard, a bounce is a bounce.

Soft bounces:

Soft bounces are temporary and usually indicate an overloaded email server. Soft bounces are not as nice as they seem.

Your email service provider will try to resend the email campaign five times before giving up.

In most cases, soft bounces will turn around to a successful delivery after multiple attempts.

Hard bounces:

Hard bounces are more serious because they’re permanent failures.

Hard bounces occur when the domain is no longer valid or the email contains a typo.

You have to remove all email addresses with hard bounces as soon as you find them.

Campaign Monitor and other ESPs will usually automatically suppress any and all email addresses that result in hard bounces.

Email bounces are really bad news for your email marketing campaigns.

How to prevent email bounce back?

1. Use double opt-in

A double opt-in is when you set a two steps authentication via a confirmation email.

This means new subscribers can only enter your pipeline once they’ve clicked the confirm button or link in your confirmation email.

Automated double opt-ins help to increase the success rate of email campaigns and keeps mail servers healthy.

Once a new subscriber with your mailing list, ask them to verify their account.

This assures the authenticity of the new subscriber’s email address.

Double opt-in helps you to filter invalid or inactive email addresses in your email list for your email marketing.

2. Maintain a clean list

Email addresses expire with time, they either become invalid, or inactive.

Therefore, verify your email list before scheduling any email marketing campaign.

Regular email list clean-ups can provide you with better deliverability and a decrease in bounces.

For this task, you can rely on email verification services like Email Inspector.

Email Inspector does a scan test of your email address list.

Email Inspector checks email syntax verifies its email domain (MX record) and validates the email addresses from the email service providers.

3. Double-check for typos

To avoid typos, the double-opt-in method is the way to go.

This way, you don’t have to manually check email address typos.

4. Authenticate your email account

Authentication protects your sender’s reputation, reduces the email bounce-back rate, and improves your email deliverability.

Authentication processes have three types:

• SPF
• DKIM
• DMARC

Authentications help the receiver’s server to check the authenticity of the email received.

5. Don’t spam your content

Your email’s content can be spammy for one reason or for another.

Here are a few tips to follow to build non-spammy email content:

• Avoid *spam-triggering* words in your email content. Spam triggering words get can you blacklisted by various Email Service Providers. Spam triggering words can be like FREE, OFF, or 50%,… words like these make the receiver’s ESP assume your email has promotional content.On frequent usage of these words, the emails bounce back.
• Avoid adding 5 links tops to your emails. otherwise, your email can look like an act of phishing activity. The receiver server will make the email bounce.
• Maintain 60:40 text to HTML ratio. This mixed ratio between the text and HTML will create dynamic and avoid coming on as boring.
• Avoid caps, bold, and exclamation marks. Content that has caps, bold, or exclamation marks can be considered spammy.

6. Maintain time frame between consecutive emails

Keep a timeslot of 90 seconds between sending two consecutive emails.

Otherwise, what happens when you send multiple emails at once, the algorithms assume it is a non-human activity. This makes your emails bounce.

Use an email outreach tool for your email outreach email marketing campaign.

This way, you can set the time gap automatically rather than doing it manually.

7. Keep an eye on your sender reputation score

As this section’s title says it, keep an eye on your sender’s reputation score.

Why?

If your sender’s reputation is low, it makes your emails bounce back, considered as spam, and worst-case scenario, block your account.

You can keep an eye on your sender’s reputation score by many free tools that allow you to check your score.

8. Send emails consistently

You should be consistently sending emails.

This way, you can maintain an engagement with your email subscribers.

Your subscribers will stay aware of your email activity and reinforce your account from falling into small bounces.

9. Avoid Free Sender Domains

The downside of using free email sender domains like @gmail.com or @outlook.com,… you cannot authenticate your email account.

This helps prevent your emails from bouncing back when sending out an e-mail campaign.

Use an authentic business domain when sending emails to get the most out of them.

10. Don’t exceed your daily sending limit

Every email service provider has a definite email sending limit.

If you try to surpass the daily email sending limit, you risk to have emails bounced back.

To protect yourself, schedule sending emails during the week.

if you keep exceeding your daily sending limit, you risk getting your account booked.

Check regularly your email service provider to follow the record of your daily sending.

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