What is an Email Bounce Rate?
An email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that fail to reach the intended recipient’s inbox. It's a key performance indicator that divides the percentage of emails returned over the total number of emails sent.
With nowhere else to go, bounced emails return back to you. Marketers and entrepreneurs need to monitor email bounce rates to get a full picture of their campaign's performance.
Armed with this knowledge, teams can reevaluate email marketing efforts and adjust sending behavior to ensure that emails are seen and read by intended recipients.
Hard vs. Soft Bounce
When sending emails, you can encounter two types of email bounces: a hard bounce and a soft bounce. Let’s take a quick glance at each.
- Hard bounce: This refers to a permanent email sending failure. This type of bounce occurs because the email address is either invalid or non-existent. It could also be because the recipient has blocked your email address or IP address from sending to them. If all your emails hard bounce, it could be because you have wrongfully configured your email authentication protocols or have an unsalvageable sending reputation.
- Soft bounce: This type of bounce refers to a temporary but fixable delivery issue. It could mean the recipient has a full inbox or spam filter protocols in place. It could also occur if there’s a server outage or if your email file size is too large.
Encountering these email bounce-backs can indicate underlying email list quality issues. If left unchecked, this can obstruct your ongoing email marketing efforts.
How Do Email Bounce Rates Affect Outreach?
To ensure business continuity, you must be proactive and keep your email bounce rate as low as possible. Neglecting this metric can lead to poor cold outreach outcomes, including the following:
- A lower sending reputation: A high bounce rate can reveal to email service providers that you’re sending emails en-masse in a spammy fashion. This can cause them to lower your email volume sending limits and potentially blacklist your IP.
- Lower customer engagement: As your email bounce rate increases, other KPIs like total click-through rates and open rates decrease. This can impede company-set milestones and slow your marketing efforts to a crawl.
- Inefficient resource allocation: Bounced emails often take up a chunk of your already-limited daily sending volume. This stretches your email cycle, increases unproductive hours, and entails a higher cost per customer.
- Reduced profitability: With poorer-quality leads in your email list, you’ll expend more resources to send these emails. This can lead to longer campaign cycles and increased marketing costs, lowering this marketing stream’s ROI.
If you’re suffering from these outreach problems, the best course of action is to halt the campaign for a few weeks.
During this time, diagnose the problem and consider warming up a new set of email domains to start with a clean slate. Cleaning your list can improve your email reputation in the long run.
How To Calculate Email Bounce Rate
Calculating email bounce rate is easy.
Here’s a visual and a step-by-step guide on how to do it:
- First, sum your soft and hard bounces.
- Divide the bounced emails with your total emails sent during the period.
- Multiply the value by 100 to get the percentage.
Let’s imagine that you have sent 1,000 emails on a typical workday. Twenty of these emails have bounced back to your email address—with 15 of them being hard bounces and five of them being soft bounces.
Given this information, your email bounce rate would be twenty over one thousand leads—or 2%.
Fortunately, you don’t have to compute these figures in your head all the time. Cold email marketing tools like Instantly come equipped with a detailed Analytics dashboard that tracks the most popular email KPIs, such as open rates and reply rates. Instantly also has a filter option to track bounced emails and auto add them to your block list. This can help keep your domain’s reputation safe.
What Is a Good Email Bounce Rate?
Regardless of your industry, you should seek to maintain an email bounce rate of 2% or less. An email bounce rate between 2% and 5% is still acceptable, but may suggest some email list hygiene issues.
Anything over 5% can be detrimental to your sending reputation in the long run. If your bounce rate exceeds that critical threshold, then email service providers may find your domain untrustworthy. This could ending up in spam folders or not getting sent at all.
What Causes a Bad Bounce Rate?
- Purchasing email lists: If you have bought your emails from a list seller, then you’ll end up having to sort through a large number of invalid and dormant email addresses.
- Failing to clean your email list: Failure to validate your lead’s legitimacy can lead to a high bounce rate. Use third-party tools to remove invalid email addresses.
- Triggering spam words: You may have inadvertently incorporated spam words into your email content,, which resulted in the email being flagged.
- Sending too much in too little time: A high sending frequency to a large volume of emails can set warning alarms to ESPs, causing them to return your emails. Read this if you want to know how to boost sending limits.
- Repeatedly experiencing hard and soft bounces: Sending to dormant, blocked, and full inboxes regularly can tarnish your sending reputation and increase your bounce rate.
How To Improve Email Bounce Rates
Use double opt-in methods
Implement double opt-in methods on websites and social media pages to verify email addresses and confirm subscriber intent. This double confirmation ensures you won't have disengaged people on your list.
Verify and clean your list
Maintaining list health involves vetting your list and showing the door to uninterested and bad leads, like dormant and invalid accounts. Unless you’re only dealing with a few dozen email addresses, refrain from cleaning your list manually.
Instead, automate the list-cleaning process using email marketing software to remove email addresses that bounce, are invalid, or don’t respond to you. People move on from emails fast, so do this routinely—once a year is the minimum.
Authenticate your domains
Before sending in bulk, authenticate your email’s domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. It’s also recommended that you use a @domain.com email rather than a personal one, like @gmail.com.
An authenticated domain lowers your email’s chance of ending up in the spam folder. Plus, it’s essential for keeping a sound sending reputation even once you begin ramping up your sending volume.
With an authenticated domain, your email will look more legitimate in the eyes of ESPs, improving your chances to land on your recipient’s primary inbox.
Establish your sending reputation
Your sending reputation isn’t a number handed out to marketers by Google, but, it can increase and decrease. Most of maintaining a good reputation has to do with your content.
To improve your email content, try this:
- Create personalized emails
- Use compelling subject lines.
- Use a tone that’s a right fit for your brand.
- Warm up your domains.
- Make it easy for people to unsubscribe.
Avoid spam label
A single subscriber has a lot of influence on your email’s deliverability. If your spam rate is above 0.1% (meaning, if more than one person out of 1,000 mark your content as spam), this can cause email providers to prevent your future emails from getting sent to your recipient’s inboxes.
Key Takeaways
To ensure high email deliverability, it's crucial to minimize your email bounce rates. Allowing emails to land in spam is not an option. Here's how to manage it:
- Identify if your bounces are hard or soft, and address them accordingly.
- Aim to keep your email bounce rate under 5%. Utilize tools for monitoring and reducing it.
- Regularly cleanse your email list, confirm the validity of your subscribers, and steer clear of spam-triggering content to preserve a healthy email bounce rate.
- Leverage automation to seamlessly create and dispatch high-quality emails that reach the primary inboxes of your list.
- Warm up your domains with Instantly.
