12 Hacks to Decrease Your Email Bounce Rate

Keeping email bounce rates as low as possible is your ticket to higher deliverability. The subject line email copy will make a difference only when the email reaches your targeted audience. Hence, monitoring your email bounces and keeping them low is crucial for higher returns.

This guide will discuss what an email bounce rate is and 12 tips to reduce it.

Table of contents

• What is an email bounce?
• How to calculate email bounce rate?
• What is an acceptable bounce rate?
• 12 ways to reduce email bounce rate
• Conclusion

What is an email bounce?

An email bounce happens when the email is returned or bounced back from the subscriber's email server. The non-deliverability of emails can be due to many reasons, which may be temporary or permanent.

There are two categories of email bounces:

Hard bounces

These emails bounce due to permanent problems such as invalid email addresses or non-existent domain names. To avoid them, identify such email addresses and stop sending emails to them.

Soft bounces

These emails bounce due to temporary reasons such as a down server, large content, or full mailbox. To avoid soft bounce emails, you can send emails several times. But, if there is still no response, you must delete those email addresses.

How to calculate email bounce rate?

You can follow these steps to calculate bounce rate:

• Divide the total number of bounced emails by the number of emails sent. It gives the total number of bounces per email.

• Multiply the bounce per email rate, thus obtained by 100 to get the bounce rate percentage.

The high bounce rate can harm your email deliverability. In addition, it may damage your sender's reputation. Also, there are chances that you may get blacklisted.

What is an acceptable bounce rate?

A bounce rate of 2% or less is acceptable. But, the bounce rate above 2% leads to deliverability issues. It indicates that you must analyze your email analytics and identify its issue.

12 ways to reduce email bounce rate

You can take the following steps to decrease the email bounce rate and increase the deliverability of your emails:

1. Maintaining a good list of hygiene

Maintain good email list hygiene by keeping track of different aspects such as:

• Bounced email address.

• Cleaning email list consistently.

2. Make use of a permission-based opt-in list

It's always better to take the users' permission to whom you are sending emails. If the recipient didn't opt-in to be on your mailing list, then there are chances that they can mark your email as spam. It can damage your senders' reputation and further increase the email bounce rate.

Thus, you must take permission beforehand by asking the user to subscribe to your newsletter. But, it helps avoid email bounces from those who have not granted you permission to send emails.

3. Keep updating your subscribers' list.

The subscribers' list must consist of relevant email addresses. The stale or cluttered list would only lead to a high bounce rate.

• You must update your email list from time to time.

• You should provide your recipients the option to unsubscribe and update or manage their preferences.

• You should not delete addresses right after your first email. Otherwise, you may have to spend much time and resources to restore your email sender reputation.

• It's better to update or clean the email list every six months.

4. Use email authentication

An email marketer should authenticate the domain name as it proves to be helpful in the long run.

• You can take the help of a good email service provider to ensure the authentication and verification of your domain.

• The verified emails give the email recipients an idea of who you claim to be and, thus, not spamming them. It also prevents sending security alerts to your recipients.

• Authenticating your domain improves deliverability rates and reduces the email bounce rate.

Related guide : What Is Email Authentication and How To Set It Up

5. Set up preference center

You should give your subscribers an option to choose and control the information they receive in emails from you. Consequently, they should decide how many emails they would like to receive from your side. It decreases the email bounce rate.

Related guide: How to Create Powerful Preference Center to Retain Your Valuable Subscribers

6. Verification of the email addresses

Verifying the validity of email addresses in your list using proper email verification tools is a must before you start the marketing campaign. Otherwise, the probability of a hard bounce rate can be very high. You can use various tools and carry out this email addresses the verification process with ease.

7. Inconsistency decreases the email bounce rate

You must send the emails to your subscribers regularly and consistently. Higher subscriber engagement is essential to reduce spam complaints and bounces. If you send emails at the wrong time, users won't open them. It might reduce deliverability, and email clients may send emails to the spam folder in the long run.

The email campaign will be successful only when you take effective actions to send consistent emails at the right time.

8. Avoid free sender domains.

There are chances that if you're using free email domains such as "@gmail.com," then your emails might end up in the spam folder. Also, those emails will not pass the DMARC policy check for Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL. It increases your email bounce rate and spoils your domain reputation.

Instead, you must avoid free sender domains and use a professional business domain for the email marketing campaign.

9. Quality emails

The quality of your email content makes a big difference.

• The content should force the recipient to read and go through the whole email. For this, you can include visual content, compelling words, attractive subject line, etc.

• If your recipients start putting your emails as spam or deleting them without opening them, it will harm your sender's reputation. Overall, it can harm the email bounce rate and increase it, thereby putting you at risk of getting blacklisted.

10. Don't create spam-like emails

• You should avoid spammy words in email as filters mark them as spam.

• Keep checking the email subject line, copy, and other links to ensure that your email pass through spam filters.

11. Track the email deliverability and performance results

It is critical to track email deliverability and other metrics.

• You can adopt different marketing practices to increase subscriber engagement in time.

• You can't let go high bounce rate unnoticed for long as it can hurt email deliverability and your sender reputation.

Related guide: Email Tracking and Its Importance for Brands and Businesses

12. Improvise your strategies

• Testing your email list continuously is also essential.

• It is good to constantly watch your email bounce rate analytics.

• You must keep an eye on the new emerging marketing practices.

• Accordingly, you should change and improvise your email marketing strategies.

• Analyze your progress and take measures to resolve any issue affecting your email campaigns.

Conclusion

Using the steps mentioned above, you can decrease the email bounce rate, ensuring higher deliverability. In addition, we recommend you use services like Mailmodo to help you keep your bounce rate at the lowest.