Email bounces can ruin your marketing campaign, a bounced email means that one of your customers missed the marketing email that you drafted especially for them, and all your hard work and money ends up being wasted.
The effectiveness of an email marketing campaign is determined by its deliverability rate, and hard bounces can affect your deliverability rate too. To get a better understanding of bounce rates, let’s first discuss some of the main differences between soft bounces and hard bounces, and how you can take steps to prevent them.
Email Bounces
An email bounce occurs when the email you send gets rejected by the email server of your client. Total bounce rate is measured by counting how much of the email you sent actually ended up in your clients’ inboxes. Email bounces can further be classified into soft and hard bounces.
· Soft Bounces are normal in marketing campaigns, you shouldn’t worry about this as the problem only lasts for a specific time, and gets resolved automatically in one to two emails. The reasons for a soft bounce might include the recipient’s server being temporarily down, or the inbox of your customer might be too loaded to accommodate your email.
· Hard Bounces on the other hand, cause your emails to never get delivered to your prospect, recipient’s email server directs the email back to your ISP. Hard bounces happen if the email of your customer is invalid, or they’ve deactivated their email address and are no longer using it.
Best Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Below are some steps on how you can increase your deliverability rate and your bounce rate low.
· Right after a hard bounce occurs, hire email validation services like Clearout or TheChecker and get your email list cleaned of any inactive or incorrect emails that might impact your deliverability rate. If however, you’re facing soft bounces, you can just try and resend the email.
· To keep the bounce rates low, you can give your subscribers the choice of choosing what they receive from you and how frequently. This way you’ll be more likely to get high open rates.
· If you start sending quality written and targeted emails to your clients, you will be attracting more customers and the engagement would also increase over time. The chances of your emails ending up in spam folders also decrease if the engagement is good.
· Maintain a good email list hygiene, and make sure the deliverability rate is good, because ignoring small issues like this can cause them to add up and later on damage your email campaign adversely. Also, hard bounces can cause your brand’s reputation to deteriorate over time.
· Use double opt-in to make sure all the emails you collect during your marketing campaign are correctly written. Also, when a subscriber is asked to confirm by clicking a link in their inbox, and they do so, the chances of them regularly engaging with your content increase dramatically.
You can also read additional articles on how you can retain your brand’s reputation by adopting good strategies to optimize your email campaign.