Imagine sending out a carefully crafted email campaign to your subscribers, only to discover that it flopped spectacularly. You got it! The emails inbox delivery bounced, and many of your audience have yet to see your content. This is anyone's worst nightmare when it comes to email marketing. Unfortunately, a high bounce rate in email marketing can signal a serious deliverability problem that can hurt your sender’s reputation and future campaigns. If you want to achieve higher email deliverability and engagement, reducing your bounce rate in email marketing is a solid place to start. In this article, we'll unpack how to reduce bounce rates and optimize your email campaigns for better results.   

With its email infrastructure solutions, Inframail can help you achieve your objectives. We help businesses boost email deliverability and reduce bounce rates to ensure their campaigns reach the right audience.

Table of Content

• What is Email Bounce Rate, and How Does it Affect Businesses?

• How to Reduce Your Average Bounce Rate in Email Marketing

• 3 Best Practices for Optimizing Your Emails and Increasing Conversions

• Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

What is Email Bounce Rate, and How Does it Affect Businesses?

In email marketing, the email bounce rate tells you the percentage of email addresses in your subscriber list that didn’t receive your message because a recipient mail server returned it. 

There are two categories of email bounces: 

1. Hard bounce

2. Soft bounce

How Is Email Bounce Rate Calculated? 

The email bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of bounced emails by the number of emails sent and multiplying it by 100 to get a percentage. 

Here’s how the formula looks:

(# of bounces / # of delivered emails) x 100 = your email bounce rate

Types of Email Bounces

There are two types of email bounces: hard bounce and soft bounce. Let's examine each in more detail. 

Hard Bounces

A hard bounce happens when an email can't be delivered because the recipient's email address is invalid, non-existent, or blocked. It might also occur when the email provider blocks the sender's email address. 

Hard bounces can be problematic for businesses because they indicate a fundamental issue with the email list quality, which can hurt their sender’s reputation.

Soft Bounces

Soft bounces are temporary bounces that occur when an email can’t be delivered because the recipient’s mailbox is full, the email server is down, or the message is too large. Soft bounces are less harmful than hard bounces as they don't significantly impact the sender's reputation. 

How Email Bounce Rate Affects Businesses

A high email bounce rate can negatively impact business communication with customers and operations. Here are some of the ways email bounce rates can affect different types of companies: 

Business Operators

Email bounce rates can affect business operators, especially those who rely on email marketing as a critical part of their customer communication strategy. A high bounce rate can reduce email deliverability and lead to ineffective customer communication. 

It also means that the sender's reputation is at risk, which can affect their overall email marketing strategy. 

Saas Businesses

Email bounce rates can be a significant challenge for Saas businesses that rely on emails for customer acquisition and retention. High email bounce rates can reduce customer acquisition rates, negatively impacting the business's profits.

Reducing email bounce rates can be tricky for SaaS businesses, as key parameters, such as email listing policies and server setup, may frequently change. 

What is a Good Email Bounce Rate?

Based on cross-industry research, anything below 2% is considered a typical bounce rate. 2% to 5% is a warning level, while above 5% is critical.

Email providers regularly research to determine typical email bounce rates. Those reports are usually based on campaign data gathered from their users. While the scope of the study makes us believe the results are objective, we should still take those numbers with a grain of salt. With that in mind, we provided several examples of reports that have found typical bounce rates. That way, we won’t rely on one source of data. 

Mailchimp Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics 

In 2019, Mailchimp created a comprehensive report on essential email marketing metrics, such as: 

• Average open rates

• Click rates

• Soft and hard bounces

• Unsubscribe rates

Mailchimp found that the Construction industry had the highest average hard bounce rate, 1.28%. The lowest, on the other hand, was in the Daily Deals/E-Coupons industry with 0.13%. 

Mailchimp Email Bounce Rate benchmarks 

MailerLite analyzed 2022 data from 40,000 accounts. They included campaigns sent to at least ten subscribers, resulting in a dataset that included around 1M campaigns.

In their report, publishing companies had the lowest bounce rates (0.2%), while the highest bounce rates (1.32%) were in the Architecture and Construction industries. 

Benchmark Email Report 

Benchmark email report analyzed a smaller group of users (≈7,470), and their numbers show a slightly different picture.

The advertising/Marketing/PR/Media/Design industries had high email bounce rates, averaging 12.27%. Their report showed that Retail/Consumer Services had the lowest average email bounce rate (6.08%). 

Constant Contact Average Industry Rates for Emails 

Constant Contact analyzes data from over 200 million emails each month. Their report shows higher bounce rates compared to that of Mailchimp and MailerLite as well: 

• Legal Services – 16.27%

• Manufacturing and Distribution – 14.73%

• Real Estate – 12.72% 

• Repair and Maintenance – 5.92% 

We can make three main conclusions from the reports we saw above: 

1. The source of analysis makes a massive difference in average results; 

2. The acceptable email bounce rate is still below 2% regardless of industry averages; 

3. The bounce rates differ depending on the industry. 

Common Causes of High Email Bounce Rates 

A high email bounce rate can significantly reduce the effectiveness of your email campaigns. You must first understand the common causes of high email bounce rates to reduce your email bounce rate. 

Invalid Email Addresses

One of the most common reasons for a high email bounce rate is invalid email addresses. Invalid email addresses are those that do not exist or have been deleted. If you send an email to an invalid address, it will bounce back, resulting in a high email bounce rate. 

Spam Filters

Email spam filters protect users from unwanted and unsolicited emails. They can also cause high email bounce rates. If your emails are marked as spam, they may not even reach your recipient’s inbox, resulting in a high bounce rate. 

Full Inboxes 

If a recipient's inbox is complete, any emails sent to that address will bounce back. This is known as a soft bounce and is a common cause of high email bounce rates. 

Syntax errors

Syntax errors are mistakes in the formatting of email addresses. If you make a typo when entering an email address, it will result in a high email bounce rate. Email spam filters are designed to protect users from unwanted and unsolicited emails. 

They can also cause high email bounce rates. If your emails are marked as spam, they may not even reach your recipient's inbox, resulting in a high bounce rate. 

Related Reading

• Why Are My Emails Going To Spam
• Email Deliverability Rate
• Email Monitoring
• Email Deliverability Issues
• Email Quality Score
• How To Avoid Email Going To Spam
• Why Do Emails Bounce
• SPF or DKIM
• How To Check If Your Emails Are Going To Spam

How to Reduce Your Average Bounce Rate in Email Marketing

Clean House: Scrub Your Email Lists

Nothing triggers high bounce rates like sending emails to an unkempt list. Before you do anything else, clean the house.

If you buy an email list (a scenario I don’t recommend), the first order of business is to run it through an email verification tool like Neverbounce or ZeroBounce. This will help you avoid spam traps and other dangerous addresses that harm your sender’s reputation.

The Importance of Email List Hygiene: Boosting Engagement by Reducing Bounce Rates

Regardless of where your list came from, you should also routinely clean it. Aim to remove any apparent bounces as soon as they occur. Then, look for any other email addresses that appear to be inactive. If someone hasn’t opened your emails in a while, they will likely forget who you are. Acknowledge this and remove them from your list. If you keep your email list healthy, you’ll reduce your bounce rate and improve engagement metrics.

Avoid Spammy Emails (and Spam Traps)

Sure, it sounds like a no-brainer. But sending spammy emails will hurt your deliverability, and it can even get your emails bounced back. Spam filters don’t just look for “spammy” content once your email lands in the inbox. 

They examine your email closely as it’s being delivered, and a high score can cause your emails to bounce back before they reach the recipient. The best way to avoid looking like a spammer is to use a third-party tool and analyze your emails for potential issues before hitting send. 

Use Custom Domains for Email

Sending emails from a freebie service, like Gmail or Hotmail, is a big no-no. Aside from the technical reasons I’ll get into in a second, even if your email doesn’t bounce, having a freebie domain looks unprofessional. What’s more, using a custom domain isn’t that hard nowadays. 

The easiest way is: 

1. Purchase a suitable domain: Prices vary wildly, but you can start by paying only a few bucks for a domain to get started. 

2. Get a Google G-suite account via Google Domains: The advantage of buying G-suite via Google Domains is that it automatically sets up Gmail and email protection features. Neato! 

On email protection, the technical reason for not using free email domains is that they don’t pass the DMARC policy for Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL, so you’ll likely experience a hard bounce (if your emails get delivered).

Verify Your Domain

Verifying your domain tells the receiving email server you’re a legitimate sender and have permission to send emails from this domain. According to one of the top sources of email marketing statistics, less than 40% of brands use three primary methods of email authentication: 

• SPF

• DKIM

• DMARC

Using domain authentication will improve email deliverability and reduce bounce rates. To set this up, you’d need to have your custom domain in the first place. Then, if you use a third-party email marketing tool, you’ll also want to verify your domain to send emails using your custom domain.

Get Personal 

Personalizing your emails has a dual benefit in that it’s more likely to get past spam filters and get opened. Firstly, email clients look for large batches of inbound messages with the same subject line. Adding some personalization to your subject line can reduce the chances of my message getting flagged as spam. 

Adding personalization to the subject line can increase unique open rates by 26% versus boilerplate subject lines, so once your email has reached your inbox, the recipient is more likely to open it. If you’re looking for ideas to get your creativity flowing, here’s a solid list of 100 personalized email subject lines to get things going.

Use Clean, Simple Code

Chances are, even if you’re sending a plain-text-looking email if it includes images and links, it’s more likely to be “rich text.” This means your message contains HTML. Email clients and spam filters look at your message’s contents differently than human eyes. 

When the email lands in their inbox, it will look like this: 

Hi, I trust this email finds you well. I noticed you currently use Mailchimp to send automated emails and wanted to ask whether you think you’re getting good value for money. If you’re just sending simple, rich text emails (like this very message), Outfunnel can save you piles of cash each year. Let me know if you fancy saving a couple hundred bucks a year. 

Thanks, 

Ben. 

No longer interested? Unsubscribe 

The adequately formatted HTML should be clean and straightforward, like this message. There are some in-line styling elements here and there, but everything’s right where it should be. But you’ll have problems if you start copying your content from one email marketing tool to another. Each platform usually adds styling or formatting elements, resulting in sketchy-looking HTML. 

That awkward-looking code is just as off-putting to spam filters as to human eyes. Adding lots of images can also result in bad HTML, so keep pictures to a minimum. If, like me, you prefer to draft your copy in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, clear any formatting after you paste the draft into your email marketing platform.

Maintain Your Lists

If you want to stay fit, you’ve got to keep at it. And so it is with your email marketing lists: if you want your lists to stay healthy, you must actively put in some effort. People get hired, fired, or just move on to new challenges. 

The rate at which this happens varies from industry to industry, but for some sectors, the “separation rate” can be 7% per month. You will start seeing bounces if your list gets stale or outdated. 

Maximizing Email Campaign Effectiveness with Automated List Management Tools

Not only will you see bounces, but keeping your list in good shape ensures you’re only emailing engaged users. If you’re sending emails once a week, for example, and someone hasn’t opened any of them for a couple of months, that’s a good time to flag them for removal from your email marketing list. 

Of course, if an email bounces, remove it immediately. Modern marketing tools like Outfunnel do this automatically.

Get Their Permission 

Not only is getting permission the single most effective way to keep bounce rates low, but it’s also a legal requirement in some parts of the world. Marketers often cringe at the idea of double opt-ins for email marketing lists. The thought of losing 20% of those initial registrations can be somewhat panic-inducing. But, those that don’t confirm their permission were more likely to bounce anyway. 

And as with several things in life, “it’s not the size that counts, it’s how you use it.” Having a clean, engaged list of active subscribers is far more valuable than having 10x as many who are just a click or two away from marking you as spam. Even if you don’t go with the double opt-in approach, you should at least use their registration as an automated email trigger, whether for a one-off message or part of an automated email sequence.

Give Your Subscribers Control 

And when it comes to permissions, there’s another layer you can add: content types. As a marketer, the kind of content you send to your subscribers can vary: 

• Announcements

• Tutorials

• Events

• Offers and more

By providing your subscribers with relevant email marketing content, you’re increasing the likelihood that they’ll stay engaged longer.

Use Customer Segmentation 

Segmenting your customer base allows you to craft personalized email campaigns that resonate with each individual. It’s been well documented that a lack of personalization generally translates to a lack of interest on the customer side. (X% of consumers say one unpersonalized experience is enough to abandon a brand for good). 

To launch more targeted email campaigns, you can segment customers or leads based on their: 

• Location (e.g., marketing seasonal clothes to people in the northern vs. southern hemisphere)

• Job title Behavior (e.g., product pages viewed, content preferences) And more!

Send Emails Regularly 

Of course, sending 30 emails over two days isn’t a great look and will likely make spam filters suspicious and irritate your recipients. At the same time, though, it’s worth noting that “going dark” and sending emails infrequently can, over time, increase bounce rates. If you’re not sending emails consistently, your audience is more likely to forget who you are and, as a result, mark you as spam or report you. 

Sadly, there’s no “one size fits all” approach to email marketing frequency, so it’s really a case of examining your own data. Try sending more or fewer emails over a given period and analyzing whether that works to reduce bounce rate.

Related Reading

• DMARC vs DKIM
• Importance Of DMARC
• What Is a Soft Bounce Email
• Email Deliverability Checklist
• What Affects Email Deliverability
• Why Is Email Deliverability Important
• Email Bounce Rate
• Fix Email Reputation
• Improve Sender Reputation
• Email Hard Bounce
• Email Deliverability Tools
• Email Deliverability Best Practices
• Best Email Domains

3 Best Practices for Optimizing Your Emails and Increasing Conversions

1. Crafting Attention-Grabbing Subject Lines to Improve Email Conversions 

Subject lines can dramatically impact your email performance. An effective email should grab your reader’s attention, and the subject line is your first opportunity to do so. A compelling subject line will boost your open rates, allowing more people to view your email content and increasing the chances of conversion.  

Crafting Compelling Subject Lines: Balancing Personalization and Clarity to Maximize Email Open Rates

Your email subject line should be concise and clear and convey the central message of your email. Personalization is a great way to grab your recipient's attention. For instance, instead of a general subject line, a subject line like "{{$FirstName}}, here's an offer you can't refuse" will create a sense of intrigue and give the recipient a feeling of exclusivity. Always avoid using SPAM triggers or deceptive subject lines that may lead to a person marking your email as spam. 

2. Strategically Using Images and CTAs to Optimize Email Content  

Images and CTAs play a huge role in optimizing your email content. Ensure all your photos and CTAs are optimized for email to download quickly and look great on any device. Also, ensure that your CTAs are strategically placed and provide a clear direction to your subscribers. Your call to action should be clear, concise, and obvious to get the desired results. 

3. Testing Your Emails and Making Adjustments to Improve Deliverability  

Email marketing optimization is ongoing, and testing and adjusting are always advisable. Testing will enable you to identify what works, what doesn't, and why. For example, you can test different: 

• Subject lines

• Send times

• Layouts, CTAs

• Email Frequency

Then, based on your findings, make the necessary changes and continue testing until you get the desired results.

By segmenting your email list, crafting compelling subject lines, properly using images and CTAs, and testing your emails, you can optimize them and increase their deliverability rate. Email marketing requires constant monitoring and optimization to remain effective.

Related Reading

• Email Monitoring Software
• Soft Bounce Reasons
• Check Email Deliverability Score
• Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce Email
• SalesHandy Alternatives
• GlockApps Alternative
• MailGenius Alternative
• MxToolbox Alternative
• Maildoso Alternatives

Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a single flat rate. We provide: 

• Microsoft-backed deliverability

• Dedicated IP addresses

• Automated technical setup 

It scales its cold email outreach efforts efficiently:

• Agencies

• Recruiters

• SDRs  

What are the Benefits of Using Inframail?   

The main benefits of using our service: 

• Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup

• Dedicated email servers for each user

• 16-hour priority support daily

How InfraMail Simplifies Email Infrastructure for Scalable Outreach

Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects. 

InfraMail provides a robust email infrastructure without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether: 

• You're an agency looking to scale outreach

• A recruiter connecting with candidates

• An SDR driving sales

Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.