Every email marketer has experienced the sinking feeling of discovering their carefully crafted email has bounced. Emails bounce for all sorts of reasons, and many of them are temporary. But while encountering a bounce or two isn’t a cause for concern, having high bounce rates can hurt your email deliverability and overall campaign performance. An email bounce rate is the percentage of emails from a specific campaign that a server did not deliver. The higher the bounce rate, the more emails didn’t reach their destination. This blog will help you better understand email bounce rates and effectively reduce them, leading to improved Inbox delivery and better overall campaign performance.

Inframail's email infrastructure can help you achieve your email deliverability goals by reducing bounce rates, preventing your emails from being flagged as spam, and ensuring they reach their intended destinations.

Table of Contents

• What is Email Bounce Rate and Why Does It Matter?

• 14 Useful Tips for Reducing Bounce Rate

• Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

What is Email Bounce Rate and Why Does It Matter?

An email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered from the total number of sent emails. Email bounce itself is a delivery failure, either temporary or permanent. Let’s say you want to surprise a friend you haven’t seen for ages. You search for their address in my book and head to their apartment. When you arrive, you discover they don’t live there anymore. You go back home feeling frustrated. Well, that’s what happens to your emails when they can’t reach your recipient’s email address. Sad, bounced emails returned to you.

Understanding Email Bounce Types: Permanent vs. Temporary and How to Interpret NDRs

Email bounce rate is the number of emails that bounce from the recipient's server and are not delivered. An email bounces due to permanent or temporary issues, like the wrong email address, the recipient's full inbox, etc. The recipient's server sends an automated bounce message - 'Non-Delivery Report.’ The Non-Delivery Report (NDR) details the particular problem with email delivery. The recipient's tab of sent marketing emails contains complete information regarding the bounce type and server response.

What Does It Mean When An Email Bounces?

When an email bounces, it can’t be delivered to the recipient and is returned to the sender. It’s like sending a letter returned to you with a message saying, “This address doesn’t work.” A bounced email indicates a delivery failure, possibly due to various reasons, such as an incorrect email address, a full inbox, or issues with the recipient’s email server.

How to Investigate and Resolve Email Bounces: Best Practices for Ensuring Successful Delivery

As the sender, it’s critical to investigate why the bounce occurred and address the issue. This might involve checking if the recipient’s email address was entered correctly or ensuring no problems with your email system. A bounced email disrupts communication and can affect ongoing interactions or business operations. To prevent future bounces, you should verify email addresses, fix any issues with your email system, and update information if necessary.

What Causes An Email To Bounce?

An email bounces due to many different reasons, including:

• The recipient's email address is wrong or invalid.

• The recipient's email address no longer exists.

• The recipient's server is down, and they couldn't receive the email.

• The recipient's inbox is full.

• The email content size is too large.

• The recipient's mailbox is not configured correctly.

• The email message does not meet the recipient server's sender requirements.

Two Types of Email Bounces

Email bounces are divided into two categories based on the reason behind the bounces:

Hard Bounce

A hard bounce is a permanent failure of email delivery. It happens when the domain name no longer exists, the email address is fake, or the email address has a typo. A hard bounce can adversely affect the email sender’s reputation and deliverability. The best way to avoid a hard bounce is to clean the list of dormant subscribers, segment the lists, and authenticate the emails.

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce is a temporary email delivery failure that usually occurs when the recipient's mailbox is full or their mail server is down. Because a soft bounce is temporary, the email will reach the recipient's inbox once the recipient’s domain server is restored or the recipient clears their inbox.

What's The Difference Between A Hard And Soft Bounce?

Hard and soft bounces are unavoidable. This table highlights their main differences, which is useful for email marketers or entrepreneurs who want to understand the reason behind high bounce rates.

Hard BounceSoft BouncePermanent delivery failureTemporary delivery failureDue to non-existent domains or a fake email addressDue to a down mail server or a full inboxAdversely affects email deliverabilityIt doesn’t affect email deliverability or the sender’s reputation score

How To Calculate Email Bounce Rate?

The email bounce rate is calculated by taking the number of bounced emails and dividing it by the total number of sent emails. For example, if a person sends 2000 emails and 200 bounced, the email bounce rate would be 10%.

What is a Good Email Bounce Rate?

The answer, as always, is that it depends.

Each industry has its bounce rate because it targets different: 

• Demographics

• Geographics

• Individuals with diverse: 

• Interests

• Jobs

• Preferences

Maintaining Email List Hygiene: Key Practices to Keep Bounce Rates Low and Deliverability High

According to Mailchimp’s industry benchmarks, a bounce rate between 0.5% and 1% is considered good. However, few bounces are typical in a subscriber's lifecycle journey. They may change their job titles, move to a different city, or abandon their old email addresses. A higher bounce rate than the industry average can signal bad email list hygiene practices. To help you out here, we will discuss 14 practical ways to lower your bounce rate and get more emails delivered to recipients' inboxes.

Related Reading

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

14 Useful Tips for Reducing Bounce Rate

1. Use Permission-Based Double Opt-In Forms  

Double opt-in forms are a best practice for a reason. When someone signs up to receive emails, they get a confirmation email first. The user confirms their email address and must explicitly permit them to receive email communications. This two-step process helps reduce email bounces and ensures that only those interested in hearing from you are on your email list. As a result, your email marketing metrics will be more accurate, and you can be confident that your messages are reaching those who want to receive them.  

2. Remove Dormant Contacts from the Email List

Dormant contacts are email addresses that have been inactive for a while. While there are several reasons why an email address may become dormant, the most common is that the contact has changed their email address or no longer uses the email account. Dormant contacts can hurt email marketing metrics, such as the bounce rate. For this reason, it is essential to remove dormant contacts from the email list regularly. This will help to improve email deliverability and sender reputation score.  

3. Use SPF and DKIM to Authenticate the Emails

Email authentication is verifying whether an email address is genuine or fake. This is important because email spoofing is a common type of email fraud. In spoofing, the fraudster uses an email with a forged sender address for malicious reasons, such as phishing. 

How SPF, DKIM, and DMARC Reduce Bounce Rates and Protect Your Reputation

According to a study, less than 40% of brands use email authentication methods like SPF, DKIM, or DMARC. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys identified Mail (DKIM) as two standard email authentication methods. SPF checks the sender's IP address against a list of authorized addresses, while DKIM uses digital signatures to verify the sender's identity. Some email clients also require Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) authentication. Therefore, enable the DMARC authentication for your emails. By authenticating their domains, businesses can help to reduce their email bounce rate and avoid being blacklisted by ESPs.  

4. Avoid a Free Domain Send-From Address  

One of the main reasons for a high email bounce rate is using a free domain send-from address. Marketing-related emails sent from a free domain send-from address don’t pass the DMARC policy of Gmail and Yahoo. So, you will experience a hard bounce if you persist in sending emails from a free domain. Purchase a dedicated domain, preferably a .com domain, for your business and enable all the email authentications. Also, you can buy a Google G-suite account from Google Domains. The advantage of buying G-Suite is that it has email protection and Gmail features that are already enabled.  

5. Engagement-Based Email List Segmentation 

When you segment your email list by engagement, you create a smaller, more focused audience within your larger list. This allows you to send more targeted, personalized email content to the most likely recipients to engage with it, which can lead to higher email open and click-through rates and lower email bounce rates. And you can also more easily track and measure your email marketing progress and ROI against specific goals. So, if your goal is to increase email open rates, for example, you can track that metric more closely for the most engaged email list segments.   

6. Avoid Spamming  

Being marked as a spammer can also increase your email bounce rate. And, consequently, can get you blacklisted. There are a few things that you can do to avoid being marked as a spammer. Don’t write the entire subject line in block letters. Spam filters are programmed to look for such subject lines. These filters also consider too many emojis spam. Always ask permission to send emails. It can be done by using double opt-in forms. 

Avoiding Spam Traps: How to Comply with CAN-SPAM Guidelines and Improve Email Deliverability

Use a spam-checking tool to ensure that nothing in your email is spam-triggering. Adhere to the guidelines of the CAN-SPAM Act set up by the Federal Trade Commission of the USA. These guidelines include: Don’t use deceptive subject lines. Identify the message as an ad. Tell your recipient of your location. Provide an unsubscribe link. Don’t use misleading header information.  

7. Set Up a Preference Center  

Over the subscriber's lifecycle are inevitable changes in their: 

• Behavior

• Preferences

• Interests

• Job titles

• Location, etc.

You should set up a preference center to navigate such changes. It's a dashboard where you ask subscribers to update or manage their preferences so that you send them only relevant and timely emails.  

8. Be Consistent With Sending the Emails

Email lists can go stale in as little as 6 months. If they remain dormant for longer periods, bounce rates can sharply increase. Thus, it is better to be consistent in sending emails. Connect with the subscribers regularly, and they won’t forget you. Immediately send your subscribers a welcome email when creating a new email list. Afterward, keep sending them relevant emails and keep them engaged. This way, you don’t have to clean my email lists regularly.  

9. Include a Manage Preference Link in the Emails  

Add an unsubscribe link in the email footer. By not including an unsubscribe link, recipients who don’t want to interact with your emails will mark them as spam, thus affecting both your sender’s reputation and bounce rate. A manage preference link can help reduce the bounce rate. By allowing recipients to update their preferences, you give them control over how often they want to hear from you.  

10. Use a CAPTCHA

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Humans And Computers Apart) are a standard security measure to protect email forms from computer bots. Computer bots try to access an email list for phishing and fraud. Thus, using CAPTCHAs, email marketers protect their email lists from getting compromised. CAPTCHAs include JPEG or GIF images with scrambled text. While humans are capable of reading distorted text, bots cannot. They can only know what format the image is by reading its source code. So, only valid email addresses will be included in your list by including a CAPTCHA in the single or double-opt-in forms.  

11. Test Your Emails Before Sending Them to Intended Recipients  

Testing your emails before sending them to recipients is always a good idea. It will help you eliminate any sending issues beforehand and test the email bounce rate to some extent. There are two ways to do it: messing with dummy email accounts and using dedicated tools. We don’t recommend the first option because it requires too much effort and doesn’t provide comprehensive insights.  

12. Get Subscriber Feedback  

Email marketers must gather feedback from subscribers to gauge email engagement and understand their interests. They can collect this feedback through various tools, such as email surveys and social media polls. They can analyze email marketing data to see which emails bounce more than others and the reasons for their bounce rate. Thus, they can use this data to curate their email marketing campaigns and remedy the aspects that increase the bounce rate. 

13. Monitor Your Results  

Email marketers should continuously monitor their bounce rate and take steps to improve their deliverability. Letting the bounce rate fester and increase gradually can adversely affect the sender’s reputation in the long run. Continuous monitoring of your email bounce rate allows you to take timely steps to improve it and prevent your email marketing campaigns from failing.  

14. Create and Follow Email Marketing Strategy  

An email marketing strategy is a detailed roadmap for your campaigns. As it’s based on comprehensive research, you can tailor your tactics and campaigns to your audiences. With a strategy, you won’t send random emails to random people. Each step will be carefully calculated, resulting in better open, click, and click-through rates. Good audience engagement improves your sender reputation and helps maintain low bounce rates.

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
• Fix Email Reputation
• Improve Sender Reputation
• Email Hard Bounce
• Email Deliverability Tools
• Email Deliverability Best Practices
• Best Email Domains

Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

The most significant advantage of using Inframail is that it helps you reach more prospects by drastically improving your email deliverability. With Inframail, you can ditch spammy cold email providers for good. 

Instead, you get: 

• Microsoft-backed email infrastructure

• Dedicated IP addresses

• Automated technical setup 

It helps you scale your outreach efforts to new heights. This means that you get all the technical features needed to optimize your cold email deliverability right out of the box. For instance, 

Inframails automatically configures your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC settings for you. It also provides dedicated email servers for each user to enhance your sender reputation further. With Inframail, you can stop worrying about deliverability and focus on what matters: reaching your prospects.

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