emailBeing a marketer today almost certainly means you must have more than a passing familiarity with the digital world; and one of the cornerstones of digital marketing, is the trusty email marketing mailshot. I’ll leave the process of managing your database, segmentation and targeting to other blogs and posts, because this post is going to focus on those things that every marketer hates – email marketing bounces. Effectively, a bounced marketing email is an unsuccessful email that is being returned to the send because it was undeliverable for one reason or another.

However, the story doesn’t stop there, because there are different types of bounced email and understanding what each one is will help future campaigns, as well as providing a more thorough understanding of the customer database and enabling a degree of data cleansing to take place – which will ultimately lead to more effective email marketing in the future.

Is your bounce rate too high?

It’s important to know whether your bounce rate is too high to start with. So what counts as a high bounce rate? If you’re working from a good, clean database, sending a quality email you would expect that you should have well under 1 percent bounce backs, perhaps even as few as just one or two bounced back messages. Obviously this also depends on the number of emails you’re sending in the first place.

How to lower your email marketing bounce rate

If you want to understand the different types of bounces that can occur, scroll on further down this article – but if you want to get into the detail of how you can address your email marketing bounce rate, read on…

Whilst this article is a great first place to begin developing a better understanding of your email marketing strategy there are a number of good books out there that can prove to be an invaluable resource, providing practical, real-world advice. Here are some of the better ones available:

Email marketing dynamite Total Email Marketing Email marketing for dummies
 Create Stunning HTML Emails  Email marketing by numbers Emarketing Excellence

But if you want some quick-fix ideas, carry on reading!

  1. Keep a tidy house. No, not the place you live, but the database you work from. Ensure your database is up to date and as clean as possible. As you carry out mailshots and other marketing activities, on and offline, to this database, make sure you update the records as you go along. This constant process of reviewing and cleansing will help keep bounces low for future campaigns. Over time, people change their email addresses, either through moving job, losing their passwords and having to create new accounts, or many other reasons.
  2. Check you’re not on a blacklist. A blacklist is simply an online list that many email programs will reference to see if your DNS server is listed on. If it is listed on the server, it is very likely that your mail not get through. One of the free, easy to use tools is available here: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx – but these are only really relevant if you’re sending mailshots from your own internal systems. Generally, if you’re using an external mailshot service, you shouldn’t need to worry about this.
  3. Use good software. A decent email marketing platform should be able to manage your bounces and automatically filter them out of the list for future campaigns. This is ok, if it’s the same list that you use to distribute communications to, but if you’re using a central CRM database to construct campaign lists, you may need to manually manage some or all of this process. It all depends on the system(s) that you’re using and the features of those systems.
  4. Avoid email list resellers. Buying contact lists into the business is one way to grow your database, but the problem with this approach is that you will often not know how recently the list was updated, what sort of quality control went in to the collection of the data, and whether the list was actually created using illegal email address harvesting techniques. In reality, bounce rates are often more than double when using bought-in lists, as opposed to a good quality list generated naturally. However, that’s not to say that all email list resellers are a bad idea – sometimes they’re a necessary tool to use and if sourced correctly can be a good addition to the marketing armoury.
  5. Use spam checkers. Spam checkers are handy tools to use, that give a little more comfort and reassurance that the email you’re about to send out won’t get flagged up as being considered spam by any of the automated filtering tools out there. There are lots of free, online resources that you can use, such as: http://www.contactology.com/check_mqs.php or http://www.emailspamtest.com – but don’t forget you can use your common sense too! Many of the better email marketing systems will also include some form of spam checker too, so check what you’ve already got before looking externally.
  6. Opt in and double opt in. Double opt ins are pretty much the de facto standard for email marketing communications now. Asking someone to opt in to your email marketing communications as part of an initial sign-up process and then asking them to confirm their inclusion and acceptance of your communications in a subsequent email, is one of the best ways to minimise bounces. Effectively, you’re just making sure that the recipients really do want to receive your communications and that they’re either not being signed up through some dubious process, or by someone else registering them for info they don’t want. The double opt in approach guarantees that you’re being given a valid email address too.

Types of bounces

There are actually two main types of bounces that can occur in email marketing: hard bounces and soft bounces. If we consider each in turn, you can see that one is much more serious (and easier to understand) than the other.

Hard bounces are generally returned to the sender because the address it was sent to is considered invalid. There are a number of reasons why the address might be considered invalid:

  1. The recipient’s email server may be down. All this means is that you’re trying to send an email to an unresponsive computer. Although these days, servers are pretty reliable, occasionally they do go offline and if this coincides with when you’re trying to send an email, then that could affect the ability to deliver it.
  2. Blacklisted IP. As covered earlier when we’re talking about avoiding bounces, blacklists are online lists that cover servers that have been reported for sending out SPAM emails. It’s definitely worth checking you’re not on a SPAM blacklist before sending. This is a particular risk if you’re on a shared server, for example, and you’re using their SMTP – but generally, the risk is avoided if you’re using a good email marketing service provider.
  3. The domain name may not exist anymore. As you probably know, the domain name is the bit after the @ symbol. Individuals and companies buy domain names to promote themselves and their businesses online, but from time to time, they rebrand, change names, or simply decide not to pursue their business ideas any more. When this happens, domain names lapse and therefore the email addresses associated with them become redundant and expire.
  4. There could be a typo in the email address. Check to make sure unnecessary spaces or characters haven’t crept in to the recipient’s email address by accident. There’s also a fairly high chance that human error might have caused some problems too. Postcodes and phone numbers are common culprits, being input in to the wrong field in your database – so watch out for them.

Soft bounces on the other hand, are a little more tricky to interpret than a hard bounce. These generally occur because of some temporary issue that needs to be sorted by the recipient and/or their service provider. There are handful of reasons why soft bounces may occur, with the main ones being:

  1. Out of office. This is especially pertinent if you’re carrying out a B2B email marketing mailshot, as employees and businesses will tend to put out-of-office autoresponder notifications in place to ensure their availability is suitably notified to potential / current customers.
  2. Auto replies. Closely related to the out of office autoresponder, is the auto reply. These are also more prevalent in work email systems, particularly for customer support type email boxes and will often just include a simple automatic reply saying something like “Thanks for emailing us. This is an automated reply. We are aware of your email and we will be in touch soon”. Although your email marketing software will detect this as a soft bounce, your email will have actually been delivered – so it’s kind of like a false positive.
  3. Email no longer exists. Although technically classified as a soft bounce, in reality you’ll probably want to consider these as a hard bounce because ultimately the recipient is no longer active or present. This type of soft bounce occurs when your email is sent out, is successfully received by the target server, but the actual email address is no longer valid – usually because the user’s email account has been closed.
  4. Inbox is full. Increasingly this is less of an issue with modern email storage capabilities now measured in gigabytes or even terabytes, as opposed to the megabytes of yesteryear, However, many people are still reluctant to clear out old emails or manage their inboxes accordingly, with archiving an alien notion to them! As a result, inboxes can fill up and new emails will be bounced back as undeliverable, albeit as a soft bounce rather than a hard bounce.
  5. General spam. Different companies and servers have different policies around what constitutes a spam message. Sometimes it’s because your email has too many links in it, other times, there are keywords and phrases that trigger warnings and cause your email to be relegated to a spam folder. That’s why it’s a good idea to use the spam checker tools referred to earlier in this post and avoid this happening with your important email marketing message.

There’s a lot of things you need to consider to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns, but using some of the tools referenced in this article, along with some of the very handy free tools available online, should certainly help. Check out the Amazon book links detailed earlier in this article for some of the better reviewed email marketing books.