What do you do with your email bounces? Remove, update, or nothing?
According to BetterBounces.net, 31 billion emails bounce each day. In other words, 31 billion emails never reach their intended recipients, and all the hard work put into crafting them goes straight down the drain. Email bounces are a natural part of the email marketing landscape but that doesn’t mean you entirely have to live with them.
Let’s begin by looking at some of the most common reasons why an email bounces and what can be done to minimize the damage.
First of all, not all bounces are the same. Marketers need to understand the various factors that generate those bounces. A few of the bounces are probably caused by a mistake – either by the email marketers themselves or by bad internet service networks.
When an email bounces back, it’s a result of an issue with the receiving account either permanent or temporary – or a block on the email from the receiver’s end.
Whenever a bounce occurs, the recipient’s server sends back a message to the sender. It is vital for email marketers to carefully review the bounce reports and make ongoing adjustments to their lists.
Before you dig in, know Your Bounces
Soft bounce – a soft bounce occurs when a temporary issue with the recipient’s email address exists. This delays the email delivery but does not necessarily stop it altogether. In most of the cases, the email server will reattempt to deliver several times. The email is considered to be undeliverable if the retry period expires without a successful delivery.
Hard bounce – a hard bounce occurs when an email is permanently undeliverable. An email address that generates a hard bounce should immediately be removed from your current database so that you will not send any further messages to that recipient.
Running email campaigns in the absence of verification and validation tools runs the risk of hitting spam traps, bounced emails and other side-effects.
Using an email lead generation tool that maximizes deliverability rates will help you keep a healthy sender reputation.
Email bounces are a symptom of unhealthy email campaigns
We usually emphasize this point a lot when we speak about bounce rates, but we’ll reiterate here — bounces aren’t the problem, it’s the underlying issues that cause them. Bounces are always a symptom of poor or out-of-date sending practices, and that means poor deliverability.
You might have an amazing email marketing campaign, but that doesn’t mean you’re effectively landing those messages into inboxes. Focus more on making your sending habits align with healthy email deliverability. This will help alleviate bounces and keep you from being limited by your email service provider in the future.
Among the questions that should come to mind when looking at your list How were these contacts obtained? How old are they? When was the last time the list was cleaned?
Cleaning the database should always be a top priority for any organization. Sending emails to users that have given consent, with a well-constructed personalized message, is a best practice to improve your reputation and helps you to get out of the soft bounce junkyard.
Remove, update, or nothing?
Using inaccurate data to drive email campaign strategies will end up getting your emails bounced every now and then. And when nothing is being done about that, your quarterly ROI goes for a dive and continuing to do nothing to resolve the situation will equally degrade the reputation of your organization, possibly even landing you on a blacklist.
30% of marketers agree that evaluating email effectiveness by looking into ROI tracking metrics over time helps to quickly identify the trends and patterns that can raise early warning signs of issues long before they get out of hand.
This helps your organization diminish factors that affect email deliverability and help you run your email campaign successfully and reach more prospects.
40% of email addresses go bad each year. Data cleansing helps to eliminate these problems, especially when working with purchased third-party data lists. Combining segmented lists with regular prospect data monitoring to update prospect data lists can help to solve the problem.
The Ultimate Prospect Data Cleansing and Email Tracking Solution
Flobile can convert expired, ineffective data into active prospect profiles that deliver value to businesses to make confident, strategic decisions.
Flobile removes all the guesswork and strife from cleaning up your email list. Using expert data scientists, innovative technology, and prospect data monitoring systems, Flobile purges your old email addresses, tracks open rates, creates data-driven email content, and keeps an eye on your best contacts.
