Avoid Extraordinary Bounce Rates Through Your Email Marketing

Avoid Extraordinary Bounce Rates Through Your Email Marketing

Email messages may not reach the recipients and return to the sender for entirely different reasons. The returned email generated by the mail server contains the description of the error that caused the delivery failure. Based on those errors bounced emails are divided into two types: soft bounces and hard bounces.

 What is the difference between them?

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A faint bounce is an email message that returns to the sender due to any temporary reasons: busy mailbox, account temporary down, network busy, mailbox over a limit, etc. If after several attempts to deliver such a message, it still bounces, a soft bounce email is classified as the hard bounce.

Hard bounces are permanently undeliverable email messages. The causes are invalid addresses like email or domain name doesn't exist, spelling errors or the mail server has blocked your server, or filtered emails and returned them as hard bounced.

Typically the error codes for soft bounced emails begin with 4 and for hard bounces - with 5. But the mail server can interpret bounces differently, so a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounced email on a different mail server.

Dealing with bounced emails after each mailing campaign is critical for every reputable marketer. Here are few quick tips you can follow to minimize the number of bounces, reduce email delivery costs, and increase conversion rates of your email campaign:

Check emails in your list for validity. You can use an email verifier software (you can find plenty of them on the Internet) to test the list of invalid emails. Or, at least check the addresses for typos manually.

Confirm email addresses. Send a confirmation message after the user subscribes to your list. If the message bounces, you will know that the address is not valid from the start. Also, you'll want to have a field in your sign-in form requiring the user to re-type his email address. Include Edit Your Account link in your emails. This will make it possible for your subscribers to keep their email addresses up-to-date with you. Check the blacklists and assure that neither you nor your ISP is blacklisted. This is important because you will not receive a bounced message as a result of a blacklist.

Remove SpamTrap addresses from your list. A spam address is an email address, to which nobody should be sending an email. Such email addresses are often added maliciously to identify the senders of spam. Send a test message to yourself. Before emailing to your subscribers, send a copy of your newsletter to yourself or some of your colleagues to check if everything is all right You can Reduce email bounce rate by including unsubscription links in your mailings; most email marketing applications allow you to add an unsubscribe link to your postings automatically or by a personalization tag.

 Another point you can do is add a refresh profile link to your mailing, most email marketing software applications contain an update your profile personalization tag that you can also easily insert into your mailing. Another way to check bounces is to have addresses removed through setting up bounce management. This will cycle through your list and remove hard and soft bounces after a specified number of times. Most marketing applications allow you to automate this and even set the number of soft and hard bounces that a subscriber must reach to be removed. Another good road is to include custom fields for phone or address so you can use the phone or mail to renew the address of those subscribers that bounce.