How to Interpret Bounced Messages

Analyzing your bounce rate metric is important to your e-mail marketing success.

In e-mail marketing, a "bounce rate" refers to the number of e-mails that never make it to a recipient's inbox. These messages could have been undeliverable for one of several reasons. High bounce rates can hurt your reputation with e-mail service providers (ESPs), slow overall total delivery time and negatively affect your delivery rate, open rate and conversion rate.

Instructions

1. Know the possible reasons for a bounced e-mail. "Hard bounces" indicate a permanent error regarding the recipient's e-mail address, such as it being invalid or deleted. "Soft bounces" indicate a temporary error, such as the recipient's inbox being full.

2. Access your e-mail analytics information. Bounce rates are typically provided by your ESP. Some may differentiate between soft bounces and hard bounces, while others may not. If this information is not available to you, assume that all bounces are hard bounces.

3. Purge all e-mail addresses that result in a bounce regularly. Some ESPs that offer automatic purging of bounced e-mail addresses include GroupMail, ListMarketer and Topica. If your service does not offer this, purge manually. Since high bounce rates damage your reputation with an ESP, it is not worth keeping e-mail addresses that bounce on your list. Instead, collect new e-mail addresses which will be less likely to bounce. Doing this regularly will keep your bounce rate low.

References

• The Messaging Times: The Importance of Analyzing Bounce Rates in Email Marketing