When you run email marketing campaigns, there will always be a certain number of emails that go out to people and bounce. What it means for an email to “bounce” is that it doesn’t get into the email in box of the recipient. This can be a problem when you’re using email marketing to get your message out to your audience, because they’re never going to get your message.
There are reasons why emails might bounce, such as:
* The email address doesn’t exist
* A server crashed
* The mailbox is full
* Vacation response set up
* Your email is blocked
* Unidentified reasons
It’s important to look through the bounced messages and find out why they are bouncing. In some cases you’ll need to remove them from your email list because they don’t exist. In others, you may be able to do nothing and it will resolve itself.
But, for any email that keeps bouncing and the email are never opened, your best bet is to remove it and then prevent that email from being added to your list again. It’s important that you stay up to date on this from day one.
You can do this with a bounce management campaign. After all, proper bounce management is a very important aspect of email marketing that you need to stay on top of. If you don’t, ISPs will start identifying your domain as sending spam and that’s not good.
* Set Up Rules – For example, always delete hard bounces (address doesn’t exist) right away and soft bounces after four or five tries.
* Always Use Double Opt-In – This can help you fight any charges of spam by using the records that show that they were opted in legally.
* Monitor Your Email Delivery – Always keep track of how email deliveries are going. Don’t just set up your email marketing campaigns without having a plan of action to track and manage bounces.
* Know Typical Bounce Rates – Each industry has their own bounce rates, but in most cases you want to keep the bounce rate under 10 percent.
* Read Customer Emails Fast – Sometimes you’ll find out there is a bounce problem from the consumer themselves when they send an email to you, or contact you on social media to complain that they’re not getting their emails.
* Troubleshoot the Problem – When you determine why emails are bouncing you should be able to fix it by deleting the offending emails, or by reaching out to the owner of the email address to ask them to white list your email address.
Whenever an email bounces you’ll get information from the bounce such as the date and time the message bounced, which server bounced it, the reason for the bounce, and the RFC code which could indicate if it’s a hard or soft bounce. Use that information to help you know how to process the bounce. Keep on top of your email marketing system so that you can lower your bounce rate, reduce spam issues, and make more sales.