Pet Copywriter Lori

Bounce Rate is one metric that is part of your email marketing efforts. While it’s not quite as important as CTR (click-through rate) it is still important. And for a few different reasons. 

What is Bounce Rate?

You might run across bounce rate as a metric in a few different places. For this article, we will be referring to it in reference to email marketing. Not landing pages or websites. (That will be a future article.)

The bounce rate for email marketing refers to the percentage of subscribers who didn’t get your email in their inbox. Bounced emails are essentially like throwing a ball against a wall. They don’t even make it to the box at all, including the spam box. 

Furthermore, there are two types of bounces. Soft and hard bounces. 

What’s The Difference Between Soft And Hard Bounces

Simply put, a hard bounce is a failed delivery, a soft is an overflow. 

Hard bounces will often happen when the service provider rejects the email. If your address is blacklisted, or if an address is wrong. 

Soft bounces might happen if an email is allowed, but there’s no room. For example, full mailboxes or if servers are down. 

How Bounce Rates Affect Deliverability

While your bounce rate isn’t critical, it can be a determining factor in if you can deliver emails to your list. And that can be an important part of your marketing strategy. 

Reputation Damage

High bounce rates can damage your sender reputation. Email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook monitor bounce rates closely. And if you have a high bounce rate this tells your provider that you might be sending bad emails. That’s bad. Because it can lead to your emails being marked as spam or blacklisted.

Blacklist Inclusion

Consistently high bounce rates can lead to your domain or IP address being blacklisted. And Blacklists are shared among ESPs, making this a big deal. And it can be very hard to remove your email from a blacklist.

What Is An Acceptable Bounce Rate 

While a high bounce rate can cause you problems, some are to be expected. If you are getting new subscribers regularly you can reduce it by cleaning your list up a few times a year. 

Otherwise, you can expect around a 2% bounce rate before you need to worry. A little higher or lower is also acceptable. 

Conclusion

Bounce rates are a part of normal email marketing and normally won’t cause you too many issues. However, if you see that rate going beyond 2% per email, you’ll want to address it. Because, bounces can harm your deliverability, keep your list clean, to ensure that messages reach your audience. 

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