Overview
There are several factors to consider when you notice that a lot of the emails that are sent via Propensity bounce. An industry-accepted average of about 10-20% bounce rate is considered normal. If your bounce rate is substantially higher than this, review the sections below for more information about the 2 types of email bounces and their potential causes.
Soft Vs Hard Bounce
There are 2 types of email bounces:
Hard Bounce—A permanent issue prevents your email from arriving in the intended inbox.
Reasons include:
- The email address is invalid or non-existent
- The recipient's email server has blocked the delivery of your email
- Your domain reputation is so low that your email is SPAM-blocked. This means that it won't even reach the SPAM folder
Soft Bounce—A temporary issue prevents your email from arriving in the intended inbox.
Reasons include:
- The recipient's email server is busy
- The recipient's email storage is full
- The recipient is not accepting emails for a temporary period
What Counts as a Bounce?
Note: If your email lands in the recipient's SPAM folder, the recipient can still view the email if they wish to. Therefore, this does not count as a bounce.
When an email hard bounces it can damage your email domain reputation. If you consistently notice a high bounce rate (more than 20%) across all your Propensity Marketing Emails, there could be several potential causes.
Refer to the section below for more information about each cause and the steps you can take to overcome each one.
Email Verification
Running a successful email campaign takes much more than a powerful message. You need to make sure you deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time, and to the right email domain.
Email verification is an essential cog in the motion of any email engagement workflow. It is the process of validating the authenticity and accuracy of an email address before you send any messages to your ICP.
There are many advantages to email verification, including:
- Protect the health and reputation of your email domain
- Increase your email delivery rates and ensure your message reaches the right people in the right inboxes
- Identify stale data before you message contacts on outdated or invalid email addresses that can harm your domain reputation and decrease your engagement rates
- Reduce the risk of being flagged as SPAM
Propensity applies a powerful third-party verification tool to every email campaign that provides real-time detailed information on the validity of an email address before it's sent as part of your marketing email campaign. This tool is integrated into Propensity and allows us to suppress invalid email addresses from your sending, decreasing your bounce rate, and ultimately improving your sender reputation.
Potential Reasons For a High Bounce Rate
SPAM Blocking
Possible reasons an email is SPAM-blocked include:
- Domain reputation
- Excessive send frequency
- Email content and formatting like links, images, and lengthy paragraphs
TIP: Escape SPAM filters - for more information on how to avoid having your email SPAM blocked, refer to our Avoid SPAM Filters article.
If you notice that a large number of emails sent around the same time have been SPAM blocked, your email may include one of the reasons listed above. Try editing your email template and keep email content and formatting best practices in mind.
Natural Email Quality Decay
Email addresses are living entities. People may use them for some time and then abandon them for various reasons, such as moving to a different job with a new email address or retiring. With this in mind, our database is as up-to-date as possible. We find that (especially now) companies are going through layoffs and seemingly overnight invalidating several emails in our system. We are trying to keep up with job changes, but in turbulent times it tends to increase our bounce rates because of the fast changes in job switching.
Blocked Message Delivery
These contacts are cold, which means the inboxes being targeted have more filters to block emails from unknown addresses. This creates soft bounces, Propensity captures 'auto-responses' which would include any immediate response from any email address, and flags those responses as potential bounces.
Microsoft email systems are particularly challenging to target because the default setup in Office 365 is to reject emails from third parties, Gmail doesn't have this setting. So, target companies using Office 365 or Outlook tend to have more bounces.
Enterprise audiences are more restrictive than smaller businesses, so if you are targeting enterprise companies their anti-phishing policies create strong barriers for emails to get through.
The bottom line is that this is an ongoing area of monitoring and improvement for all email systems, not just ours.