What is a good bounce rate? Let’s think about it: you send your bulk email campaign and have a hight bounce rate. Is there a good or a bad bounce rate? The answer to this question is: a “good” bounce rate simply doesn’t exist.
The goal in email marketing is to minimize the bounce rate as much as possible, ideally to zero.
Instead of looking for a “good” bounce rate, email marketers should focus on practices that help ensure a clean contact list with valid email addresses that have given permission to receive communications.
Therefore, the point is not to find a good bounce rate, but to continually work to reduce it.
A high or a low bounce rate indicates issues that need to be resolved, such as the need to clean up your email list or improve email address collection.
Bounce rate is always bad because it means that your emails don’t get at the inbox placement.
And it is a real challenge for those who deal with bulk email lists, because this harms not only the recipients of the campaigns that don’t receive the comunications, but also the senders’ reputation and investments.
This results in financial waste arising by poor deliverability of campaigns. Consequently, the engagement rate is hit and also all the ROI.
In this article, we will analyze in details how bounces interfere negatively in all aspects of email marketimg.
When a soft bounce turns into a hard bounce
Suppose your email was rejected for a temporary reason (soft bounce). Some time later, you resend it to the same address. Your message was rejected again.
Changing the status from soft bounce to hard bounce is a precaution of the email marketing tool, so the sender doesn’t try to send emails repeatedly to a contact that has already been blocked.
Therefore, you need to pay attention to how your email marketing tool works, as hard bounce and invalid email do not mean the same thing.
How bad can be a bounce rate
Only to remember, any kind of bounce (especially hard bounces) are a real poison for the sender reputation. A list containing at least 3% of them can be blocked and the IPs and domains are sent to spammers’ blacklists.
And with a tarnished reputation, the sender can no longer communicate with their customers as they become blocked. And consequently, generating leads becomes almost impossible.
These are the reazons that you now understand that the question “what is a good bounce rate” doesn’t make sense.
The role of opt-in in reducing bounces
The opt-in process is fundamental to the success of any email marketing strategy, especially when it comes to reducing the bounce rate. Opt-in is the user’s consent to receive your emails.
This explicit consent is essential not only to comply with data protection regulations, but also to ensure that emails are sent to genuinely interested recipients with valid addresses. And if you have a clean email list, there is no bounces.
Simple opt-in and double opt-in
In simple opt-in, the user signs up to receive emails by filling out a form and submitting their details. After that, it starts receiving communications automatically, without additional verification steps.
With double opt-in, in addition to filling out the form, the user receives a confirmation email with a link that needs to be clicked to complete the registration. Only after this verification is the email address added to the company’s contact list.
How double opt-in can reduce hard bounces
Double opt-in plays a crucial role by reducing hard bounces.
Here are some ways it helps:
- Email address validation: With double opt-in, a confirmation email is sent to the address provided by the user. If the address is invalid or entered incorrectly, the confirmation email will never be delivered and the user will not complete the registration process. This prevents invalid emails from being added to the list, reducing the chance of hard bounces in the future.
- Engagement with real users: Double opt-in ensures that only genuinely interested and engaged users complete registration. This not only improves the quality of the email list, but also increases open and click rates, while decreasing the bounce rate.
- Protection against fraudulent sign-ups: In some cases, bots or malicious users may sign up with fake or non-existent email addresses. The double opt-in process adds a layer of protection, as an invalid address will not go through the confirmation step.
Tools and strategies to decrease or avoid bounce rate
As you could see, “What is a good bounce rate” is a non-sense question. However, you can decrease, or even avoid bounce rate in your lists. It is an essential part of any successful email marketing strategy.
By using the right tools to monitor bounces and adopting proactive strategies to reduce this metric, you can not only improve the deliverability of your emails, but also protect your sender reputation and maximize the impact of your campaigns.
Nowadays, practically all email marketing platforms have detailed reports of campaigns and email marketing performance, including bounce rates monitoring. Here are some of the most popular ones: Mailchimp, HubSpot, GetResponse, Active Campaign.
However, these tools offer post-sending reports, when the bounce rate damage has already happened.
But there are ways to avoid this problem before sending, such as with email verification platforms. In this case, we recommend SafetyMails.
What is a good bounce rate – Final thoughts
The question “What is a good bounce rate?” doesn’t make sense because ideally, the bounce rate should be as low as possible.
Instead of aiming for an “acceptable” rate, the focus should be on actively removing bounced addresses from email lists.
To optimize email delivery and protect the sender reputation, it is crucial to implement a frequent process of cleaning, removing immediately addresses that generate hard bounces and monitoring soft bounces to take appropriate action if they persist. Don’t forget: soft bounce can transform into hard bounce, according your email marketing platform.
Additionally, it’s a good idea to stay vigilant and encourage recipients to update their contact information, especially before sending high-volume campaigns.
FAQ
Opt-in is the user’s permission to recieve your comunication by emails. It is necessary to the success of email marketing campaigns, and also to senders reputation, that will not classify you as a spammer.
When you work with a double opt-in, you request a double confirmation to your contact. This way, you have a valid and active email in your list. And it also increases the engagement and click rates, at the same time that protects against fraudulent sign-ups. This way, the chances of your email being rejected by hard bounce greatly decrease.
The ideal is a list containing zero bounces. However, this is difficult when you have lists with millions of emails.
The acceptable rate (and rule of thumb for email providers) is 3% bounces, regardless of list size. Lists containing bounces above 3% are considered spammers. Avoid being considered as a spammer by keeping your lists clean!