How to bounce back from high bounce rates
- Open rates: 45.4%
- Click-through rates: 4.5%
- Hard bounce rates: 0.8%
No matter the industry, open rates and click-through rates are often determined by the quality of a newsletter’s content. As for bounce rates, however, it's important to first understand that there are a few different types. Constant Contacts, another leader in e-mail marketing, defines them as follows:
- A "Bounce" is where the proverbial rubber meets the email. This happens when a recipient's mail server rejects your email message.
- A "Soft Bounce" is often a temporary problem, thus the descriptive word "soft." It happens when the mail server confirms the recipient's email address, but even so, cannot deliver the message. The recipient's mailbox may be full or inactive, the recipient's mail server may be temporarily down or the connection may have been broken.
- A "Hard Bounce" is a message that's permanently undeliverable because the address is non-existent or invalid, or because the recipient's mail server is blocking your mail server.
To keep your newsletter bounce rates to a minimum, it’s best to verify e-mail addresses to the fullest degree. By using an e-mail validation tool, such as the free one from verify-email.org, e-mail marketers can rest assured that hard bounces are kept to a minimum. Verify-email.org has the ability to validate the e-mail format, the domain name and whether the user's mailbox still exists.
From NetSphere Strategies’ experience, verify-email.org is a remarkably useful and accurate tool to validate a user's e-mail address when the e-mail address you thought was correct resulted in a hard bounce. For example, when the e-mail format is firstname.lastname but robert.lastname@company.com failed, verify-email.org will reveal the correct e-mail format, be it bob.lastname@company.com or something similar.
So regardless of your industry, as long as you take care when creating your newsletter – and your contact list – an e-mail marketing campaign can be an incredibly useful tool for getting your company’s name in front of the public eye.