Three tips to turn your bounces into opportunities!
How can you find out your bounce rate, and what can you learn from it? Your emails must be delivered correctly to your prospects' email addresses. Emailing, whether for a newsletter, a commercial offer or anything else, is an essential part of any marketing campaign. Discover three effective email processes.
Email marketing: what are bounces?
Deliverability statistics
When an email campaign is sent, marketing software informs you of the number of emails delivered, opened, clicked on, etc.
You also know who has unsubscribed from your mailing list and you can find out the proportion of emails that your prospects or customers have blocked, spammed or never opened.
What are bounces?
The data showing the impact of your campaign includes a rate: the number of bounces.
In the postal sector, a bounce is the return of a letter marked NPAI (does not live at the address indicated).
The delivery was not made and the letter is returned to the sender. The return includes the bounce, together with an error notification.
Soft bounces and hard bounces
There are two types of bounce:
- Soft bounces are linked to temporary unavailability. There are various reasons for this, such as a mail server - Exchange for example - being overloaded, an excessively large email, a filter preventing content from being received, etc.
- Hard bounces occur when deliverability is impossible. There are a number of unacceptable reasons for this, such as an email address that has not been allocated, contains a typo, is out of date, etc.
Are your mailings reaching a worrying bounce rate?
It's normal to experience bouncing when sending your marketing campaigns. So at what point should you be alarmed?
Mailjet believes that a reasonable target is to stay below 5%, and that 8% is far too high.
MailChimp considers that an incompressible rate of 0.34% is unavoidable, and that a maximum should be set at 2.82%.
The risks associated with bounce rates that are too high
Is it a problem to have a high bounce rate on your campaigns? Yes, because you run the risk of being blacklisted by the various messaging services.
As a result of these negative signals regarding the quality of your contact base, you will be labelled as a spammer and your emails will suffer the anti-spam skimming that goes with it, whether your bounces are soft or hard.
What tips do you need to know about bounces?
Spam is the thing to avoid. That's why you need to look after your bounce rate, reducing it from one mailing to the next. How do you go about it?
Tip number 1: update your contact list
Update your contact list by deleting emails associated with bounces as you go along.
By cleaning your list regularly, you'll improve its topicality and ensure that you get a good score from qualified prospects.
- As far as hard bounces are concerned, there's no getting around it: delete them immediately. Some email campaign software will do this automatically for you.
- As far as soft bounces are concerned, if the temporary impossibility is subsequently lifted (email desaturated, filter deactivated, etc.), the email will be delivered. So leave yourself a (short) margin for manoeuvre when dealing with soft bounces. On the other hand, after three soft bounces for the same recipient, it's wiser to remove their email address from your mailing list.
Tip number 2: email confirmation of registration
Set up a subscription with email confirmation - your database may contain erroneous or fictitious emails.
In order to confirm their registration, each recipient will have to enter a correct email address, as they will then have to go and view the clickable content that has been sent to them.
This is a double opt-in registration process: a good way of defusing typos, typing errors and other non-existent emails at an early stage.
Tip number 3: check the technical aspects
Be impeccable when it comes to the technical aspects of your emails. Marketing software will be invaluable in guiding you in this direction.
You need to set up the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) protocols in the DNS (Domain Name System) zone of your site and configure your SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server efficiently.
This will make you more identifiable to your recipients' ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and webmails.
What tools should I use to manage bounces?
Features to look for in email marketing software
To maximise your chances of deliverability, the choice of software solution is important.
It must be sufficiently powerful from a technical point of view and detailed in terms of analysis, so as to give you the maximum amount of information to enable you to make a detailed assessment of the success of each of your email campaigns later on.
Simple, effective solutions
Good maintenance of your recipient base is an integral part of the success of your campaigns.
Some software, such as phpList, is open source. Contact cleaning is also a feature of Sarbacane and SendinBlue.
With ActiveTrail, you can take email error management a step further by automatically correcting deductible typos and input errors.
Advanced options for the more experienced
Some publishers offer a webhook, while others, more complex options, such as Mailgun, are genuine infrastructures designed for insiders to boost the performance of your basic solution.
Up to a certain threshold, having bounces when sending a marketing email is not alarming. But if you don't take action, your performance in terms of deliverability will fall inexorably.
Bounces are a fact of life, but they're not inevitable: it's up to you to take action to turn them into an opportunity.
Article translated from French