Dealing With Bounced Emails

Finding out what happens after you hit the “send” button is extremely important since it may help you to know your subscribers better and, as a consequence, to improve your email campaign results.
In today’s post we focus on bounce rates. Are you calculating them periodically?
Let’s go back to the basics.  Bounce rate is the number of email messages (in percentage form) that were returned as undeliverable.  You can calculate it simply dividing the total number of emails that were bounced by the total number of emails sent, and multiply by 100 to get your bounce rate as a percentage.

For example, if you have sent 5000 email messages and 800 of them returned undeliverable, your bounce rate is 16%  (800/5000 * 100).

We higly recommend that you keep track of your bounce rates, following each email campaign you send, and learn to manage bounces messages.
In order to increase your delivery rates, make also sure to deal with hard and soft bounces in different ways.

A hard bounce happens when emails are sent to a non-existent email address (either the domain name does not exist or the address is misspelled or is erroneous).
A soft bounce means that the email message was sent to the destination server but the delivery is delayed temporarily for some reason. (eithe full mailbox or the server is temporarily unavailable).

So, what actions should we take when hard or soft bounces happen?
Hard bounces >>>> Remove those bounced email addresses from your database.
Soft bounces >>>> Try re-sending your email message later. If the email continues to bounce back, contact the recipient to update their email address or remove it from your list.

These are simple actions that you should take regularly. They can take time and be boring but, in return, you will get a cleaner database and more effective email campaigns.

Check out how you can manage bounced emails with SendBlaster…it’s easier than you think!


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