Three tips to turn your bounces into opportunities!
How do you know your bounce rate, and what can you learn from it? Your emails need to land properly at your prospects' e-mail 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 sending an email campaign, marketing software informs you of the number of emails delivered, opened, clicked...
You'll also know who has unsubscribed from your mailing list, and the proportion of e-mails that your prospects or customers have blocked, spammed or never opened.
What are bounces?
One of the key indicators of the impact of your campaign is 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).
Delivery has not taken place, and the letter is returned to 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 saturated, a mail message being too large, a filter preventing content from being received, etc.
- Hard bounces occur when deliverability is impossible. They may be caused by unassigned email addresses, typographical errors, out-of-date addresses, etc.
Are your mailings reaching a worrying bounce rate?
It's normal to experience bouncing in your marketing campaigns. So when should you be alarmed?
Mailjet believes that a reasonable target is to stay below 5%, and that 8% is far too high.
MailChimp considers an incompressible rate of 0.34% to be unavoidable, and a maximum of 2.82%.
Risks associated with high bounce rates
Is it problematic 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 qualification of your contact base, you'll be labeled 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 take care of 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 up your list regularly, you'll improve its currency and ensure that you score well with qualified prospects.
- As far as hard bounces are concerned, don't be discouraged: delete them immediately. Some email campaign software will do this for you automatically.
- As far as soft bounces are concerned, if the temporary impossibility is subsequently lifted (mailbox desaturated, filter deactivated...), the email will be delivered. So leave yourself some (short) leeway when it comes to handling soft bounces. On the other hand, after three soft bounces for the same recipient, it's wiser to remove his or her email address from your mailing list.
Tip number 2: e-mail 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 the correct e-mail address, since they will then have to go and consult the clickable content sent to them.
This is a double opt-in registration process: a good way of defusing typos and non-existent emails before they occur.
Tip number 3: Control technical aspects
Be impeccable when it comes to the technical aspects of your emails. Marketing software will be a great help in guiding you in this direction.
You'll need to set up the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) protocols in your site's DNS (Domain Name System) zone, 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 maximize your chances of deliverability, it's important to choose the right software solution.
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 assess the success of each of your email campaigns.
Simple, effective solutions
Proper maintenance of your recipient base is an integral part of the success of your campaigns.
Some software packages, such as phpList, are open source. Sarbacane and SendinBlue also offer contact cleansing.
ActiveTrail's email error management goes a step further, automatically correcting deductible typos and input errors.
Advanced options for the more experienced
Some editors offer a webhook, while others, more complex, are true infrastructures designed for insiders to boost the performance of your basic solution, like Mailgun, for example.
Up to a certain threshold, bounces in email marketing are not alarming. But if you don't take action, your deliverability performance will drop inexorably.
Bounce is a fact of life, but it's not inevitable: it's up to you to turn it into an opportunity.
Article translated from French