Don’t Play Tennis with Your Email Marketing

What is a hard bounce versus a soft bounce? And how can you get the ball back in your customer’s inbox? Unlike many of the Tennis pro’s we’ve seen in the Australian Open recently, getting your emails into your customer’s court need not cause you to swear, or even break a sweat. Here’s what you need to know…

Email Marketing is still one of the lowest-cost, highest-return forms of marketing (yes, even compared to traditional ‘offline’ marketing). With costs as low as mere cents per customer even when utilising professional, highly-automated email marketing software; it should come as no surprise that this powerful tool gets abused more than an umpire at a John McEnroe Grand Slam.

One area you don’t want to score highly on is your bounce rate.

Firstly, let’s get the boring bit out of the way, what is the difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce? Secondly, we’ll take a look at what you can do starting today to get your bounce rate falling like John Key at a Chinese New Year celebration (whose resulting cast ended up being sold for a whopping $18,500).

Hard versus Soft

Bounces are a natural part of email marketing and occur even with the cleanest and most targeted lists. However, every bounce is one less person reading your newsletter and impacts on campaign performance.

International statistics put the average bounce rate around 3.5% when a list is regularly mailed to (at least once every 30 days). A list mailed to less frequently typically averages around 9%. Mailing to lists for the first-time can return rates as high as 20%. Of course this depends on a number of parameters such as industry, the number of new customer’s you’ve signed up since your last mail-out and so forth.

Bounce data reflects the number of recipients that bounced, as well as the percent that bounced. No doubt if you’ve got this far through this boring section (congratulations by the way) then you’re already aware of this: bounces are classified as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’.

A soft bounce is an email that gets as far as the recipients mail server (therefore the address is recognised), however, it is then bounced back undelivered before it reaches the recipient.

Soft bounces tend to occur because the recipient’s mailbox is full, the server is down or busy, the message is too large or the user no longer uses the mailbox.

A hard bounce is a returned email message that is permanently undeliverable. Typical causes include invalid addresses (nonexistent domain name, typos, recipient has changed their address etc) or the recipients mail server has blocked your server.

Resending to hard bounces is not attempted by professional email marketing software, and should not be attempted even if you manage your email marketing manually (you can give yourself a slap on the wrist if that comment hit home).
Hard bounces are removed automatically if you’re using a professional solution. Rather than be deleted, they will typically be moved and not mailed to any more (the provider Exceed’s clients use moves hard bounces to a ‘Bounced Subscribers’ category).

Subscribers on this list will not receive future campaigns, which not only keeps your list up-to-date, but also reduces your costs for future campaigns.

For soft bounces, the email marketing service provider will have a default number of times it tries to resend soft bounces (for example: our provider’s default is 6), before adding the recipient to the Bounced Subscribers list. This number can usually be modified on request.

What to do to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Now you know what a bounce rate is, here are some tips to get your campaign bounce rate down before your next campaign:

1)    Cleanse your list

Although bounces should be handled automatically for you (if you’re using a professional provider), the problem is that when new subscribers sign up they may enter an invalid address.

Before your next campaign send, thoroughly review the list for obvious typos, incorrectly formatted addresses and invalid domains. If you routinely have new subscribers between each campaign (and we hope you do) it is worth checking all new subscriber’s addresses before every campaign you send.

2)    Utilise double opt-in

This essentially prevents invalid addresses (keep an eye out on our blog for an article coming soon about opt-in protocol).

3)    Mail at least once every 30 days

As well as keeping your list up to date, this also helps solidify your relationship with your subscribers (especially important for those who have recently signed up).

4)    Get their new address

If you have your customer’s address or phone number, contact subscribers whose address bounced and request their new email. You can call or just mail out a postcard.

There’s no question every business should utilise email marketing, but its low cost does not excuse taking an unprofessional approach. A low bounce rate is just one way of measuring the success of your efforts.

Feeling inspired? Take a read of another recent article on our blog about Email Marketing: 12 Tips for Email Subject Lines That Get Results