You believe you’ve done everything right the message is appropriate and the format is professional and your recipients have signed up. But your email message always returns with what appears to be a lot of bounces. What’s wrong? It could include “nothing.” Some bounces are inevitable. Marketers’ goal is reduction rather than elimination. The most important thing is that you’re constantly making improvements. Many factors influence the overall quality of email delivered. Even permission-based marketing services such as MailChimp which require two-step authentication estimates that between 10 and 20% of the emails sent through their system are not accessible to users email inboxes. The first step in reducing the bounce rate of marketing and sales emails is to know why certain emails don’t get to your inbox.
1. Increasingly Aggressive Spam Filters
The SPAM conflict is escalating into an arms race. SPAM filters continuously improve their algorithms to eliminate unwanted messages, while spammers come up with new methods to bypass them.
In addition, the corporate spam filters or email filters are recognizing more of the same messages as SPAM in order to remove junk mail. Certain industries have more over others. It is important to know how you compare to your competitors. Are you ahead of the norms in your industry or are you being lagging further behind?
Check out the bounce rates that are self-reported of two well-known email marketing platforms, MailChimp and Constant Contact. Certain industries have more frequent bounces than other industries.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2. Individual Server Administrators
Administrators of the server review every email and give the email an SPAM score. SpamAssassin is a well-known tool used for identifying unwanted messages by looking through and evaluating every element of the email message. SpamAssassin’s checklist of the criteria used to evaluate emails as SPAM keeps growing larger and bigger.
It’s clear why the phrase “Fast Viagra Delivery” is an excellent indicator of an SPAM message. There are a variety of elements that can negatively score emails that can easily be found in legitimate marketing emails. Here are some SpamAssassin description of the criteria that may make you look bad:
The server administrator decides what is a pass grade So what passes certain filters may not be able to be able to pass through all of them.
3. Natural Database Decay
People are fired and hired. Companies are purchased. New jobs are created. Companies shrink and expand each quarter.
Due to natural decay of lists and natural list decay, a certain percentage of emails address will not work. If your industry’s monthly hire/separation rate is 4.5 percent, and you haven’t emailed the same list for 3 months, then 12.9 percent of your contacts could have left their job at the time that the next email blast is sent out.
4. Temporary Un-deliverables
Soft bounces occur when a Soft bounce is when the server denies an email because of the appearance of a temporary problem like a full inbox or the connection is not created, or the message is too big. Some email providers distinguish between hard bounces vs. soft bounces when they report reports. Others do not.
Many email providers attempt to resend emails that bounce softly. Hubspot for instance, will try to resend messages that bounced softly over a period of up to 72hrs, until the message is successful in delivery or is unable to deliver permanently. In this way, the bounce rates for a particular campaign can change within the following days after an email campaign.
5. Invalid Addresses
Hard bounce occurs when hard bounce happens when an email message is not delivered to the sender, because the address of the recipient is not valid. It could happen because the domain’s name doesn’t exist or the address of the recipient is not known. It usually occurs due to any of these reasons such as fat fingers or intentional fraud.
Be aware that there is no spell-checker in email. Typing errors are common. A person could have had a mishap when signing up. Your salesperson may have mistyped the address while adding it to your CSM or even the third person you purchased the list from may have made an mistake.
There’s also the chance that the contact provided an email address that was not genuine that could occur if you’re offering online something for example, the content of a website in exchange for an email.
6. Sender Reputation
A reputation that is good and respected is more important than money. – Publilius Syrus
The task of a spam filter is to determine how well-known or pertinent you are to your readers. It is the responsibility of the sender to ensure that they are Reputation is the main element used to judge the acceptance of emails from an ISP. The reputation of the sender is evaluated through a range of variables and is connected to the domain or IP address from which emails originate or the combination of both. ISPs typically use external organizations to supply reputation of senders information so that they can check emails against it.
Examine your own domain’s reputation by using a tool for free, such as the Return Path’s SenderScore or McAfee’s TrustedSource.
7. Blacklisted IP Ranges
Spam filters check your sending IP against blacklisted IP ranges. This means that when someone in your IP range is sending spam messages legitimate messages, you could be snared by filters also.
The old saying goes you’re only so good as the company you keep.
For instance, if any of the million users on Infusionsoft or Aweber are doing something unprofessional It could impact temporarily the ability of other users to deliver their messages. This is why email service providers are so committed to making sure their users are operating within their rules of service.
On an individual basis it is possible that the marketing department of your business is using the email program, it could impact the delivery time of email messages to customers.
Repeat offenders may be placed being placed on permanent blacklists. Most likely, if you’re permanently blacklisted or blacklisted, you’ll be aware. If you’re interested, you can check your domain’s address on Debouncer, that monitors more than 100 blacklists.
8. Evolving Industry Standards
The criteria for what is considered to be “spammy” changes often. DMARC (which is “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance” is a technical standard that was developed by a group of companies and other organizations who wish to decrease the possibility of abuse based on email.
838 billion emails for marketing were sent out in 2013. – Forrester Research
Every year, there is an annual DMARC gathering to define the guidelines to safeguard users from harmful and annoying emails. DMARC is focused on email spoofing, which is the making of emails with an unauthentic sender address however, updates on their most effective practices could also impact bounce rates.
