As far as metrics go, “high” isn’t always a positive thing, especially when talking about email bounce rates. The email bounce rate refers to the percentage that email addresses in your mailing list did not get delivered to the recipient because their mail servers returned them.

What causes emails to bounce?

Email bounces fall under two categories: soft bounces and hard bounces. Soft bounces are temporary failures; they could mean the recipient’s inbox is full and cannot accept any new email, or they have set up an out-of-office, which resulted in an auto-reply. Hard bounces are permanent failures. And no matter how often you try to resend that email, it will not go through.

There are various reasons why an email will trigger a hard bounce; maybe the recipient has left the company, and the email address no longer exists. The recipient’s email address may have changed when the organization rebranded. An email bounce can also occur if the email address is a spam trap. However, the main causes of an email bounce are sending an email to an invalid email or an incorrect email address, which can happen if you simply have the wrong email address or the email address contains typos.

How do high email bounce rates affect my business?

High email bounce rates hurt your sender reputation, which relies on properly formatted email addresses, avoiding spam traps, no appearances on blocklists, and low email bounce rates. Sender reputation scores are assigned to your organization by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The higher the score, the better for your email deliverability rates. Therefore, reducing your email bounce rate is crucial to keeping your IP address healthy.

Email bounces are inevitable in even the best email marketing campaigns. And bounce rates that are 2% or less is considered quite normal. However, should your bounce rates have crept past 2% or more, it’s time to take action.

How can I reduce email bounce rates?

Cleaning your email lists should be the first priority when reducing high email bounce rates. Email lists that get stale or out of date are most susceptible to high bounce rates because they contain more email addresses that are no longer valid.

Email verification services can help you clean your email databases by pinging each email to ensure it is active. Ensuring the email addresses in your list can receive mail not only reduces the risk of bounces, but it helps increase deliverability and ensure a successful campaign. Email verification services can also correct typos and illegal characters in incorrectly entered email addresses.

Runner’s EDQ Email Verification Service can remove up to 95% of bad email addresses to increase deliverability, avoid high bounce rates and blocklisting, and protect your valuable sender reputation. We can help maintain your IP’s health by reducing fraud by confirming only valid, not fake; emails enter your systems. We also help maintain CAN-SPAM compliance with FCC mobile domain detection.