Best practices to reduce your email bounce rates

There are different reasons why emails bounce. Click here to know more about it. In this article, we will go through the best practices to improve your delivery rate and prevent your emails from bouncing.

Before that, let's take a look at the delivery factors that are under your control. experimenting with these elements will tell you which ones will have a big impact on deliverability and which ones are not as important.

1. The quality of your contact list - This is always important, but if you’re a new sender, or your IP is new, this is all the ISP knows about you.

2. The frequency and relevancy of your emails - If you send emails every day, ISPs will be stricter with you. You absolutely need to segment your mailing list in this case.

   Are you sending the same message to everyone?

   Are you personalizing content?

   This will have a big impact on engagement and thus deliverability.

3. The content and format of your messages - This matters, but not as much as some would believe. Spammy messages from a sender with a high reputation will have fewer deliverability issues than valuable messages from a sender with a poor reputation. Nevertheless, it’s good to avoid using spammy tactics.

4. Sender reputation - Extremely important, but not quite as in your control as the other above factors. It deserves more attention.

Always do a warm-up before you start sending emails

When you switch from one email service provider to another, the email server used for sending your emails will change as well. Your new ESP's email servers are not allowed to send a large number of emails at the same time, so to make sure the emails are delivered properly, you will need to start with a small number of emails and increase the number of emails over time.

The email warm-up process plays a crucial role in email deliverability, avoiding it can result in a lot of emails not being delivered permanently.

Click here to learn more about how to do email warm-ups with Growlytics.

Always opt-in users to receive emails

Any serious email marketer uses opt-in to make sure they are not sending emails to customers who have not opted-in to receive emails. Opt-in can be achieved by asking for email IDs from popups while customers are on your site or you can ask for it when they signup on to your site or do a checkout to make the purchase.

In short, with opt-in, your customer knows that they are okay to receive emails from you. This will reduce the probability of them marking your emails as spam and reporting or blocking your email domain.

Clean up the email list before you send any emails

A lot of emails bounce because your customer database is old and emails do not exist. There are also cases when you want to upload your offline customers to Growlytics, for these customers also, you will need to check for invalid emails which may bounce.

There are many popular services out there to clean your email list like zerobounce.net or neverbounce.com. You can see the comparisons of top service providers here. This will remove invalid, deleted, and misspelled addresses — this is likely to increase your open rate.

Always personalize your emails

Always personalize the emails, as they are more likely to get past spam filters and get opened. Adding personalization to the subject line can increase the open rates by 25%.

Generally, email clients like Gmail look for large numbers of incoming emails with the exact same subject line and email contents to categorize them into Promotions or emails as spam categories. For instance, by adding the name of the user to your subject line you’re able to reduce the chances of your message getting flagged as spam.

Don't use your first campaign as a way to 'clean' your list!

It's a bad idea to use a test campaign to clean your email list, email service providers have a very strict policy for this, and they may even stop providing you services if they notice such things.

If you send a campaign to an unverified email list, not only do you risk an account suspension, but you put yourself at a major disadvantage because you damage your own Sender Reputation.

It's better you use proper email clean-up services like zerobounce.net or neverbounce.com. You can see the comparisons of top service providers here.

If you damage your email domain reputation by accident, your next campaign may experience even more blocks as recipient servers reject your mail. It's better if you spend a little time on making your list as clean to keep your sender reputation high.

Verify your sender domain

When a recipient mail server receives your email, it basically asks, “Is this email from an authentic email server whose owner is the same as it says it is from?”

For this, the recipient mail server checks DNS records, specifically SPF and DKIM records associated with the domain you are using for sending emails.

If the recipient mail server doesn't find the required information on the domain you are using to send the emails, your email will start getting rejected and bouncing, which will eventually reduce your email domain reputation.

In short, make sure the following setup is done:

1. Make sure SPF records are properly configured

2. Make sure DKIM, and DMARC records are present and correct

Make sure your email doesn't look like spam

You need to be very careful about the contents of the email. Spam filters of recipient clients like Gmail are there to decide whether or not your email looks like spam.

The problem is that because spammers are always changing their algorithms and tactics, the filters have to change too. Hence, you can't just "set it and forget it". You have to make sure that your email template complies and doesn't have any pattern that makes it seem like spam.

You can use tools like mail-tester.com or mailgenius.com to help you stay on track or understand the changes to the format, wording, links, or content which will make sure your emails aren't treated as spam.

Consider sending emails on a schedule

Try to stay regular and consistent on your mailing schedule, it is less likely for your subscribers to forget that they agreed to receive mail from your business or group.

If you stop sending emails in between and suddenly send a big campaign, it gets marked as a spike by the recipient servers and may result in email bounces.

This doesn't mean you need to send out emails daily. It is more about staying consistent with engagement patterns. Plan an engagement pattern and do your best to stick to it.

Make sure your sending server is not blacklisted

If a large number of the emails you send out are not getting delivered, then do a quick check to see whether your sending server is blacklisted or not. You can use a variety of services to do so. MXToolbox is one such service you can use to check if your sending IP is blacklisted or not.

Dos and Donts for Email Deliverability

Things to Do	Things to Avoid
Sign up to Google Postmaster, These services will give you insights into your reputation with these ISPs.	Buying, renting, or harvesting email addresses will not allow you to gauge the quality of your mailing list. This can also cause a violation of guidelines like the GDPR
A memorable email sign-up process will reduce the chances of your emails being marked as spam. Having a double opt-in sign-up will give you a 70% success rate. A CAPTCHA on your registration page will prevent spambots from polluting your list.	Sending emails to people who don’t want them or can’t receive them are likely to increase your spam complaints and can also put you in violation of the GDPR.
Use email engagement to manage email frequency. Only your most engaged audiences should receive the most emails. You can use list segmentation to help manage this. Score your content with spam-checking tools. You don’t want your emails to get blocked for bad coding. You can find free tools online to help you out.	Sending to group email addresses (e.g. info@, sales@). ISPs want emails to be sent at an individual level, and don’t look kindly upon this activity. Plus, there’s always the chance that someone in the email group will mark your message as spam.
Review your campaign reports at an ISP level. Monitor bounce and complaint rates at an ISP level and look for signs of your emails being bulk sent to spam for certain ISPs.	Old or inactive email IDs don't add to your revenue, hence sending emails to these users will hurt your metrics. Email IDs without any engagement for the last 180 days should ideally be transferred to a re-engagement program.
Use email tools that show how your email renders across all devices and browsers thus ensuring it renders for everyone. Emails that don’t render properly can result in no engagement or spam complaints. Emails that render correctly also increase your trustworthiness in the eyes of the ISPs.	Sending emails with spammy language. USING ALL CAPS, ending sentences with lots of punctuation (!!!), using too much “super-hot exclusive sale!” terminology…the ISPs don’t like any of it, and neither do your customers.
Maintain a proper text-to-image ratio. ISPs prefer more text than images, with an ideal ratio of 60:40. Try to limit your email size to a maximum of 100KB.
Make it easy to unsubscribe from your emails. It might seem counterintuitive, but the alternative is for users to report you as spam. Respect the desires of your audience.
Use personalization as it increases engagement rates, which is good for your sender reputation as well as revenue. Make your emails as tailored as possible, and go beyond just using first names. Incorporate things like behavioral data, purchase data, and user preferences.