How to reduce bounce rates?

Bounced emails are addresses that could not be delivered successfully to recipients of email marketing campaigns.

This article explains the difference between SOFT and HARD bounces and will provide best-practice recommendations to reduce the number of bounces to improve overall deliverability rate. 

Remarkety will display soft and hard bounces as simply "bounced" in the reports page. Although, in the Manage contacts page, we will list the bounce as either Soft Bounce or Hard Bounce. 

A soft bounce means that the email address was valid and the email message reached the recipient’s mail server. However, common reasons it bounced back include:

• The mailbox was full (the user is over their quota)
• The server was down
• The message was too large for the recipient’s inbox
  
  

A hard bounce on the other hand, occurs when the message has been permanently rejected either because:

• The email address is invalid
• The email addresses don’t exist
  

We add these hard-bounced addresses to the account's suppression list and include a detailed explanation for the reason. What this means is that even if you send an email via Remarkety for that user, we will not even try to deliver to that address, because we know it’s no longer valid. Continuing to try to send to a known bad address will harm your reputation with the receiver, so we prevent that.

The best way to reduce the number of bounces is by following some key deliverability best-practices. This includes the following:

1. Maintain good list hygiene: Purge your list regularly of invalid emails and non-responders. High bounce rates can affect your sender reputation so keeping your lists clean will go a long way to achieving higher email delivery rates.
   
   We highly suggest for our customer to focus their email marketing on the engaged customers, rather than the ones that do not open emails, frequently. 
   
   
2. Use double opt-in or captcha: request new registrations to verify their authenticity when subscribing to your list. This way you can ensure that the user’s email is not only valid, but that they in fact want to receive your email messages.
   
   
3. Monitor your email delivery: Track your email delivery rates by paying close attention to your bounce rates as well as your response rates. With regular monitoring, you can catch potential failures before they happen or before they do too much damage. 
   
   
4. To increase the deliverability rate of your Remarkety emails, and it's a good practice to have an SPF record in place.
   Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication method designed to detect forged sender addresses in emails. An SPF record (Sender Policy Framework) is a simple DNS record which tells other email providers (such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) that Remarkety is authorized to send email on your behalf. You can learn how to set it up here.

***Customers in the Advanced and Professional plans are eligible to a dedicated success manager. Contact Remarkety to request an account audit with your dedicated success manager. 

To learn more about improving deliverability rate, contact support@remarkety.com