It’s all too familiar – You setup your email campaign to go live and when it does you go straight to your reporting dashboard to begin monitoring its performance. Low and behold you see your email has a handful of bounces (emails that never actually made it to the recipient). You ponder why they bounced and seek ways to diminish this percentage since, after all, it’s affecting your overall deliverability rate. We are here to help! Below are a handful of reasons your emails may be bouncing.
1.) The email no longer exists or never existed.
We’ve all seen it (and admittedly may have been this person before). Someone wants to download your content and the email and information they use to subscribe is far from real. Our latest jokester filled out a form with the fake email, “BarackObongo@gmail.com.” Emails bounce if the email never existed in the first place (like our friend Barack Obongo). Other times when people subscribe and become a part of your email list they accidentally misspell a portion of their address. It’s best to check out the emails that bounced and determine 1) if it’s even a legitimate email and 2) if there is an obvious typo that can be corrected before the next email send.
2.) The individual’s inbox may be full or the server may be down.
When an inbox is full or when things are not working properly with the server, you may receive a bounce on your email report. However, this type of bounce is known as a “soft bounce” meaning the issue is temporary and not permanent (in this case you don’t necessarily need to delete the address out of your database just yet). When this happens the server sends you an email with details regarding why the email bounced. If the recipient’s address continues to be an issue over time, you would then need to take action and remove that email so that it doesn’t continue to be a problem.
3.) You have been blacklisted or blocked.
Sometimes emails are blocked or blacklisted, and that happens for a couple different reasons. First, depending on the elements within your email, there may be some qualities that are being detected as spam. Other times it can be attributed to mass quantities of emails coming from the same server (which can easily happen if the server is shared). If you find you are being blocked or blacklisted you will need to submit a request to the specific server in order to be removed.
Managing bounces is an essential part of your email marketing as it plays a role in your overall deliverability rate. Moving forward, be sure to analyze the types of bounces you are receiving so that you can be prepared to handle them accordingly. To learn more about managing your email bounces, be sure to checkout How to Effectively Manage Your Email Bounces.
