More and more people are starting to look into online businesses to complement their incomes during this period, or to spin-off from their jobs at risk. With this in mind, email marketing is one of the methods with low barriers of entry, just as e-commerce.
We put together a list of faux-pas done by beginners starting in the world of email marketing, that damages their IP reputation, which in short means their email campaigns will be directed towards the users' Spam folder and never read. To avoid this, or even worst, to avoid being blacklisted from sending further campaigns, we put together a list of 9 ways to reduce email bounce rate. We learned from our own mistakes, so we hope you can learn from ours.
1. 👀 Train your front-lines to confirm the email addresses they are gathering.
If you are gathering emails on your website, use a solution that sends out on your user’s email address a confirmation link. By clicking the link, he confirms that the email address is correct, that no typos or misspellings happened when he introduced the email thus reducing your email bounces.
If you gather emails through other methods (face to face, phone etc), make sure that customer spells the email address and then receives the same confirmation link on his email address.
It may seem an overhead at the beginning when you are building your digital business’ infrastructure, but it will save you a lot of time and money in the long run. Do you know what is the worst that can happen if you have a high email bounce rate?
2. 🤖 Use a captcha.
Another recommendation that needs to be implemented at the beginning of your user’s journey is a captcha. This is a simple solution that keeps bots away from flooding your mailing list, causing your bounce rates to spike.
3. ✅ Implement a preference center
Another technicality of keeping your bounce rates low is implementing a preference center where your users can pick and choose what types/ categories of information they subscribe to.
4. ✂ Remove your bounces as they occur.
When a bounce happens, investigate whether it’s a hard or a soft bounce. If it is a hard bounce, take steps to remove it from your list as soon as possible. However, if this proves to be tedious to do manually, we have the right solution to clean your bulk email lists.
5. 🧹 Clean your mailing lists regularly.
Keeping a high level of your mailing list hygiene you maintain your ISP reputation score. Here at RemoveBounce, our mission is to help you decrease your email bouncing rate. All you need to do is sign Up* only with your email address, upload your email list, sit back and relax. We will let you know once we finished checking each email address, one by one. Our reports are user-friendly, and we will provide back to you separate lists of valid and invalid email addresses.
6. 📝 Check your content.
Sometimes the way to hell is paved with good intentions, however this is not a good excuse for the ESPs not to mark your newsletter as spam. There are services such as Vetter or Mail-Tester.com that check the content of the newsletter you intend to send out and let you know what is the probability that your email will be marked as spam. Fine tune your message to avoid receiving spam complaints, which in turn are downgrading your IP’s reputation, going back to point 1 that we’ve made above.
7. 📅 Sending regular campaigns.
If you send regular campaigns, there are less chances that people will forget about when and why they subscribed to you and will not flag your email as spam when they receive it.
8. 📊 Keep track of your reports.
The main email marketing providers have interactive dashboards that you have access to, where you can track your campaigns performance. Keeping track of the evolution of bounce rates can help you identify which ones of your business practices are bringing bounce emails into your mailing list.
Businesses are complex and different, so from a soft-bounce perspective there isn’t really a one size fits it all rule, but keeping an eye on your soft-bounces and implementing some business rules to remove them after a few trials will keep your list hygiene and your IP reputation high. 🌟