You might think that in email marketing there is little you can do with an email that is returned to sender. If the recipient does not exist then that surely is an end to it. All you can do is remove the address from your email lists.
There are three main kinds of bounces:
Blocked
Soft bounce
Hard bounce
'Blocked' means that the recipient's email service provider is blocking your email. There can be many reasons for this and it will be subject of a subsequent article.
'Soft bounce' means that the mail server is temporary unable to accept your email. This could be that the user's inbox is full or that the email server has a problem. What will happen is that attempts to deliver the email will continue. However, if it continues to be rejected then it will become a hard bounce. If it is the first time it has bounced it can be useful to include it in the next sending as the problem might well have cleared up by then. If you leave in all soft bounces then your returns are less useful to you.
A 'hard bounce' is where the email server could not send the e-mail. The norm is either that the user does not exist on that domain, or the domain cannot be found. This is a permanent condition. It renders your email impossible to send to the address you have.
When considering the email marketing software returns you should ignore soft bounces. The percentage you should address is the number of blocked and hard bounces compared to the number of e-mails sent. If you are using a bought-in list then the number of hard bounces should be used as a way of reducing the charge.
If your email list has been generated in-house then you should look to the causes of your hard bounces.
It is largely accepted that in B2B email marketing some 30 per cent of those on your email lists will change their address each year. If the move is internal then there will probably be a period of time when the person will have access to their previous address. If you send emails at extended intervals then you need to have some procedure to head off these changes of address, perhaps a footer to remind the receivers to notify you in good time.
If your bounce rate is particularly high for newly sourced email addresses then you should look to your method of capture. If you used a trade fair for instance, and the addresses were hand written, find out if the space allowed in the documentation was sufficient for the addresses to be clear. If you give a reward for the number of email addresses harvested you could consider not including those that have been written incorrectly.
If you feel it cost-effective, examination of each email address subject of a hard bounce might well reveal simple and easily corrected errors, such as a missing full stop or one in the wrong place. A incorrect domain name is not unusual.
The real test is whether there is a common feature with the bounces which could show a simple way of reducing the lost email addresses.
