What Is a Good Email Bounce Rate, and How to Lower It
4 min read
A bounce is an email that could not be delivered. Mailbox providers watch how many of your emails bounce, and they use it to judge whether you look after your list.
Hard bounces and soft bounces
- Hard bounce: a permanent problem, for example the address does not exist. Remove these at once.
- Soft bounce: a temporary problem, for example a full mailbox or a server that is down. Try again later, and remove the address if it keeps happening.
What rate should you aim for?
There is no single official number, and providers do not publish one. Many senders and email services treat a hard bounce rate under about 2 percent as healthy, and higher than that as a warning sign. Keep it as low as you can. Cold lists tend to bounce more than lists of people who signed up themselves.
Why it matters
A high bounce rate can damage your sender reputation. When that happens, even your emails to good addresses are more likely to be filtered into spam, and the problem can be slow to repair.
How to lower it
- Check the list before you send. A check finds addresses that do not exist so you can remove them.
- Remove every hard bounce after each send.
- Send to Passed addresses first, and send to Unknown addresses in small batches.
- Do not reuse old lists without checking them again.
- Fix typos. A good check suggests a correction for mistakes such as gmial.com.
Paste or upload your list. Only Passed and Failed results use a credit. Unknown results are free.
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