Small business marketers know it takes a lot of effort to put together an email marketing campaign. Regardless of what email marketing platform you use, it takes considerable time to create a template, craft compelling content, find the right images, build your email lists, and segment lists to ensure you’re message is targeted for the right group. That’s why it’s so frustrating when you follow all the right steps and still have a high bounce rate. Learn how to address a high bounce rate in your email marketing efforts to ensure your message is getting to its intended audience for the best impact.
One of the many reasons small business marketers opt to use an email marketing platform like Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Sendinblue, or numerous others is because of their reporting capabilities. Chances are if you’re merely sending from your inbox, you likely won’t know if an email bounced unless it comes back “undeliverable.” Not knowing why an email bounced will do little to help you rectify the situation, which is why ideally you should use an email marketing platform to provide those kinds of insights. If you’re already using an email marketing platform, the following types of bounces will be identified so that you know how to address them.
When an email bounces because of a “non-existent email, that means that the email address isn’t valid; it could have a typo in the address, the person with the address may have left the company or has an incorrect extension such as .net instead of .com. When you get this message, it’s important to review the email addresses in question to see if there are any obvious typos in the email address. If not, try to acquire a different email address for that contact. Regardless, these bad email addresses should be removed promptly to avoid future bounces.
Especially around the holidays, email marketers find themselves with several emails being returned as “mailbox full.” If someone is out of the office for an extended period and doesn’t check emails while they’re out, this often happens. It also happens if someone is using a secondary email address for solicitations only, and rarely checks the inbox. Regardless of the cause, if your contact has so many emails in their inbox that they can’t receive any more, your emails will bounce back until there’s space for them in the recipient’s inbox. To address this, you may want to follow up with the contact by social media, phone, or mail to check whether the address is valid.
If the email addresses are placed within the “Blocked” category, the receiving server has blocked the incoming email. While the message is off-putting to marketers, it’s important to understand WHY the email was blocked. In some cases, you can make adjustments and resend, while in other cases, you’re simply out of luck. With government institutions or schools, servers can be stricter when it comes to receiving emails. If you’re “from” and “reply” emails are from a more generic email address such as “info@” or “sales@” it can trigger a block from stricter servers. To resolve this issue, you need to get in touch with the contact and request that their system administrators unblock your email marketing platform’s IP addresses. Contact your email platform’s provider to get that list to share. Mailchimp and Constant Contact both have information on how to do this.
Bounces that don’t give the server a reason for bouncing are put in this category (labeled slightly different depending on which email marketing platform you use), so it can mean that the email bounced for one of the reasons above or something else. It’s important to take note of these bounces and remove the email address if the bounce continues to occur.
Running a small business is not easy. New startups especially struggle when it comes to…
If you’re a small business owner, you want your website to be creative and interesting…
One of the easiest yet most overlooked sources of new business for small businesses is…
Marketers have a lot of different tactics to choose from when promoting a small business.…
Creating a marketing budget for your small business is essential for achieving your marketing goals.…
Link building is an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) and plays a significant…