An overview of Bounce and Unsubscribe Rates for Email Campaigns

 

A couple of things that come hand in hand with email marketing are bounces and unsubscribes. Interestingly, these two are quite an integral part of all email marketing campaigns including those sent to the cleanest and most targeted lists. In fact, if viewed statistically, every bounce or unsubscribe you receive, is actually one less person reading your newsletter. Hence, for an active marketer, it’s important to know and understand how these metrics affect your overall campaign effectiveness and what measures should be considered to trim down these percentages for future campaigns.

Evaluating your Bounced Emails

Bounced emails are an outcome of many reasons such as your recipient moving, shifting jobs, changing his/her ISPs, and etc. In certain situations, they not always give preference to update their account information with their newsletter providers. Another thing that can affect your number of bounces is the frequency with which you send mails to your clients.

Genuine statistics suggests that for a monthly mailing list, an average bounce back rate ranging from 2% to 5% is fine. Whereas, for the not-so-regularly mailing list, it can rage from 5% to 13%. In addition, first-time mailing lists can have a bounce back rate of something as high as 20% - 30%.

Follow these tips to have low bounce back rate:

  • Mail at once in a month to strengthen your relationship with your subscriber base (especially with recently signed up clients).
  • Provide your recipients with a way to update their email address and other account details somewhere on your Web Techniques.
  • As soon as you get a bounced email, either call or send a mail to your client to let them know that their email bounced and also, ask for an updated one.

Calculating Unsubscribe Rates

Irrespective of your attractive offers are, or targeted your lists, you will still get subscribers who prefer to opt-out of your mailing list. Interestingly, there is no way to neglect this completely but there is surely a way out to reduce it remarkably. This is where email content plays a very vital role in holding back a confused recipient from opting-out.

Statistically, a genuine unsubscribe rate for a list that you deal with on regular basis, can be approximately between .2% and .75%. Absence of regular communication can hamper the relationship your relationship with your clients and customers. Hence, keep sending newsletters or offers at least monthly to keep your company fresh in their minds. In case of less-than-one-month mailing, you can have your unsubscribe rate lying between 2% and 5%.

Follow these tips to keep your unsubscribe rates low:

  • Send emails only to recipients who have agreed to receive offers from your organization.
  • Within the body of your email, tell your recipients again how/where they opted-in.
  • Regularly send offers or newsletters to your recipients to maintain constant touch.
  • Send only the requested content to your recipients. Do not try to get benefitted by mailing your subscribers, anything and everything. In case of offering multiple newsletters, ensure to segment the unique subscribers so they receive only the newsletters that asked for. Over-mailing can cause list fatigue and increased unsubscribe rate.
  • Add value to your messages. Stand as trusted authority on a certain subject, repeatedly offer great deals to your customers, and tell them about your new updated product information.

Summary: Every marketer wish to maintain a high level of email deliverability and to follow this two-pronged approach, they first have to ensure that all their enlisted subscribers have allowed to be contacted via email. Secondly, companies must align themselves with genuine email service providers who are experts in maintaining good ISP relations and deliverability monitoring.