Configure Active Bounce Management to Boost up Your Delivery Rate

A bounce is a notification, clearly stating that for some reason, your message failed to land into the recipient’s inbox. Preferably, these bounces take the form of SMTP codes. These codes in turn, help ISPs communicate the reason for the bounce. Hence, to keep yourself away from the worry of increasing bounce rate, you need to consider bounce processing that ensures to safeguard the integrity of email lists by being clean and updated.

Need of Processing Bounces

Processing bounces is surely an inevitable deal of task that you need to accomplish to stop paying for e-mail messages going to some non-functioning addresses. Moreover, absence of bounce processing, lets the mailing list’s natural churn end up producing large section of inactive addresses on the list. Hence, monitor your bounces correctly to gauge potential delivery problem, where an e-mail domain that represents a major portion of your list has stopped responding or your messages start getting rejected. Monitoring bounces after every campaign, helps you fix such irregularities.

Most importantly, ISPs also consider bounce information to determine if they are being targeted by a spammer as their e-mail lists are of very poor quality. In case an ISP notices a large percentage of invalid e-mail coming from one IP, he may identify the mail stream as spam and block it.

Mentioned below are some useful tips used to reduce your bounce rate remarkably:

• ISP’s suggests that hard bounces should not be retried more than three times. Practically, it is sufficient to retry a hard bounce just once, after a period of two to four days.
• Once your retry attempts fails, you must ensure to remove the hard-bounced addresses from the list immediately. Similarly, soft-bounced addresses should be removed if they generate bounces consistently in four to five e-mail campaigns.
• Use an e-mail change of address service to help stand against e-mail address toss in your mailing list.
  The best way to reduce the presence of incorrect and false addresses right from the beginning is using double or confirmed opt-in subscription process.
• Give your subscribers an option to update their address and preferences by adding an e-mail address update link to every e-mail you send and a profile update form to your Web site.
• Test your messages for probable spam-oriented content and reduce the chances of getting rejected by ISP and corporate spam filters.
• Check all bounce messages to discover the major reasons of e-mail rejection. It might be possible that your message does not get rejected on the grounds of blocking or filtering and hence, all you need to do is contact the administrator of the receiving system.
• Follow consistent monitoring of your bounce rates. Investigate the cause, and take necessary measures if a message lies beyond the standard. Though it is true that average bounce rates can contrast significantly, but if your rate persistently goes above 5 percent, you may have to check for issues like list input and cleanliness.
• Try to contact your bounced subscribers either by posting a mail to them or making a call to get their new e-mail addresses.
• Add a script that checks syntax errors to make sure that your subscribers are entering their e-mail addresses correctly.

Summary: Bounce processing important to maintain the integrity of your email lists. Also, it brings fruitful results of higher deliverability because ISP’s consider frequent attempts of delivering emails to non-existent addresses, spamming or harvesting. Hence along with proper bounce processing, marketers are also required to follow some useful tips to reduce their bounce rate significantly.