Email Bounce Rate

What is a bounce rate?

A bounce rate for email marketing is the percentage of emails sent but not successfully delivered to the recipients.

How to calculate email bounce rate?

Email bounce rate is calculated by dividing the total number of bounced emails and divide that number by the total emails sent.

For example, if 100 emails where sent and 2 bounced, the bounce rate is 2%.

What is a good email bounce rate?

A good bounce rate is anything less than 2%, meaning for every 100 emails send only 2 are not delivered.

Related: Email Deliverability Tips to Get Your Message to the Inbox

What does a high bounce rate mean?

A high bounce rate means that a high portion of your emails sent ended up bouncing, as a result those emails were not delivered. Any bounce rate over 2% is above industry standard, but a high bounce rate would be considered anything over 10%.

What is the difference between a soft bounce and a hard bounce?

The difference between a soft bounce and a hard bounce are soft bounce are only temporary, hard bounces are permanent.

Examples of a soft bounce are the recipients inbox is full, size of email is too large, or email server was down. Examples of a hard bounce are the email address is not valid, the domain does not exist or due to strict email security filter.

What are causes an email to bounce?

There are several reason why an email will bounce, here are the most common:

• Outdated email addresses. For example, if an individual closes their email account, this would cause a bounce.
• Purchased email lists. This lists tend to have outdated email addresses. Individuals who opt-in to receive an email will have the lowest bounce rate.

Related: Why You Should Delete a Bunch of Your Email Subscribers Right Now