Improving Your Email Marketing Campaign Bounce Rate
When an email campaign can't be delivered to an email address, it’s usually because it has bounced (has been blocked by the recipient’s email server). There are different types of bounced emails, and knowing what causes them can help you reduce the amount of emails that get bounced, and maintain a good sender reputation.
In this article, learn more about:
Viewing bounced emails
You can see how many emails bounced in Email Marketing in your site's dashboard.
To see which emails have bounced:
- Go to Email Marketing in your site's dashboard.
- Click View statistics on any sent or published campaign.
- Click Bounced under Delivery Statistics.
Types of bounced emails
Emails bounce for different reasons. Some issues that caused the bounce are temporary, and some are permanent:
Soft bounce occurs when a temporary issue prevents the delivery of an email to its recipient. Some common reasons include:
- The recipient's mailbox is full.
- The recipient's email server has technical issues.
- The email message is too large.
Since soft bounce is a temporary issue, emails that are marked as soft bounced in email campaign statistics will not be marked as bounced in your contact list.
Hard bounce is caused by a permanent issue that prevents the delivery of an email to its recipient. Some common reasons include:
- The recipient email address is invalid, meaning it might contain spelling mistakes, no longer be in use or it might not exist.
- The recipient email server has blocked delivery.
Bounced by a local blacklist: If you've received spam complaints in the past or if you continue sending emails to email addresses that have bounced before, your campaign can be rejected and bounced.
Viewing contacts that bounced an email campaign
You can find out which contacts are bouncing your campaigns, and download a report which includes specific reasons why emails were bounced.
To view email addresses that bounced your campaign:
- Go to Email Marketing in your site's dashboard.
- Click View statistics on any sent or published campaign.
- Click Email recipients.
- Click the field next to Filter by: and select Bounced from the drop-down menu.
- Click Download.
Preventing emails from bouncing
A quality mailing list is more important than a large mailing list. It’s best to grow your mailing list organically and over time. Sending to a smaller mailing list that shows high engagement not only improves your statistics and reputation, but you’re more likely to achieve your goals sooner if you continuously deliver emails to recipients that want to hear from you.
Even with a quality mailing list, emails can still bounce. There are steps you can take before sending an email campaign to prevent emails from hard bouncing:
- Only send email campaigns to people who have actively signed up or subscribed to be on your mailing list.
- Enable Double-Opt in your form settings, asking users to verify their email address.
- Only import contacts from the mailing lists that you have built up and have permission from people to use. Do not use purchased mailing lists or contacts you found online (e.g. Facebook).
Tip:
You can add a subscribe form to your site to help grow your mailing list.
Protecting your sender reputation
The number of bounced emails from your campaigns is used to establish your sender reputation, and impacts how many recipients you can reach with your email marketing campaigns.
How Wix helps to protect your sender reputation
When you’re using a new mailing list, Wix samples a small portion of it to protect your sender reputation, to make sure you're following Wix Email Marketing best practices.
If an email bounces, Wix automatically labels the recipient's email address as "Bounced" in your contacts. When you send an email campaign, Wix removes email addresses with a "Bounced" label from your list of recipients.
How you can protect your sender reputation
You can help to protect your seller reputation by checking bounced emails, and maintaining a clean mailing list.
After you have sent an email campaign:
- Check for typos in email addresses that have bounced your campaigns.
- If you have alternate email addresses for subscribers whose email campaigns bounced, contact them directly and invite them to re-subscribe to your mailing list.
- If you are unable to correct a contact's email address, delete it from your mailing list and don't send to it again.
- Never add a bounced contact back to your mailing list without verifying the email address and getting permission from your customer or subscriber.
Regularly review your mailing lists:
- Maintain your mailing lists by reviewing them every 6 months. It’s recommended to remove anyone you haven’t been in touch with during the past 12 months.
- Use an email validation tool to keep your mailing lists clean.
Tip:
Read Wix Email Marketing Best Practices to learn how to improve your delivery rate.
How bounced emails can affect your Wix account
Just like your business reputation, a good sender reputation is easy to maintain but takes more effort to regain when negatively impacted. A low number of bounced emails is expected, and can occur even if you’ve done everything to prevent them. If your bounced email rate is higher than normal, Wix can take the necessary safety measures to keep the negative impact to a minimum, and make sure you can improve your reputation sooner. If your email bounce rate is high, one or more of the following may happen:
- Declined emails: Wix may decline distributing some of your email campaigns until you clean your mailing list and slowly rebuild your reputation as a sender.
- Reduced email allowance: Your email allowance (the number of contacts you can send email campaigns too) may be reduced if you have a large number of bounced emails.
- Deactivated account: If you continue to have a high bounce rate over a long period of time, your Wix account may be deactivated due to a breach of the Wix Email Marketing Terms of Use.
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