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To Reduce Your Emails Bounce Rate: 10 Effective Strategies

April 5, 2025By Sarah Johnson9 min read

If unmanageable bounce rates occur due to your previous marketing techniques, the bounce rates will increase again due to the previous marketing techniques, and the bounce rates will increase again due to the value marketing techniques. Learn to lessen your bounce rates.

Email Bounces Explained

When a recipient cannot be reached, the message sent will bounce. However, a recipient's address may bounce due to the hard and soft (the more common) reasons.

Hard Bounces

These are permanent delivery failures, such as:

  • • Address is fake
  • • Domain does not exist
  • • Address is blocked (by a spam filter)
  • • The account is deactivated
Soft Bounces

These are temporary delivery failures and include the following:

  • • Mailbox has reached full capacity
  • • Server is down
  • • Message sent exceeds a predetermined file size
  • • Irregular temporary server issues

10 Effective Strategies

1Email Address Validation

The best way to reduce your bounce rates with marketing techniques is to validate the email address before you market to a given email address. Email validation checks address syntax, the validity of the domain, whether the domain has a mailbox, and the existence of a mailbox and will do all of this in real time.

Advantages:

  • Allowing to detect invalid formats and typos instantly
  • Block malicious and disposable email accounts from your database
  • Decrease bounce rates by an estimated 95%

2Double Opt-In

Double Opt-in requires subscribers to confirm their mail address by clicking a link sent their email inbox. Thus the email address is considered valid so that the subscriber truly wants receive your emails.

How it works:

  1. 1. User submits email address on signup form
  2. 2. System sends a confirmation email
  3. 3. User is supposed to click a link to confirm
  4. 4. That confirmation obtains the provided email to the primary list

3Regularly Clean Your Email List

Email accounts decay by nature. People change jobs, abandon previous accounts, and adapt to utilizing different email clients. Regularly cleaning the list will keep a attenuated subscriber base and in a good condition.

  • Remove hard bounces directly
  • Validate your list by the time of 3 and 6 months
  • Get rid of subscribers with no engagement within the previous 6 months

4Stay Away From Bought or Rented Email Lists

Email lists that were purchased are known to create very high bounce rates. The lists usually contain a lot of even outdated emails, some invalid, dead email accounts, and disinterested clients who are not recipients supposed to receive the emails.

Risks of purchased lists:

  • • 30-50% bounce rates are typical
  • • Damage sender reputation through spam complaints
  • • Risk of being blacklisted by ISPs
  • • Breach of anti-spam laws

5Segment Your Email List

Segmentation lets you deliver more targeted and relevant content to select groups and schedules. This increases engagement and makes it less probable for the emails to be marked spam or bounce.

Segment by:

  • • Level of engagement
  • • History of purchases
  • • Characteristics
  • • Pattern of behavior

Benefits:

  • • Increased rates of open
  • • Greater engagement
  • • Reduced rates of unsubscription
  • • Better effectiveness of deliverability

6Monitor and Respond to Soft Bounces

While soft bounces are temporary, repeated soft bounces from the same address may come to mean a more permanent problem. Implement a system to monitor and manage soft bounces effectively.

Best Practice:

If an email address soft bounces 3-5 consecutive times, consider it a hard bounce and remove it from your active list. This protects your sender reputation and prevents ongoing delivery issues.

7Authenticate Your Emails

With proper email verification, you can minimize the chance of your emails being rejected or bouncing. To prove that the emails are authenticated, adopt SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

  • SPF: Confirms and allows certain servers to send emails under your domain
  • DKIM: Gives a digital signature to emails to verify their authenticity
  • DMARC: This gives guidance about what to do with authentication failures

8Maintain Consistent Sending Patterns

If you do not engage in a pattern of sending emails, and instead deploy a lot of emails out of the blue, you run the risk of having your emails be flagged as spam, or having a lot of your emails bounce. It is therefore advisable to engage in regular sending in order to build a reputation and trust score with your ISPs.

  • Sending emails at regular intervals is very important
  • When you are scaling up, don't just send a lot of emails at once. Increase the volume you are sending over time
  • Remember not to engage in a long time of inactivity followed by a big movement of volume sending emails

9Use a Reputable Email Service Provider

Your Email Service Provider is very important in your email deliverability. Make sure to choose a provider whose reputation is strong, whose infrastructure is robust, and who has positive collaborations with ISPs.

Look for email service providers who offer:

  • • Dedicated IP addresses for high volume senders
  • • Bounce management as a standard offer
  • • Advanced reporting and analytics
  • • Email marketing regulations compliance

10Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers

If a subscriber is inactive you do not have to remove them just yet. First, you can attempt to re-engage with them. A targeted campaign can help you retain key contacts while also lowering the rate at which your email list decays.

Re-engagement Campaign Ideas:

  • • Campaigns with "we miss you" offers
  • • Updating email frequency preference center
  • • Surveys to analyze non-user engagement
  • • New content exclusivity or first access to new inventory

Success Measurement

Utilize the following metrics to analyze to what degree have you achieved the goals:

Bounce Rate

2% = Satisfactory

List Growth Rate

New subscriber addition quality and quantity should be balanced

Deliverability Rate

Successful email delivery

Engagement Rate

Campaigns with opens, clicks, and conversions

Final Thoughts

There are numerous details to keep in mind when improving your email bounce rates. Incorporating these 10 ideas can help you email marketing ROI improve, achieve better email deliverability, and help protect your email sender reputation.

To achieve lower bounce rates, have a clean email list. Email validation should be the first step.

Ready to Reduce Your Bounce Rates?

Start by validating your email list with EmailBounce advanced validation tools.