An email bounce is an email that couldn't be delivered to the recipient's inbox and, therefore will bounce back to his sender. Bounces undoubtedly harm your email reputation and should be minimized as much as possible.
Types of Bounces
Hard Bounce: indicates a permanent failure of email delivery. Typically they result from sending an email to a non-existent address or one that won’t accept any incoming mail. No further delivery attempts will be made for this type of bounce.
Soft Bounce: indicates a temporary problem with your delivery - a recipient’s server declining your message or an inbox so full that it can’t accept any more emails. A new attempt to deliver will be made.
Bounce Rating
A bounce rate of around 2% is considered more than acceptable. Anything above that indicates you should begin to be concerned and make some adjustments. If the rate reaches 10%, it is best to stop the campaign and investigate before heavily hurting your email reputation.
How to lower your bounce rate and keep it under control
Verify each email address
Verify your leads with Hunter’s Email Verifier, this allows you to review the deliverability status of professional emails before sending an email. The Email Verifier works for individual addresses but you can also upload them in bulk via Bulk Email Verifier.
We only suggest using email addresses with a confidence score of 90-95% or higher, although a high score does not guarantee full deliverability.
Please keep in mind that "Accept all" emails, are set up to accept all emails and this prevents us from knowing if a mailbox has indeed been set up and if emails sent to this address will bounce or not. Therefore, we can't be certain about the deliverability of this type of email.
💡 If you have the full names of the contacts you are looking for, as well as their company name/domain, you can directly search for emails through Hunter's Email Finder for individual contacts, or through the Bulk Email Finder tool when uploading entire lists. The Email finder, allows you to find and verify emails at the same time, without any extra cost.
Warm-up your email address
Prior to sending a large volume of emails, it's essential to warm up your email address.
This is important for several reasons:
Deliverability: It helps improve your email deliverability by establishing a positive sender reputation with email service providers. This means your emails are less likely to end up in spam folders.
Avoiding Blacklists: Sending a high volume of emails from a cold or unused email address can trigger spam filters or get your address blacklisted. Warming up gradually reduces this risk.
Building Trust: Gradual email sending builds trust between email service providers and recipients. It shows that you're a legitimate sender, not a spammer.
Engagement Metrics: Warming up allows you to monitor and adjust your email strategy based on initial engagement metrics. You can fine-tune your content and target for better results.
Reputation Management: If you're switching email service providers or domains, warming up helps you maintain your sender reputation during the transition.
You can read more on how to warm up an email address in the blog post below:
💡We recommend starting with a daily sending limit of 20/30 emails p/day and gradually increasing it.
Check your content
Your content has a direct impact on whether your message will be delivered. We recommend conducting some A/B testing to refine the email content and subject lines. Craft emails that don't trigger spam filters by avoiding excessive links, all caps, and spammy keywords, and consider personalizing your campaign's content and using non-robotic language.
💡While we don't support an A/B test option, we recommend duplicating an email campaign and editing its content to simulate an A/B test.
Make it easy to opt out
By providing recipients with the option to unsubscribe, you're helping to keep your leads list fresh and relevant. All unsubscribe recipients are added to your Unsubscriptions list and Hunter will automatically exclude them from future emails.
💡You can create a default unsubscribe sentence here and customize it for every email campaign based on your needs.