Email Marketing Glossary Terms: Bounce Rate

The bounce rate of an email marketing campaign is the total ratio of those emails that bounce when compared to the overall number of emails sent. Email marketing managers will track the bounce rate to help determine the efficacy of their list. Specific details of bounced emails can help to rationalise or cleanse an email list while the bounce rate can help to identify good and bad sources of email lists.

Acquiring an email list through a broker or directly through a list builder can have mixed results. While there are certainly genuine, high quality lists on the Internet that can prove extremely beneficial in email marketing there are an equally large, if not larger, number of poor email lists. A bad email list will have a high bounce rate for many reasons.

It is usual for at least a small number of emails to bounce during an email marketing campaign. Some list members provide inaccurate details either by accident or on purpose while other members will simply have changed email address or their server may be experiencing problems. Alternatively, you may be having your own difficulties using an ISP server or other outbound email server.

Always ensure that your emails are being delivered properly by including one or more of your own test email addresses. Some ISPs and other outbound email servers can struggle to cope with the load of email marketing campaigns and if this is the case then you need to act quickly to prevent all of your email marketing emails from bouncing.