A huge problem facing email marketing campaigns is emails that bounce. It is critical to the success of your campaign that there should be few or no bounces. To improve the ROI of your campaign, you will have to take a more active role in managing your bounces. These ideas will help you get better management of your bouncing emails.


Make sure you have lists that have been verified and are ‘clean’. Don’t take the list for granted. Make sure there are no syntax errors or typing mistakes. This will greatly reduce your bounces at the first point itself. Try using Email Change of Address (ECOA) service which will keep you updated of companies and clients who have had email changes recently. It has been reported that there is a 2.5% churn of email addresses every month, and using an ECOA service will help you greatly.


Make sure you get email confirmation through the use of auto responders whenever a reader signs up, registers, or makes a confirmed purchase. This will allow you to make corrections from the first point. Try to include account management or profile change links in your mail to prompt your customers to make easy changes from the link provided in your email. Alternatively, you can contact them through mail or telephone to update their email addresses.


You need to look into how to get around spam filters, as you will want to avoid them like the plague. Look at the workings of some commonly used ones to know how to get your mail through them unscathed. Monitor blacklists to make sure that your list contents are not in them. Reduce your bounces by removing ‘spam flag’ addresses like noone@somedomain.com and also be sure to test mails before you send them to see how they will appear to your readers.


Look into changes made in ISP’s after they have merged or had financial problems, or general name changes. Users of a domain may have shifted as a result of this and a simple domain replacement might end a huge bounce problem. If you know about it, include a link in emails sent to those readers about whether they want to update their email ids.


When nothing works, remove or suppress emails that are bouncing consistently. Certain applications allow hard bounces to be moved into a trash box counter for suppression and won’t be part of the next round of emails.


Along with all this, try to get in-depth knowledge about how emails bounce and what you can do to counter this problem.

How To Reduce Email Bounces