An unfortunate reality of email marketing is that a portion of your emails will bounce and won’t make it to the inbox. According to our latest metrics report, the average email campaign can expect to return a 5.77% bounce rate.

Managing your bounced emails is very important as they can hurt your email deliverability and ultimately cost you money.

With Vision6, we take a lot of the stress out of managing your bounces with features such as:

• Bounced email capture and reporting
• Auto-deactivating permanent bounces on their 3rd occurrence
• Excluding invalid email addresses from being added to your database
• Double opt-in process that verifies the email address of a new subscriber
• Update profile forms enabling subscribers to easily update their details in your database
• Automated message and database triggers (like triggering an SMS to a contact with a bounced email)

We also know that email marketers want flexibility when it comes to managing their databases. So we give you options to manually update, deactivate, delete or unsubscribe contacts that bounce. Technically speaking, it’s the permanent bounces that you really need to worry about. Unless you do something, they will continue to bounce and will hurt your deliverability.

What’s a permanent bounce?

These are emails that contain an error with their address. They will continue to bounce if you resend messages to them. Common reasons for a permanent bounce are that the mailbox does not exist or the address has been spelt incorrectly.

What’s a temporary bounce?

These are emails that could in theory receive your message successfully if you were to re-send it. Common reasons for a temporary bounce are that the mailbox is full or temporarily unavailable.

What’s the best way to manually manage my bounces?

Try to contact the subscriber and ask for an updated email address. If this isn’t possible, we recommend deactivating the contact in Vision6. This prevents sending emails to them until they are reactivated (with a new email address).

If you’re willing to simply let the contact go, delete them from your Vision6 database. Just be sure to do this only after flagging or deleting the contact from any internal databases you manage as well. Otherwise you might accidently add them back into Vision6 next time you upload your database.

To learn more on managing bounced emails with Vision6, watch this tutorial video.

Posted by:
Jon Tobin
Team Leader Sales and Support

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