I bet you review your key email marketing metrics - open, click, convert - on a regular basis. They may even be numbers that you have to report to someone in your organization. I bet that some of you even check your overall deliverability - “We have 97.6% deliverability! Yeah! Yipeeeee!”
However, I bet many email marketers are not aware of another critical metric to your overall email marketing success: bounce data. How often are you digging into the detailed report of your email addresses that bounced?
Before we think critically about the answer to that question (and why it is so important), let’s first ensure that we are on the same page with regards to the phrase “bounce data.” At the most fundamental, basic level, bounce data refers to undeliverable email addresses. The term “undeliverable” is even debatable, but for argument’s sake, lets say that undeliverable = email not accepted by the incoming mail server.
Of the undeliverables, one could separate the bounces into 2 main categories: Hard (bad email address, bad domain, etc.) or Soft (connection timed out, mailbox full, etc.). On the other end of the spectrum, you could get as granular as looking at the specific bounce codes [link to description of bounce codes] such as 5.x.x or 4.x.x.
So, why is reviewing your bounce data so critical?
High bounce numbers may be indicative of one or more of the following:
1. Poor list growth/collection process
- Data entry errors - Is a human transposing email addresses from offline to online?
- An old list - How old is your list? Remember that people tend to change their email addresses often.
- Purchased and/or rented list - Have you recently augmented your house file with an outside vendor?
2. Broader deliverability issues
- Blocked and/or blacklisted - Are you seeing a disproportionately high number of bounces at one ISP? Is there detail in the bounce data that would indicate a systemic issue?
- Low Sender Score and/or Bronto Sender Rating - How does your IP address look, relative to your peers?
3. Spam-like design
- One big image - Are you forgetting that designing for email is different than for designing for the web?
- No authentication - Are you (or your ESP) using all of the latest authentication technologies (SPF, SenderID, DKIM, DomainKeys, etc.)?
So, don’t forget to peek at your bounce data every so often. If you don’t know where to look, ask your ESP. If your in-house solution or ESP can’t provide that level of detail, maybe it’s time to start shopping.
DJ Waldow
Director of Best Practices & Deliverability at Bronto
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Please define what is meant by the term “Bronto Sender Rating” in this article?
Thank you.
The Bronto Sender Rating is a proprietary objective scoring system that uses delivery feedback from ISPs to determine what the holistic value, as seen by recipients, is of the sender as a whole. It includes such metrics as bounces, complaints by recipients, and volume sent…as well as a few other data points we hold confidential but have proven their worthiness as good components of measuring the patterns of a sender’s mailings. Also, it should be noted that it is written in such a way that one bad send shouldn’t throw the score into a tailspin. However, repeated bad sends will have a direct impact on the score and thus the sender’s ability to send in the future.
chris@bronto