For every email you send, your campaign dashboard returns key performance metrics that indicate how well your campaign performed. Aside from the open rate and click rate, you also have the bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, rejected rate, and delivery rate. For those looking to wrap their heads around all of the rates that affect deliverability, here’s a breakdown:
Bounce Types in Sugar Market:
There are two types of bounces; Sugar Market’s system records soft bounces and hard bounces, which can be caused by multiple things. The important differentiation is that a soft bounce is seemingly temporary, and a hard bounce is seemingly permanent.
- A soft bounce may be caused by temporary server issues. For example, if the company domain has an email limit per day.
- Hard bounces are caused by permission rules such as if the recipient email has a server spam filter in place, if the email address is incorrect, misspelled, if the domain is invalid, etc.
Rule of 15:
Sugar Market will continue to send emails to an email address that returns a soft bounce 15 consecutive times. Once the email registers the 15 consecutive soft bounces, it is categorized as a hard bounce, and undeliverable. This number will appear in your rejected rate on your campaign dashboard.
Delivery Status vs. Opt-In:
You'll see two things on a contact record in Sugar Market: Subscriber Status and Delivery Status, but what's the difference?
- Delivery Status: Once an email is categorized as undeliverable (soft bounce 15 consecutive times), Sugar Market no longer sends to them. This is a process in place to protect your spam ratings and ensure you are not blacklisted or sent directly to spam.
- Subscriber Status: This is the traditional method in which contacts can choose to opt-in or opt-out of marketing communications autonomously. Unlike an undeliverable email, which is a byproduct of 15 consecutive soft bounces, the subscriber status is usually changed by the recipient themselves. For example, if a contact is filling out a form and does not opt-in, they do not get email communications due to a choice they willingly made rather than insufficient data.
Note: When a record is created in Sugar Market, and you haven't sent an email to them, their DelStatus (delivery status) is marked as “Unknown” until you send them an email.
Effects on Deliverability:
The higher your soft bounce rates are (.2%-.5% is industry standard), the worse your spam rating is, and the more likely chance that your emails are sent directly to your recipient’s spam folder. In other words, the higher the bounce rate, the less likely your emails are to end up in the inbox. From the moment that an email service provider gets a red flag on their end for an email that bounced from your email domain, it lowers your email deliverability rate.
Not only do you want to stay out of the spam folder, but with a lousy spam rating, your email marketing tactic will hold significantly less power to drive MQLs or support your initiatives.
How do I know the bounce reason?
In terms of tracking bounce information, some email servers (on behalf of the recipients) are configured to return a reason for a hard bounce, in which case you would track that information in Sugar Market and your CRM (if the CRM functionality is set up). If the email servers are not configured to do so, then Sugar Market will lack insight into the bounce's reasoning.
Sugar Market records the validity and deliverability of an email on the Contact Level using the OpOut (subscriber status) and DelStatus (delivery status) fields, which push up to your CRM. To determine the reasonings (or bounce codes) for a bounce, you need to run a custom report or use SQL.
Identify Opportunities to Help Your Deliverability:
Once you pull a list of bounce codes, you can analyze the list to identify trends. You might find that a majority of soft bounces are stemming from a reason that you feel is permanent despite what the system believes. You can then create a report using Sugar Market’s custom report functionality that pulls in any email that returns that specific bounce code and use it as an exclude on your email sends. This will help lower your soft bounce rate on campaign sends, thus having a positive effect on your deliverability and spam rating.
There are a number of other best practices you can adopt to assist your spam rating as well, such as:
- Avoiding no-reply email addresses
- Setting up a custom email domain
- Using a tool to verify your email list
- Understanding subject line best practices
- Utilizing personalization
- Adding an unsubscribe link
- And more
What are your recommendations to fellow marketers looking to clean up their deliverability rate? Let me know in the comments!
