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Email marketing is one of the best ways to engage with customers. The relatively inexpensive and easy-to-customize emails can help drive traffic to a website, or even into a store. Email communication helps your customers stay connected with what’s going on at the business. The analytics from your email marketing platform can help you track clicks and find out the value of each subscriber.

If your business has committed to an email marketing strategy, then it’s likely you’ve also spent time amassing customer emails to build your email list. But it takes more than just building your email list to have a great email strategy — you also have to manage your email list to keep it in good shape.

Lower Your Bounce Rate

An email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that were unable to be delivered out of all the emails you sent in a single campaign. You may see both hard and soft bounces: hard bounces happen when an email cannot be delivered because the email address is incorrect; soft bounces happen when there’s an issue with the server being down, the mailbox is full, or an email is too large. Most email clients will attempt to resend an email that has a soft bounce a specific number of times before it’s considered a hard bounce and the subscriber is removed from your list.

The acceptable bounce rate for your emails depends on the industry you’re in – you can find a list of industry bounce rates at Constant Contact. As you can see, most industries have a less than 15% bounce rate with many averaging around 7%-9%. It’s wise to keep an eye on this number to make sure you’re reaching customers who will interact with your emails.

If you have a high bounce rate, you’ll want to look through the emails that have bounced. Some email addresses may simply be misspelled and only need to be fixed, while others may need to be deleted from your list completely (though your email client will usually take care of removing hard bounces from your list).

Say Goodbye to Some Subscribers

Sometimes you have a user that receives your emails, but never opens, clicks or responds to them. And yet they don’t unsubscribe. This kind of user is troublesome because their inactive presence can skew your open and click-through rates. You can try reaching out to them with a new offer or with an email that asks if they still want to be on your list.

If they don’t respond and you see this behavior going on for several months, you may want to be proactive and remove them yourself. It’s better to have a highly engaged list of fewer people than a large list of people who ignore your emails. Be aware that once you remove a subscriber you cannot re-add them to your list; the only way to re-add them is if the user re-subscribes to your list.

It’s important to keep up with your email list hygiene. If your business is getting high bounce rates, it can negatively impact your reputation on the email client platform. If you’re having trouble maintaining your email list, a company like Roundpeg can help manage your list – all you have to do is let us know.


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