1) Clean Your Email Lists: Whether manually or via a list-hygiene service, check for incorrectly formatted addresses, invalid domains and typos (i.e., alo.com).
2) Re-engage Inactive Subscribers: If you bounce more email every time you send and/or more than half of your list hasn't opened or clicked on a single email in the last six months, it's time to conduct a re-engagment campaign. Keeping inactive addresses on your list will only drag down your email deliverabilty because many of those addresses belong to people who abandoned them without unsubscribing.
3) Consider Using an Email Change of Address (ECOA) Service: With many companies experiencing email address churn of 2.5% a month, an ECOA service could pay huge dividends. Return Path, a leading ECOA company, reportedly receives 1,000,000 email address changes a month.
4) Confirm Email Addresses: Send an auto-reply confirmation when a person subscribes, registers or makes a purchase. If that message bounces, you can attempt to correct it right from the start. Additionally, you may want to consider requiring a second email address line (in your online forms) that confirms the correct address was entered.
5) Include Subscription/Account Management Links in Your Emails: Make it easy for your customers and subscribers to update their email addresses by including a link in your email messages to your Web site account/subscription management page.
6) Prompt Customers To Update Information: When a customer is completing a transaction in the shopping cart, for example, prompt them to verify and update information - particularly their email address. If you have postal addresses or phone numbers for customers/subscribers with bad email addresses, consider contacting them via mail (such as a postcard) or telephone.
7) Monitor Email Delivery Rates By Domain: Track your open and bounce rates by major domain, such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink and others. If one is significantly different than the others, or your experience a sudden change, you may have a filtering or blacklist problem.
8) Monitor Blacklists: Regularly check the major spam databases and blacklists to ensure you or your email provider has not been added. Click here to check your DNS against MAPS and SpamCop, two of the more popular blacklist databases. (You will not receive a bounce message as a result of a blacklist, even though the email has not been delivered.)
9) Understand and Monitor Spam Filters: Get to know the more common things that most spam filters look for, including Microsoft Outlook's Junk Filter. Click here to see a list of many of the major spam filters. Also, click here to view the terms reviewed by Spam Assassin one of the more popular spam filters. (Spam filters also will not generate bounce messages.)
10) Remove "Spam Trap" Addresses: These are often added maliciously. Examples include:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
and
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.
11) Pretest Your Email: Prior to distributing your email campaign to your entire list, send a test to yourself and others (make sure you include all the major email services used by members of your list).
12) Understand How Your Email Provider Processes Bounces: Gain a thorough understanding of how your email provider classifies and handles soft and hard bounces - and manage accordingly.
13) Monitor Changes Among ISPs: After mergers, financial troubles and other announcements, many users of a particular ISP may decide to switch to a different account or ISP for their email. Consider sending an email to members of your list with the domain name in question, asking them if they would like to update their email address and other information.
14) When All Else Fails, Suppress or Delete Recurring Bouncers: Determine an appropriate bounce suppression/deletion strategy for your email program. With Lyris' email marketing application, hard bounces are automatically put into your "Trashed" list and will not be included in any ensuing message distributions, unless they are moved back into your active list.
If you are an active email marketer, managing and reducing your email bounces (see definition below) has never been more critical. Actively managing your bounces can reduce your email delivery costs and increase conversions, improving the ROI of your email marketing campaigns.
