Email Bounce Rate
Percentage of sent emails that fail to reach recipients' inboxes due to delivery issues or invalid addresses.
Definition
Email bounce rate measures undeliverable messages, split between hard bounces (permanent failures like invalid addresses) and soft bounces (temporary issues like full mailboxes). Industry benchmarks typically range from 2-5%.
High bounce rates damage sender reputation and deliverability, potentially causing future emails to be filtered as spam. Regular list cleaning and validation help maintain healthy bounce rates.
Why It Matters
Bounce rates directly impact email deliverability and sender reputation with ISPs, affecting whether future campaigns reach subscriber inboxes. Poor bounce management can severely limit email marketing effectiveness.
Monitoring bounce rates helps identify list quality issues and infrastructure problems, enabling proactive maintenance that protects long-term email marketing performance and ROI.
Examples in Practice
An e-commerce retailer seeing 8% bounce rates after purchasing an email list, indicating poor data quality and potential deliverability issues.
A newsletter publisher maintaining 2% bounce rates through double opt-in processes and regular list validation, ensuring strong inbox placement.
A B2B company experiencing sudden bounce rate spikes after a domain change, requiring SPF and DKIM record updates to restore delivery.