Campaigns with a high bounce rate are a major headache for marketers. With the cost of collecting an opt-in being anything from 50p to £5 in many cases, a bounce rate of 25-30% is a huge waste.

In addition bounce rates are now used by ISP’s such as AOL to determine whether the email message is Spam. To ensure that your delivery rate is maximised follow the procedures below.

Pre-screen your addresses

Emailcenter can pre-screen your email addresses for invalid addresses. Our software verifies the email address by communicating with the recipient’s server to find out whether the user exists. In a recent exercise Emailcenter carried out analysis of a customers bounces. Over 53% of the 9,141 bounces could have been prevented and cleaned using this method.

Train your customer facing staff

It is important to stress to customer facing employees about the need for completing databases accurately. If these people know how the email address field in your customer database will be used they are less likely to fill it with junk.

Opt-in process

Recipients can also be known to type in the wrong address. This can be avoided by either asking the recipient to verify the email address they have inputted or to use a double opt-in method. Double opt-in is where an email is sent to the subscribers address straight after completing the signup form. In this email is normally a link they must click on to confirm the registration.

Use a profile page

In the B2C environment, recipients will often overlap their new email account with their old one. This means you must give them the opportunity to change the address they are subscribed to. This can be achieved through creating a profile page for each recipient that can be linked to from the email with a message encouraging them to update their details.

Analysis of previous bounces

After a campaign has been sent you can analyse the messages that have bounced if you are using a solution such as Maxemail. This will enable you to identify whether your server has been blacklisted, the emails have too many typo mistakes, they are out-of-date or your emails are blocked by ISP’s Spam filtering software. Upon understanding which issues you face proactive steps can be taken to correct and clean your list.

Taking these steps will enable you to increase the number of emails that will get through to your customers while making your email campaigns run more efficiently.

In this article we talked about how Emailcenter helped verify a clients bounces. This client spent an average of £1.10 for every address they collected. By cleaning and correcting these addresses they can avoid a waste of £5,329 spent on collecting these, a perfect argument for undertaking this exercise.