Email Bounce Rate. How G-Suite May Increase It
4 min read
Email marketing remains a powerful tool for business development. Even if it is one of the oldest digital methods of establishing interaction with the customers, it keeps impressing the market with new technologies, strengthens customer loyalty, and boosts sales. The main attraction of eMarketing is its profitability – experts believe its ROI amounts to 4000%. No wonder as the number of email users has already surpassed 4 billion and is expected to reach 4.6 billion users in 2025. But there are crucial aspects that may whittle down even the most effective email strategy. And bounce rate is one of these.
What is the email bounce rate?
No matter how elaborate an email campaign is, there will still be some letters that will return back to a sender. The percentage of subscribers that will not receive the message is an email bounce rate. There are quite a few reasons why it happens. Based on these, marketers speak of soft bounce and hard bounce. In the first case, the email cannot be delivered due to some temporary issue, like a mistake in the email address or full inbox. But if messages cannot get through because of permanent reasons – for example, the email address is no longer in use. Such a situation can seriously hurt the deliverability rate and affect the whole marketing campaign.
What is a generally accepted average for it? Usually, 2% of undelivered emails is OK. It means that only two letters out of 100 will not reach the recipient. However, when this parameter comes to 5%, it becomes critical for the sender’s reputation. Internet Service Providers (ISP) usually set limits for bounces and can block any account that considerably exceeds it. Of course, this parameter also depends on the industry. Here is some email marketing benchmark summary collected by the experts. Still, there appear a lot of new factors that need to be taken into account when developing a new email campaign. The intention of Google to suspend all G-Suite free accounts is one of them.
How paid G-Suite can worsen things.
Google Workspace or G-Suite is a multi-faceted application, but its primary function is that it allows its subscribers to use the Gmail interface and add their own domain name. However, not so long ago, Google announced that the service would introduce paid plans in July 2022. All customers who wish to retain their accounts will have to switch to a paid Google Workspace version. Even if everyone can enjoy a year discount for a smoother transition, this change will immediately lead to the situation that lots of email addresses will become stale. Currently, G-Suite has more than 2 billion active users. Even if a tiny part of them refuse to continue using the service under new conditions, it will immediately increase the email bounce rate and seriously affect marketing campaigns. But there are efficient solutions – keep reading to find out more.
Ways to reduce the email bounce rate.
No matter what outer obstacles may interfere with email campaigns, there are always methods to soften these or even bring them to almost zero influence. When it comes to an email interaction between a brand and a customer, a marketer’s first and foremost task is to make sure all emails are sent to active accounts and real users. Here are a few steps that may help achieve it.
This step will allow you to determine whether the recipient exists or not. Actually, the easiest way to do it is to send an email bounce test message to see whether it will be delivered to the right inbox. But it is just the tip of the iceberg - if you really want to do it right, you will have to go through a long checklist that will take time and nerves. Alternatively, there is a great alternative to manual validation – ready-to-use validation applications that will flawlessly do the job for you. Consider Mailcheck, a high-precision service that will perform a hassle-free email verification in no time. This app can be easily integrated with the most widely used platforms to function on your behalf continuously.
Do not underestimate the importance of controlling your undelivered emails. Use a marketing tool that will provide you with statistics of soft and hard bounce rates for each campaign. All hard bounces should be specifically monitored. This approach will help you identify which email addresses are no longer alive. The key idea of this stage is to identify the roots of the poor email deliverability and successfully eliminate these. Thorough analysis will enable you to develop a plan to avoid the same mistakes in future.
Summing up the above, the crucial thing to understand is that hours spent on creating a successful and engaging email marketing campaign may be a waste of time if you do not verify the list of recipients in advance. Even a small percentage of undelivered emails can affect the sender’s reputation and even increase the risk of being blacklisted. You have read only about a few ways to optimize email deliverability. There are many other aspects to take into account when planning an email marketing campaign, but email address validation software should always be treated as a top priority.