Bounced emails - what should you do about them?
If you’ve sent a Mailchimp email campaign lately, chances are it’s bounced to a few people. What does that even mean? How do you find out? And do you need to do anything?
So you’ve sent an email campaign from Mailchimp and you’ve hopefully(!) looked at the campaign report. And in that report you’ve seen a “Bounce rate”. Now what?
But what does “bounced” mean when it comes to emails?
Basically it means your email hasn’t been able to get through to the recipient. There are two types of bounces: “hard” and “soft”. If you click on the teal number (where it says “59 bounced” in the example above, you can see more details and which type they are.
About Hard Bounces
Hard bounces happen when an email can't be delivered. This can be caused by an invalid email address or an unexpected error during sending. It’s fairly common to see in the following scenarios:
You have a B2B audience with lots of business addresses - someone on your list has left the organisation and their email has stopped working.
You have an audience with older people in it who often took an email address offered by their home broadband provider e.g. bob.smith@btinternet.com. Then they move to another broadband supplier, they lose that email address. Younger people tend to have more portable email addresses e.g. gmail etc. which they retain.
There is a typo in the email address - gmail is probably the most misspelt word ever.
Your site has been hit by spambots who signed up with invalid email addresses.
if an email hard bounces, the contact status will change from subscribed to cleaned. At that point they become deadwood in your account. If you send a campaign to “all subscribers”, cleaned contacts will automatically be excluded. They are not counted in your contact numbers for billing purposes. They are retained in your account for reference. You cannot add that email address back into your audience or edit it if you notice a typo in the email address - you would need to add them as an entirely new subscriber with the correct email address. You cannot archive cleaned contacts but you can permanently delete them.
About Soft Bounces
Soft bounces are recognized by the email server, but are returned to the sender for a variety of reasons.
This can include issues like the mailbox being full or temporarily unavailable - future sends may get through successfully. However if not, soft bounces can turn into hard bounces over time.
Say for example you have a B2B audience which will be impacted by staff-turnover. You have previously got emails through to a person successfully, but they have left. Initially those emails will soft bounce. If you send several emails over a period of time, each of which soft bounces, Mailchimp will then convert that into a hard bounce.
Bounce Reasons
If you want to do a bit more digging you can also click on the “Bounce Reason” alongside each one, which will open up a page of gobbledegook. If you trawl through it, further down you will see something written in plain English that gives you a bit more info:
Do you need to be concerned about bounces and do anything?
That depends.
If you have been emailing your audience regularly and there are just the odd few bounces, then probably not. There’s not usually any need to take action, and if soft bounces repeat Mailchimp will clean them off organically if they continue to soft bounce.
However, if you notice that there are similarities in the addresses that your emails have bounced to, e.g. they are all [something]@yahoo.co.uk, you might want to check for blacklisting.
If you have not emailed for several months or if you have added lots of new contacts either by importing or syncing, then you should re-validate your audience list BEFORE sending a campaign to minimise bounces. A sudden high bounce rate can negatively impact your sender reputation, delivery and cause blacklisting.
How do you re-validate? Typically by exporting your audience and processing it through something like Zerobounce (or even better doing it before you import contacts in the first place).
Got questions? Need help?