Help with High bounce rates

Marketing & Content Email Marketing Tool
1

Hi, Hubspot community, I am a digital marketer in the B2B space. In my first email campaign I experienced a bounce rate of 7.64%, to combat this issue I deleted the contacts with hard bounces and created an unengaged contact list so they would not receive any further communication from my company. However, some of my colleagues just sent me a list of several hundred more customers and my boss wants me to email them as well (I report directly to the VP). I explained to my boss that if we send another email with a bounce rate above 5% our account will be suspended and he is pretty adamant about sending them the newsletter as well. My question is, with these new contacts ( when importing I removed the contacts with invalid emails and duplicate info) how can I ensure a low bounce rate? Or should I only send the newsletter to our active and engaged customers? I would appreciate any advice on this!

2

Hey @LPhares, thanks for reaching out! This is a great question, and there’s a bunch you can do to minimize your bounce rate:

  1. Scrub email addresses through a deliverability tool, like NeverBounce. This is never a perfect solution, but it can help you weed out the majority of invalid email addresses from your lists. I would run any new lists through NeverBounce as well as any lists that have been sitting for 3+ months without any sends
  2. Search your database for “.co,” “.con,” and other typos. Sometimes, a user enters their email address incorrectly, and this can be a good way to catch it
  3. Send to lists that are expecting to hear from you and have opted in. Cold email lists that you generate from sources like ZoomInfo or manual research are less likely to be valid than email addresses entered on your forms
  4. If you must send to cold or unengaged lists, scrub them and then break up the email send into multiple smaller ones. It’s easier to manage multiple bounces across multiple sends without getting on HubSpot’s radar vs concentrating all potential bounces into a single send

You’ll likely never completely eliminate bounces (people change jobs, get locked out of email addresses, and the like), but being mindful of where your lists are coming from and how recently they have successfully had emails delivered to them will help you keep your bounce rate down.

Hope this helps!!