The Importance of Analyzing Bounce Rates in Email Marketing

Bounce Rates are an extremely important metric in online marketing. For those engaged in email marketing, there are two separate definitions for ‘Bounce Rates’ to consider.

The first definition relates to the delivery of your email marketing campaign. In this case, the bounce rate tells us what percentage of addresses didn’t receive your message because it was returned by a recipient mail server. In this case, high bounce rates will impact your campaign because:

1. Your sender reputation suffers when bounce rates are high.
2. You delivery rate suffers when messages bounce.

In email marketing, it is essential to keep your mailing list clean. What is the point in keeping email addresses on your list if they continue to bounce? It slows delivery to valid addresses and damages your sender reputation. There are two categories of email bounces. A hard bounce refers to those messages that were returned by a recipient server because the address is invalid because the domain name doesn’t exist or the address for that domain isn’t recognized. A hard bounce would be returned, for example, if an address on your list was entered incorrectly as info@messagingtimes.cim rather than .com.

A soft bounce, on the other hand, is returned because of a temporary problem with the email address or recipient mail server. When a recipient’s mailbox is full, for example, the server will bounce the message back to the sender. The address is valid, but there is something temporarily preventing the message from getting to them at the moment it was sent.

* GroupMail’s Subscriber Add-on makes it easy to manage bounces by enabling senders to create rules that automatically delete or exclude addresses that bounce from your list. For more information, read Managing Bounces with GroupMail.

The second definition for bounce rate relates to the activity on your website or landing page. Firstly, a landing page is the page that visitors to your site ‘land on’ when they click on a link, either from a search engine result, referral site or your email message. High bounce rates on your landing page could signify that visitors don’t find the information to be relevant. A low bounce rate on your website or landing page signifies that the information on your site is relevant to visitors.

I use ‘signify’ because the way that bounce rates on a website are calculated involves the measurement of time spent on a page. The threshold for a session timeout required for a bounce to be counted is quite high. High enough that if a visitor ‘lands’ on a product checkout page and completes a purchase (which generally doesn’t take too long to complete) the visit may be counted as a bounce.

Additionally, Internet users today tend to spend less time on any one page or site because they tend to skim content. A short visit does not necessarily mean that the visitor found the information to irrelevant. We tend to consume content and make decisions faster today because there is so much competition for our attention and because we tend to multi-task more. I can’t remember the last time that I spent more than 5 minutes on any one website.

“…For example, if the page that you are investigating is the final step of a process (purchasing a product, registering for information) having a high bounce rate should not be unexpected. On the contrary, if the page that you are analyzing makes up the first step of the process (viewing a product), then a high bounce rate might be cause for concern…” continue reading

Website bounce rates can be analyzed quite easily using a web metrics tool such as Google Analytics. Bounce rates can help you to analyze keyword relevance or the effectiveness of your website or landing page design. It could be assumed that the more relevant and informative that your landing page is to visitors, the lower the bounce rate will be.

Avinash Kaushik, the web metrics guru and Google Analytics evangelist, talks about the importance of the Bounce Rate metric in terms of website analysis in the video below.