Reduce bounces by not having them in the first place
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on May 12, 2008
Bounces are like parking tickets. You don't really want them. They're hard to avoid when there's a lot of traffic around. A few of them won't get you in too much trouble. Get too many and you're up before the spam courts.You're less likely to have bounce-causing dead addresses on your list if you don't add dead addresses to your list (surprise!)
MarketingSherpa have four interesting practical tips on how you can avoid typos and misspellings in submitted email addresses and thus lower the bounce rates of your welcome messages or sign-up confirmation emails.
Two other common ways to introduce dead addresses to your list are if you lose the capacity for rational thought and buy a list of email addresses. Or if you wait too long before sending email to an address.
How long is too long when emailing old addresses? DJ Waldow has a good stab at answering that question for you in this pair of posts.
In both these cases, dead addresses may be the least of your worries. People won't expect your emails and you'll hear the sound of "report spam" buttons being pressed in response.
More on bounces | Tags: email marketing, bounce management, subscription forms
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2 Comments:
With the advent of disposable email addresses that expire in a matter of few hours, reducing bounces going forward might not be that easy after all.
By 
Roy Rajan, on
13 May, 2008
Thanks Roy. Yes, disposable email addresses are a growing and challenging phenomenon (and as an industry, we have to ask why they have become popular). The good news (I think) is that the resultant bounces won't affect your deliverability in the same way that sending to dead Hotmail addresses will. So the issue is more about lost opt-ins (as you say in your post).
By 
Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
14 May, 2008
