Use our helpful email bounce rate calculator to work out the bounce rate of a single email campaign or across multiple email campaigns.
You can also use it to derive the number of bounces or attempted email sends to hit your goals, as well as to calculate your email delivered rate (non-bounce rate).
Bounce rate is a useful metric to optimise your email campaigns with. Use this free calculator to review and improve your performance, or to speculate about different scenarios.
[Disambiguation: If you are looking for the bounce rate which applies to websites, please go here]
Email Bounce Rate Equation
The formula for email bounce rate is as follows:
Click to enlargeEmail Bounce Rate = (Bounces ÷ Attempted) x 100
What does Email Bounce Rate mean?
The bounce rate of an email campaign tells you the percentage of emails that you sent that were rejected by email inboxes. These rejections are known as ‘bounces’. This is a useful metric as it can tell you many things about your email marketing efforts.
Types of Bounces
To understand why bounce rate is useful, you first need to know about the two types of bounces that can occur:
Hard Bounces: This type of bounce tells you that you cannot email this address anymore. The problem that ‘bounced’ your email is likely permanent:
- the email address has been shut down
- the domain name the email address is using doesn’t exist
- your email address has been blocked (by the recipient or their email server),
Soft Bounces: This type of bounce can be thought of as being a temporary problem. Common reasons for soft bounces include:
- The email addresses inbox is full and can’t accept your email
- Your email was too large for the inbox to accept
- The recipient’s email server was temporarily down
Why Bounce Rate Is Useful
If you look at the above reasons for both soft bounces and hard bounces, you can see that some of the reasons are the sender’s fault, and some are not. It makes sense to try to reduce your bounce rate either way, as there is no point in writing and sending emails only for them to not be received.
For any email addresses which gave you a hard bounce, you should simply remove that email from your email list. By removing email addresses that you simply cannot contact from your list you are giving yourself a more accurate image of how successful your lead generation efforts are.
Doing this will also reduce your chances of being automatically being marked as spam – as email addresses that don’t exist repeatedly will tell email providers that you are potentially just spamming them. You can also reduce hard bounces by writing emails that sound less spammy.
The main thing you can do to reduce soft bounces is to make sure your emails aren’t unnecessarily large. Optimise your images and any code you include to make in minimal yet effective.
Top Tip
Bounce rate has an inbuilt paradox.
Having a lower bounce rate in some cases will, in fact, lower your bounce rate further. This is because some email platforms will use bounce rate itself as an indicator of how spammy an email sender is. This means that the bounce rate itself affects how many inboxes your emails actually make it into.
Keep your email list tidy, and your emails small to improve your bounce rate.
Find out more
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