Many email service providers (ESPs) monitor bounce rates and will take action if bounce rates increase too much. A hard bounce rate of 5% or above is enough to cause most ESPs to reach out or take action to restrict your sending.

ESPs have thresholds in place that if exceeded will result in a domain being temporarily disabled, meaning that your email campaign sending privileges may be indefinitely placed on hold. These limits are in place to protect your email reputation in case your system is compromised by a spammer or someone in your organization makes a large mistake.

If you do not have a good reputation tied to your domain and IP address, your email will not reach your recipients’ inboxes.

The number one reason we see people get blocked is that they have a bad mailing list. Most of these lists have bad email addresses. ESPs are good at recognizing bad mailing lists.

Best practices for lowering bounce rates:

1. Clean your mailing list of invalid email addresses.
2. Only send emails to recipients that you have communicated with recently, or they have signed up to receive campaign email.
3. Verify the email address is correct with a confirmation email (or confirmed opt-in).
4. Don’t purchase your list or scrape websites for emails.

The number one reason we see people get blocked is that they have a bad mailing list. Don’t purchase your list or scrape websites for emails. It’s the easy way out and you will pay the consequences. Again, most of these lists have bad email addresses, and ESPs are very good at recognizing bad mailing lists.

You should have your Privacy Policy easily accessible on your website. In addition, you should have a place on your website where users can unsubscribe from your mailings, in addition to a link in every email you send. Campaign email sent from Mothernode will always automatically include an unsubscribe link.

While Mothernode must rely on you to be responsible for how you procure your mailing list, we do track and give you data to easily see how your emails are being received. Mothernode gives you information for bounces, unsubscribes, complaints opens and clicks so that you can modify your mailing lists appropriately. In addition, we automate a lot of the work by keeping track of recipients that have unsubscribed, bounced or complained and stopping future deliveries to those recipients.

*The contents of this article are provided by Mothernode and the MN ESP to help Mothernode customers establish best practices for their email marketing.