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Bounce Rates: The Most Important Email Metric?
Are you focusing on the wrong email metrics? In this post, we explain why it all comes down to bounce rates.
ITPro Today
December 8, 2014
2 Min Read
When it comes to email analysis—in the form of a monthly, weekly or daily report—certain metrics always seem to get more attention than others. While click rates, open rates, opt-out rates and others are of course critical to an organization (particularly the marketing and sales departments) one could make an argument that the most important email metric, from a company-wide perspective, is actually the bounce rate.
In fact, here are three reasons in support of this argument, in no particular order:
Delivery Rates Trump All: First, there’s the obvious impact of bounce rates with regard to your email deliverability. Of course, all of the aforementioned email metrics are dependent on your deliverability rate. After all, an email cannot be opened or clicked if it was never received. While soft bounces vary from one batch to the next, companies should keep an especially watchful eye on their hard bounce rate; removing them from their lists as quickly as possible.
List Integrity: The bounce rate of your email campaigns are a direct reflection of your list integrity; the higher the rate, the less clean your lists have become. Not only will a high bounce rate negatively impact deliverability (by slowing the delivery to valid addresses), it will also reflect poorly on your brand…
Sender Reputation: If your bounce rate remains high for an extended period of time, your organization is virtually guaranteed to be flagged as a spammer, a status no company wants. Not only can bounce rates provide insight into your sender reputation, they can help you gauge your overall brand reputation as well.
Companies spend an inordinate amount of time breaking down the performance of their email programs. While other metrics will continue to receive the lion’s share of analysis, it’s important to remember that most of them are dependent on low bounce rates.
What do you consider to be the most important email metric? Be sure to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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