Exploring Email Bounce Rate Benchmarks in Marketing

The email bounce rate remains a perpetual concern for professionals in the marketing domain. Unlike other metrics, gauging email deliverability poses a slightly intricate challenge, making it tough to assess the effectiveness of campaigns.

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So, what does email bounce rate mean?

The email bounce rate shows the percentage of emails that didn't make it to the people they were supposed to in comparison to the total sent. Essentially, it points to delivery issues, which could be temporary or permanent.

When your emails can't reach your intended audience, they bounce back. This makes it crucial for marketers to be familiar with the email bounce rate benchmarks to improve their campaigns.

Importance of Monitoring Email Bounce Rate in Marketing

As a business, it is important to monitor email marketing benchmarks because it helps you understand if your email is reaching the right audience. With the help of bounce rate monitoring, you can become aware of the red flags and potentially avoid them, too.

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Furthermore, it can also help you reconsider and improve your strategy to keep your business running smoothly. When you pay attention to bounce rates, you can make improvements in your campaigns and also connect with your audience on a wider scale.

How Do You Calculate the Email Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate is usually reflected in percentages. It is calculated by dividing the number of emails that came back to you by the number of total emails that were sent in the campaign. The result is then multiplied by 100 to receive the bounce percentage.

The formula for email bounce rate is as follows:

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Benchmark Average Bounce Rate by Industry

The industry you operate in also impacts the email marketing benchmarks. This is mostly because not every industry caters to the needs of the audience via online channels. While some industries may have a high bounce rate, others may have a comparatively lower one. The optimal email bounce rate is less than 2%.

At the same time, it is also important that you take a close look at the bounce rate of different industries. These include:

1. Food and Beverage Industry

The bounce rate across the food and beverage industry is around 0.30%. The nature of the particular restaurant’s website has a huge role in the bounce rate. For example, certain restaurants may offer all information directly, upon which customers would bounce off.

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Other factors that can contribute to such a high bounce rate are the lack of interactive elements, boring visual appeal, and so on in the restaurant email marketing campaign. Moreover, you may send transactional emails without a personalized touch that doesn’t appeal to the audience. Thus, it is important to understand the drawbacks of a poor layout or including all information in one place and make changes to distribute information evenly.

This keeps the customers informed, which can help lower the bounce rate. Furthermore, the average email bounce rate will also be affected by sending emails to outdated lists or not targeting the right audience through campaigns.

2. Games Industry

The average email bounce rate for the games industry stands at 0.16%. Most of the target audience of the games industry is very young people who are in the habit of abandoning their email IDs, not using inactive accounts, and may use temporary emails for sign-up purposes.

The games industry has a global customer base, which is why email deliverability can be affected, as it may be flagged as spam or due to email configuration differences. Some of the games also have a free-to-play model, which is why many players sign up using disposable emails that they use solely to play free games.

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Since data privacy concerns are increasing at a rapid rate, most young gamers may not provide accurate email addresses while signing up, which may affect the deliverability rate, leading to a high bounce rate.

3. Ecommerce Industry

The bounce rate across the eCommerce industry has taken a significant shift in the past few years. Compared to other industries, it was estimated that the eCommerce industry also showed a significant email bounce rate. The eCommerce industry’s email bounce rates were 0.19%.

Various issues can have a significant negative impact, leading to a higher email bounce rate for the eCommerce industry, like outdated email lists, targeting issues, and engagement spam. Furthermore, it will also be affected due to the large file sizes of your email marketing material and server problems.

In the eCommerce industry, businesses should partner with reliable service providers in order to avoid spam and bounce rates. Being in the ecommerce industry, it is always important to provide personalization in emails to increase email open rates.

4. Marketing & Advertising Industry

The average bounce rate for the marketing and advertising industry is around 1.10%. Marketing and advertising are two of the most crucial things to consider when it comes to email marketing on a video platform, but even these face a lot of challenges.

Targeting issues and increased unsubscribe rates are probably some major reasons why the average bounce rate for the marketing and advertising industry will be so high. Furthermore, targeting mobile users can also lead to an increased bounce rate because of the shorter attention span.

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Considering these differences, the marketing and advertising industry is gradually shifting its targeting and implementing strategies to improve its email bounce rate. Thus, optimizing the emails for marketing and advertising is extremely crucial to lowering the bounce rate further.

5. Computer & Electronics Industry

In 2022, the average email bounce rate for the electronics industry was approximately 0.24%. The emails may feature unnecessary product features and promotions that the audience cannot connect to. Moreover, the short-term product deals in the email campaigns can also lead to an increased email bounce rate.

Since the user is not very active, the bounce rate will increase. Similarly, when you offer all the information regarding the products in one email without a clear CTA, it does not hold their curiosity, and they will leave without going further.

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The competition across the computer and electronics industry is very high, which can pave the way for an increase in unsubscribing from emails, thereby preventing the proper functioning of the campaigns. One of the best things to do in this case would be to optimize the emails properly to reduce the bounce rates.

Benchmark Average Bounce Rate by Channel

In various cases, the industry average email bounce rate benchmark isn't enough, which is why it is important to calculate the bounce rate of channels, too. This helps in the proper calculation of the return on investment and the quality of leads received from the channels.

Some of the major channels whose bounce rate benchmarks you must analyze include the acquisition channels and delivery channels.

You must understand the difference in email bounce rate among each channel to identify areas where you can improve. This can also help boost site usability and create better content to reduce bounce rates.

Different channels usually feature different bounce rates because of their appeal to the target audience. For example, the bounce rate in acquisition channels may be significantly impacted by the presence of invalid links and spam addresses. Moreover, the content filtering differences across the delivery channel will have an impact on the email bounce rate.

The target audience across each channel has a huge role to play in determining the email bounce rate. It is crucial to target your emails in such a way that the click-through rates of your target audience increase. Furthermore, the email bounce rate in the delivery channel will also be affected by the email service provider's (ESP) reputation with respect to spam complaints from users. If the complaint score is high and ESP's reputation is poor, the bounce rate will be high.

Comparatively, referrals and emails usually have a low bounce rate because they intend to target customers. The right target audience is reached out to with the necessary links who are genuinely interested in viewing your content. Thus, they'll engage more with your content than usual.

Benchmark Average Bounce Rate by Device

Simply put, mobile users tend to bounce more than desktop or tablet users. Mobile users enjoy a seamless browsing experience and don't want to be bothered by irrelevant content. If an email doesn't meet their needs, they'll likely leave. Therefore, mobile users are likely to abandon unopened emails and won’t notice them unless they open them on their desktop devices.

Another big reason for higher mobile bounce rates is that mobile users often switch between apps more than desktop users. If your main audience is mobile users, this could harm your business reputation.

You must carefully analyze the number of mobile users who are your target audience and the bounce rate through them. After that, you may switch to optimizing the campaigns for mobile users and creating a different landing page. Furthermore, it is also important to track user data and understand user behavior to create targeted strategies for your audience and optimize marketing across different channels.

Conclusion

As the digital landscape evolves, the bounce rate for emails will evolve, too. However, it is important to be familiar with the email bounce rate in each sector, especially across your email marketing campaigns, to make the necessary changes.

By highlighting the benchmarks and necessary practices, you can improve your email marketing campaigns. Furthermore, it will also help boost user engagement by improving your email's open rates. Thus, you can focus on bounce rate optimization with a reliable email marketing software and improve your marketing strategies over time.