60% of email goes nowhere. It never even sees the light of day, lost in cyberspace forever.
Why does this happen? According to an internal study by Averetek analyzing more than a year of email data, 42% of those emails are forwarded to another mailbox (typically in an instance where someone leaves a company). 18% are subject to a hard bounce — returned to sender. There are a few common reasons for a hard bounce:
- Email address is invalid or doesn’t exist
- Domain name doesn’t exist
- Subscriber’s mailbox is no longer active
A high bounce rate is no trivial matter. You can send your email again and again until you reach the right addresses, but there will be an effect. ISPs watch for IP addresses that repeatedly send email to bad addresses. Done with too high a frequency, this can affect your reputation and spam score. At the extreme, bad email can even land your IP address on blacklists.
If you’re experiencing high bounce or forwarding rates, this indicates problems with your email list management and potentially with your acquisition methods. Conversely, a low bounce rate points toward a high-quality, permission-based email list fueled by active and engaged subscribers.
So, it’s not an inconsequential statistic; it’s a key piece of success for email campaigns.
Closing the Gap with ContactAI
SAP Virtual Agency’s
ContactAI service is an essential tool in reducing your bounce or forwarding rates and improving your overall campaign performance.
Through its email validation process, ContactAI authenticates email addresses before an email is ever sent, essentially eliminating hard bounces and forwarded emails. Not only does this help you reach more people with your campaign, but it allows you to better track your campaign data by stripping out the bad, extraneous data you’ve absorbed in the past.
Email validation is just one benefit of the ContactAI, which also enriches contact lists by gathering missing information and prioritizes your contacts based off what stage they are at in the buying process, allowing you to pursue better leads.
SAP Virtual Agency also offers the data-driven list acquisition service
Lead Essentials, which allows partners to download up to 1,000 net-new names every month for as little as $300 per month.
Want to learn more about strengthening your email campaigns? You can begin using these and more features on your very next campaign! Visit SAP Virtual Agency today. Guides on both ContactAI and Lead Essentials can be found in the Knowledge Center.
