I often hear “I have X% bounces. How do I compare against
benchmarks?” I have a theory on this, when it comes to negative metrics such as
bounce don’t benchmark yourself against others. We are going in the direction
where data integrity is key, where subscribers are being given the tools to manage
their inboxes; where relevancy of marketing communications and subscriber
engagement is a contributing factor to filtering.
The answer, in my opinion, is to benchmark yourself against...
yourself. If your average bounce rate was say 5%, it doesn’t matter if the industry/vertical
average is 7%, this doesn’t mean you should allow for this metric to increase or
not try to tackle the issue. It should always be an objective to do your best
to get this lower the following year.
I would say the most common 5XX errors [hard bounces] are
for disabled or unknown addresses and policy based rejections. There are others
that I am aware of, but those two are the most frequent. Unknown users are one of the common deliverability
challenges so you should want this as low as possible for obvious reasons.
TIP:
Don’t just benchmark the overall bounce rate, but per marketing
campaign. Many companies will have a variety of campaigns such as welcome, newsletters,
reactivation, remarketing etc. If you took benchmarking bounces that one step
further, you could find identifiers to when you are going wrong i.e. if the overall
average is 4% but the average on welcomes are 10% there could be issues with
your acquisition sources and these should be looked at.
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