Understanding Bounced Emails, Deliverability, and Opened Emails

So, you’ve sent out an email marketing campaign, now what?

You probably want to know how effective your campaign was, right?

But in order to understand the results of any email campaign, there are some things you need to understand first.

Bounced Emails

The first thing you need to understand is what a bounced email is. For lack of a better word, a bounced email is a rejected email, but one that was rejected by the email service provider that your email recipient uses to access email (like Gmail, Windows Live Mail, etc.). This means that the user will never see this email, even in their junk mail or spam folder.

There are two kinds of bounces, hard bounces and soft bounces. A hard bounce is a permanent bounce, the kind of bounce that means that this email address really isn’t any good. For example, if the email address doesn’t exist, then the email will bounce…hard. A soft bounce indicates a temporary situation, like the email account was full.

Deliverability

The next thing you need to understand is deliverability. What is deliverability? Deliverability is a percentage indicating how many emails made it to the inbox. However, it’s actually a bit more complicated than this. What this actually refers to is the percentage of emails that did not bounce. It is possible that the email didn’t make it to the inbox, but instead was redirected to the junk mail or spam folder. But the email was delivered, so it is counted as delivered. It is not possible for an email system to give you a precise breakdown of which emails made it to the inbox and which ones didn’t. Email privacy protection features in almost all email clients prevent that.

Opened Emails

Open rates. Most email products report on the number of emails that were opened by the recipients. This is a good figure to have, but just like deliverability, it is important to understand that this is more complicated than it might seem. Why? You guessed it, because of email privacy concerns. Almost all email clients (Gmail, Windows Live Mail, Outlook, etc.) do not, with their default settings, report back to an email sender when an email is opened.

Because of this, most email marketing systems use one of two methods to detect that an email has been opened. The first method is that a special, invisible image is embedded in the email and when the email requests this image from the server, it sends a code that lets the server know that that email has been opened and who opened it. The second method is to detect when a link is clicked. The idea with these methods is that, if the images were shown or a link was clicked, then the email was opened.

However, most email clients also include an email privacy feature where images are blocked by default. The user must either choose to show the images or “trust” the sender in order for the images to send a message to the server indicating that the email was opened. This means that it is entirely possible for an email recipient to open the email and even read it without showing any images or clicking on any links—in which case, there is no way to know the email was opened.

When you understand these facts about email statistics, you can better interpret the results of your emails campaigns—and you can even engage in campaigns to help your results be more accurate. You could launch an educational campaign trying to get your customers to “trust” you as an email sender, so images show automatically, thus improving the accuracy of your open rate statistics.

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