About Bounce Warnings

If you have received a bounce warning, it means that your email bounce rate has exceeded acceptable limits. It can be frustrating to discover that your emails have bounced, however, it is more important to understand what caused these bounces and how to avoid them in the future. Zoho CRM takes bounces seriously as they not only affect the delivery of your emails but also the reputation of the email service used to send the emails, in this case Zoho.

Watching out for a high bounce rate

"Bounce rate" refers to the percentage of email recipients who did not receive the emails you sent to them. While, in general, a small number of bounces are to be expected in bulk emailing, a warning is issued when the bounce rate crosses a certain limit. To set a benchmark, a bounce rate under 5% in Zoho CRM is acceptable and anything more than that needs to be attended to immediately.

Read further, to understand the ways in which you can avoid email bounces.

How to avoid email bounces

There can be many reasons why your emails have bounced. Based on these reasons, bounces are classified into hard bounces and soft bounces.

• Hard bounces: Email addresses are marked as hard bounces, when Zoho CRM finds that emails are permanently undeliverable to those email addresses. In such a case these hard bounced email addresses will be blocked. This means you will not be able to send any mails to them from Zoho CRM again.
• Soft bounces: Email addresses are marked as soft bounces when Zoho CRM finds that emails cannot be delivered only temporarily to those email addresses. In such a case, you will be allowed to send a mail to the soft bounced email address five more consecutive times. If at the end of the fifth time, the mail is not deliverable, it will be considered as hard bounce and the email address will be blocked.

Regardless of the type of email bounce, it is good practice to follow the suggestions mentioned below in order to continue sending emails from Zoho CRM without hassles.

Avoid formatting issues while importing a list into Zoho CRM.

Often when you import leads and contacts in Zoho CRM, there may be formatting errors in your import sheet that have skipped your attention. Make sure you check the following points while you import a list.

• In your import sheet, find and remove any additional characters in the Email address field - such as a comma, quotation mark, space etc.
• Make sure each column is titled correctly, after the respective field names. For example, First Name, Last Name, Email Address and so on.

Avoid sending emails to old and stale email lists.

One of the most common reasons for email bounces could be that your contact list is outdated.

When we say "stale list", it could mean any of the following:

• The email addresses are no longer valid
• The contacts have not been getting emails from you for a long period, say more than six months.
• Your leads and contacts have long since changed their email address.
• Your contacts have not been using their email account for too long, so the account has stopped working and started returning bounces.
• The recipient email domains have expired.

In any of these cases, there is a good chance your for your emails to bounce. Therefore, it is good practice to check and update the list of leads and contacts at regular intervals. If it's been too long since you sent a batch of emails, re-confirm your contact list before you send another set of emails.

Avoid using a public domain address as your "From" address.

It is very likely for your emails to bounce if you have been using a public webmail address as your "From" address.

Free web domains do have strict policies to avoid spam, however when you use such an email address to send your emails via Zoho CRM, it is very likely for your emails to bounce. For example if you send emails via Zoho CRM using example-id@yahoo.com, the receiving servers will identify that the email is not directly from Yahoo but via another platform. In this case, there is a chance that the servers might reject the emails, resulting in an email bounce.

Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you use your own private domain based email address in Zoho CRM to send mass emails to customers.

Avoid buying email addresses from illegitimate sources.

If the email addresses of your leads and contacts have been collected at different points in time from untrustworthy sources, it is likely that they are fake or invalid. It is better not to send to bought or harvested lists. It is highly recommended that you verify and confirm the interest of your leads and contacts in receiving the emails before you send bulk emails to them.

Remove invalid email address

To make sure your contact lists do not become obsolete, ensure that you verify the email addresses at regular intervals. Over time, it is likely that some email addresses shut down due to prolonged inactivity and become invalid. Make sure to delete such invaild email addresses.

To check your email bounces, Zoho CRM offers you an Email Bounce report by default. This report can be accessed from Reports > Email Reports > Bounce Report.