A low bounce rate is one of the mandatory rules that you are required to follow to protect your account's reputation and improve the quality of your communications with contacts. All rules are listed in Reply Usage Policy.
Bounce rate threshold handling in Reply
Previously, the acceptable bounce rate for a sequence was 15%. Once these rates were reached, the sequence was suspended and stopped, and it was impossible to resume it.
As a result, you had to create a new sequence and manually move all the contacts to it to resume your activities. The huge disadvantage of such an approach was that there was no guarantee the sequence would reach the same threshold twice a day.
A new approach for bounce detection and handling
The new logic allows you to manage the bounce routine easier with the enhanced bounce detection and suspension feature. Now you don't have to manually move the remaining contacts to another sequence. The step will be automatically resumed. As a result, you can spend less time managing sequences.
The new acceptable bounce rate is 8%, which is calculated every 24 hours.
If you reached an 8% bounce rate while sending some of your steps:
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Bounces are calculated per all email steps and all sending emails in the sequence. The number of bounced emails is calculated once an hour.
Important. The limit for the number of emails sent during a day will also affect the logic for bounce calculation. The number of allowed emails during the day is 200 emails (sent per entire sequence and for the current sending window). Here's how it works:
If 199 or fewer emails were sent and an 8% bounce threshold is reached, the first step as well as any other steps in the sequence are not stopped.
If 200 or more emails are sent and an 8% bounce threshold is reached, the logic for bounce rate threshold handling will be applied.
Please note. You can also track the status of your sequence and its bounce rate by its toggle: when the sequence reached a 4% bounce rate, the toggle of the sequence will be orange, and when an 8% bounce rate is reached, the toggle will be red.
What is bounced email & bounce rate?
Bounced emails are emails that you have sent, but for some reason, these emails were rejected by the mail server, so they are not delivered. There are two types of bounced emails:
hard bounce: permanently rejected emails
soft bounce: temporary undeliverable
The reason for this can be the outdated or incorrect email addresses of the contacts you are trying to reach out to. For example, the email addresses belong to people that are not related to the same business anymore, invalid, nonexistent emails, etc. As a result, the server is unable to accept emails that are sent to such contacts.
To understand why your emails bounced, you need to check the Delivery Status Notification message. You can find this message in your email account Inbox as a reply to your sent email. This message will contain bounce error codes and an explanation of how to manage them. Here's an article that explains the most common types of such errors.
The bounce rate is calculated in the following way:
Bounce rate in % = Bounced emails x 100 / Total people
The best way to avoid emails that bounce is to check your contact lists before starting the sequence. For this, you can use the Reply email validation service. However, there can still be a place for bouncing. The higher the bounce rate, the greater the risk that your sequence will be suspended and you will obtain a negative reputation for your domain.
For this reason, Reply provides you with some bounce rate threshold handling techniques. Recently, it was updated with new changes. Let's take a look at the new approach to bounce calculation and how it affects the sending email steps in your sequences.