#36 - Running a Bounce Analysis

Today, I’ll be walking you through a recent diagnosis we did of a brand struggling with bounce issues, along with what we looked at, and the suggestions we gave.

Let’s get into it.

The High Level

The brand came to us noticeably alarmed, with about 30k total bounces in the span of about 3 weeks (you typically don’t want more than 1% over 30 days).

Flows Check

And so we got to work.

Taking a look at flows, we noticed a ~1.7% bounce rate on welcome flows, likely indicating lots of fake emails being inputted (because they were displaying the discount code on a successful submit).

It’s never recommended, because you’re training your prospect not to open your emails, hurting engagement metrics and CVRs.

If you’re running into issues like this, we suggest going with double opt-ins, making prospects confirm before the first proper email goes out. The only time you want to rethink this is when there’s a LARGE difference between email submissions vs email sends.

The biggest difference we’ve seen is 50%, but this was with a site that was heavily targeted by bots, and the support team didn’t receive any angry tickets, so we kept it.

Another two flows that had high bounce rates were the post-purchase, as well as the re-engagement flow (3.5% & 2.5%).

Not gonna lie, a little perplexed at the post-purchase, as you would think customers would give their real emails to receive purchase updates (we might run a CAPTCHA on the thank you page or some additional copy to talk about email).

As for the re-engagement, the brand was using an incredibly old list of people who’ve not interacted for a long time, so no surprise there as emails could no longer be valid.

The Backend

(you can check this by heading into deliverability > email > bounce details and this will be what you see)

For this brand in particular, the high number of bounces was due to the high campaign frequency over the past 3 weeks.

When we distilled it down even further, there were only ~4.8k unique soft bounces (note Klaviyo tags a profile as hard bounce and suppresses the profile once they soft bounced 7x).

We also noticed a good chunk of the bounces (~20k) were from Apple Mail emails (icloud.com), with error ‘invalid sending address’.

Unfortunately, this is more of an Apple issue with nothing much we can do, as logically if the brand had an invalid sending address the emails wouldn’t be able to be delivered to the rest of the users (whether through flows/campaigns).

Side note: Domains do experience a wave of bounces/spam at different points of the year which might be a result of how domain filter emails/security measures, and we’ve seen it across comcast/bigpond as well.

It thankfully cleared up at the end of the month.

Apart from that, we also noticed a slight delivery error that happened around the same period bounces started happening (rate limit exceeded).

This could be because of the sudden increase in sending volume (vs normal sending vol of the brand), likely flagging the system as potential mass spam (if Google is flagged, high likelihood of other inbox providers flagging it too).

That’s why a warm up process is required, especially when leading to bigger events like BFCM or Christmas.

Finally, whilst the brand was running their campaigns to their engaged segments, what they were not doing was running exclusions.

It’s equally as important knowing who NOT to send to just as who to send to - exclusions play a big part in ensuring lower negative engagement rates, and better overall deliverability (make sure you don’t overlook this).

And that’s a wrap!

I tend to go a little heavier and deeper when talking about these audits we run for our brands.

Would love to hear your thoughts on it, if you’ve anything you’d like us to cover, as well as how we can make this newsletter better for you (just hit reply!)

Have a great weekend ahead.