You might wonder what a bounce rate is?
Bounce rate is a percentage of emails not delivered to your email list. It's crucial that you keep your bounce rate as low as possible so that the rest of the emails get actually delivered.
You might ask yourself: why is this important and how does it affect your working emails?
And this is the reason. A large number of email service providers and anti-spam monitors actively check the bounce rate in order to determine if your email is spam, or whether it will be delivered at all.
Email service providers often keep and use bounce rate stats for future deliveries from your email domain. If your email bounce rate is high, future emails delivered to that provider might be flagged as spam or not delivered at all, for a certain period of time. That is why it is crucial to keep your bounce rate as low as possible.

Email can bounce due to temporary problems which is usually called soft bounce. Another reason that can cause an email to bounce is by sending an email to an email address that does not exist or work at all, then it is called a hard bounce.
Even though both bounces are bad, there is unofficial consent that sending email to not existing email is much worse.
How to Reduce email bounce rate
In order to reduce bounce rate, you should do regular checks and update your contact or lead emails. This involves:
Unsubscribing email address that had a hard bounce from a previous send.
Authenticating your leads email addresses when they fill in forms.
Updating email addresses for contacts that have changed companies.
This can be done manually if your email lists contain few contacts. But if your email lists are huge then we recommend using an automated way to perform checks and update your contacts emails.
FunnelBud provides an automatic way to verify leads emails even before you send an email to them and therefore reducing your bounce rate.
When should you verify your contact emails to reduce a bounce rate
Whenever you do an import of contacts from any other system
If you haven’t sent an email for a few months to that contact
If emails have come through a native form
Before sending the first email to a contact
At least once a year
These methods of checking emails will reduce your percentage of bounce rate.
This article is a part of Importance of keeping your contacts up to date, and we recommend reading that article to have a full picture and have more information about other reasons why you should update your lead emails on a regular basis.