What bounce rate percentage causes deliverability problems?

Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that when it comes to deliverability, he advises senders to check off as many checkmarks from the best industry practices as possible (or as many as their business case allows). He considers that there is not a single day when your emails reach 100% inbox, some of the emails will go to spam folder and it is close to impossible to avoid it. However, that difference between 93% inbox placement and 95% inbox placement is still beneficial for you as a marketer and those unquantifiable efforts may help you achieve exactly that. It may not mean much in short term, but during the years it should add a solid income to your business.

Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that as a sender, he highly recommends 3rd party verification services. Captchas catch the bots from signing up but there are lot of other menacing problems when it comes to bad email sign ups. He finds them critical.

Email marketer from Constant Contact explains that a good bounce rate should ideally be under 2%, with rates above this requiring attention to list hygiene.

Email marketer from Email Geeks says to be clear, 2% on initial opt-in should raise red flags. After that, I’d expect sends to have much lower undeliverable rates. As an ESP I generally *do not* recommend clients use 3rd party verification services, they are a waste of money in my experience and more easily solved by improving your subscriber acquisition setup. Using CAPTCHA’s, other various bot detection techniques, confirmed opt-in, etc.

Email marketer from Litmus explains that maintaining a bounce rate below 2% is vital for ensuring good deliverability and avoiding spam folder placement.

Email marketer from Email Geeks says another good approach is to put together an outline of what the true impact of a major deliverability issue will have to your organization using the lifetime value of an email subscriber and what negative impact on business a major ISP issue will have. If you have any sort of average lifetime $ value of an email subscriber, and know that (as an example) Gmail is 45% of your subscribers, you can forecast what drop in ROI email marketing will experience if reputation declines and Gmail spam folder placement occurs (using some assumptions like a 1% or less open rate from Gmail spam folder). Senders often use this approach to outline the importance of monitoring deliverability rates and investing time and costs into doing so.

Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that bounce rates can absolutely hurt delivery and there isn't a magic number but the goal is to get to 0 (even though that is impossible).

Email marketer from ActiveCampaign recommends regularly cleaning your list to ensure bounce rates stay as low as possible, avoiding deliverability problems. Ideally you should aim for below 2%.

Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum shares that if bounce rates exceed 5%, immediate action like list cleaning and reviewing acquisition methods are necessary to avoid deliverability issues.

Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that a bounce rate greater than 2% should raise red flags because higher than that, you likely have either a list hygiene issue and/or a sender reputation issue. She has seen it where with a bunch of hard bounces (invalid email addresses) there was also an increase in block bounces. And sometimes it was due to a huge volume spike (let's dig out old lists!) that yielded a bunch of bad email addresses and also looked very spammy due to the volume spike, so the MBPs started to block.

Email marketer from Mailjet explains that a bounce rate consistently above 2% should prompt investigation, as it can negatively impact sender reputation.

Email marketer from HubSpot explains that while they don't state an exact number, consistently high bounce rates damage your sender reputation and hurt email deliverability in the long run.

Email marketer from Reddit explains that a bounce rate above 3% is considered problematic and needs immediate attention to maintain a healthy sender reputation.

Email marketer from SparkPost explains that you should try to keep your bounce rate under 2%, and address the cause quickly if it goes above 5%.

Email marketer from ZeroBounce shares that ideally, your email bounce rate should be less than 2%. Anything higher than that could damage your sender reputation and harm your deliverability rate.

Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that bounces aren’t buying and they likely cost you money, so it seems like bad business not to care about them. She would be more worried about spam traps (which don’t bounce), but depending on the bounce reasons and mailbox providers, you could absolutely encounter deliverability problems due to bounces. The most likely outcomes are spam folder placement and/or outright blocking. It’s not easy to quantify because the thresholds are likely variable, and intertwined with several other datapoints.

Email marketer from MailerLite shares that email deliverability is at risk if the bounce rate is too high. A target bounce rate is between 0% and 2%.

Expert from Email Geeks shares it is good to maintain rates over time (especially by domain if you can get them) so that you can show the impact of specific actions and/or know when it's time to hit the brakes and fix a problem.

Expert from Spam Resource explains that a bounce rate of over 1-2% should be investigated and rates over 5% indicate a serious problem that should be addressed immediately to prevent deliverability damage.

Expert from Word to the Wise shares that you should keep your bounce rates low as high bounce rates impact deliverability. Your list quality suffers as the ratio of good to bad addresses gets out of whack, and mailbox providers begin to filter or block messages from senders with too many bounces.

Documentation from Google Workspace shares that while not explicitly stating a bounce rate percentage, consistently high bounce rates contribute to emails being marked as spam, affecting deliverability.

Documentation from SendGrid shares that a bounce rate exceeding 5% indicates significant list quality issues that can harm deliverability.

Documentation from Microsoft shares that high bounce rates are a signal to email providers that the sender may not be following best practices, negatively affecting deliverability.

Documentation from Amazon SES explains that high bounce rates, specifically those above 5%, will impact your reputation and may lead to account suspension.