Author: Vladislava Karataneva

Email marketing sends targeted messages to promote products, nurture leads, and turn subscribers into customers. It remains one of the most cost-effective channels available, and launching your first campaign takes five steps: strategy, platform, list, design, and deliverability.

What is email marketing? A quick definition

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that sends targeted emails to promote products, share updates, or nurture leads. It works by building a list of people who’ve opted in, then sending content matched to their behavior, interests, or place in the customer journey. That’s what separates it from a broadcast channel: every message can be different depending on who’s reading it.

Why is email marketing important? Cost, ROI, and reach

Email marketing matters because it’s the one channel where you control the cost, own your audience outright, and can measure the return on every single send. The channel earns its reputation on cost. You’re not paying per impression or per click; you’re paying a flat monthly fee for your contact tier, no matter how many emails you send within that plan’s limit. That’s different from paid social or search, where spend scales with reach. The often-cited $42-for-$1 figure is a mature-program average, not a first-year one: realistic email marketing ROI in year one is closer to 100–200%, climbing to 300–500% by year two.

Email also stays useful as other channels get noisier. There’s no algorithm deciding who sees your message, and a list you’ve built is yours to keep even if a platform changes its rules or shuts down. Combined with segmentation and personalization, that direct line to your audience is why email keeps outperforming channels with a higher sticker price.

How to get start email marketinged in 5 steps

Five steps take you from no list to a sent campaign, and none of them need a developer or a design background. Work through them in order: platform and list come before design, so you’re not redoing work once you’ve already built something.

1. Plan your email strategy

Start with a goal. A campaign might aim to generate leads, convert existing leads, re-engage inactive subscribers, or promote a new product; the goal decides everything else about the send. Once you know the goal, define your audience, decide what format and tone will land with them, and pick which metrics you’ll use to judge whether it worked.

2. Choose a platform

An email service provider handles sending, list management, templates, and analytics, so the real decision is which features you need at your budget. SiteGround Email Marketing, for example, comes with a no-code builder, an AI email writer, and AI image generation on every plan, plus automation, segmentation, and built-in analytics, backed by a 98.80% delivery rate. That removes the need for separate design, copywriting, or list-building tools on a first campaign.

3. Build your email list

If you’re emailing existing clients, build your list by importing your contacts directly into the platform. If you’re starting from zero, use SiteGround Email Marketing’s built-in signup forms and subscribe pages to start collecting subscribers right away; on WordPress, the SiteGround Email Marketing plugin adds custom signup forms to your site and connects automatically with form plugins you might already use, like Contact Form 7, WPForms, or Gravity Forms. Then segment your list using the custom fields you collect, such as location, interests, or birthday, so you’re not sending the same email to everyone regardless of what they’ve told you about themselves.

4. Create the campaign

Most platforms include premade templates, so building an email doesn’t require HTML or a designer. SiteGround Email Marketing gives you a library of these to start from, then lets you customize colors, layout, and images in the no-code builder. The Generate with AI feature makes this even easier: describe what you want in a short prompt, and it builds the whole email for you, layout, copy, and images included, so you’re editing a finished draft instead of starting from a blank page.

5. Get deliverability right before you send

None of the above matters if the email lands in spam. Skipping domain authentication is the single most common reason a new sender’s first campaign never reaches the inbox, not a weak subject line. Before you send anything, walk through our full email deliverability guide, which covers the technical setup that protects your sender reputation from day one.

Main types of marketing emails

There are more than a dozen specific types of marketing emails, but most fall under a few core categories:

• Welcome emails. The first message a new subscriber or customer gets, timed to arrive immediately after signup.
• Promotional emails. Built around a specific offer or sale, with one clear call to action.
• Informational and retention emails. Newsletters, how-to content, and updates that keep subscribers engaged between purchases.
• Event-triggered and transactional emails. Automated sends tied to a specific action, like an abandoned cart, an order confirmation, or a password reset.

For the full breakdown, including subtypes and when to use each one, see The 13 essential types of emails explained simply.

What drives email engagement

Three things decide whether a campaign performs: permission, relevance, and frequency. 

1. Permission comes first. A double opt-in signup (built into SiteGround Email Marketing, so you don’t have to set it up separately), where a subscriber confirms via a follow-up email, keeps your list built from people who actually want to hear from you, which matters more for deliverability than any subject line trick. Buying a list skips this step entirely and usually costs more in bounce and spam complaint rates than it saves in time.
2. Relevance is where segmentation and personalization pay off. Messages built around a subscriber’s actual behavior consistently outperform generic blasts, and something as simple as using a name or referencing a past purchase raises the odds an email gets read. This is also where the email customer journey matters: a welcome email, a re-engagement email, and a win-back email are solving different problems for the same subscriber at different points in time.
3. Frequency is the one most businesses get wrong in both directions. Too many sends and unsubscribe rates climb; too few and subscribers forget who you are. Test a schedule, watch the results, and adjust; there’s no universal right number, only the one that fits your audience.

Common email marketing mistakes to avoid

A few mistakes come up more than the rest, out of the worst email marketing mistakes beginners tend to make:

• No plan after the welcome email. The mistake isn’t a bad signup form. It’s collecting emails with nothing lined up to send next, so the list goes cold within weeks and engagement quietly drops on every send that follows.
• Treating every subscriber the same. A customer who bought last week and a lead who signed up for a discount code are in completely different stages, and sending them identical content wastes the segmentation data you already have.
• Skipping list maintenance. Inactive subscribers and invalid addresses drag down your open and click-through rates over time, which can hurt deliverability for your entire list, not just the inactive portion of it.

None of these are hard to fix once you know to look for them; the damage comes from not noticing until the numbers have already dropped.

What email marketing metrics to check after you hit send

Your first campaign doesn’t need an A/B test. It needs four numbers checked within a day or two of sending, so you know whether to change anything before campaign two.

Metric	What it tells you
Open rate	Whether the subject line got attention
Click-through rate	Whether the content and call to action worked once people opened it
Conversion rate	Whether the send hit the goal you set in step one, a sale, a signup, or a download
Bounce rate	List health. A high bounce rate on a first send usually means the list was built or imported carelessly, not that the email itself was weak

A weak open rate points at the subject line. A weak click-through rate with a healthy open rate points at the content or the CTA, not the subject line. Reading the two numbers together is what tells you which part to fix first, instead of rewriting the whole email and guessing again. These four are the starting point; once you have a handful of sends to compare, the rest of the email marketing metrics worth tracking will tell you more than any single campaign can on its own.

Ship it, check the numbers, improve campaign two

Your first campaign won’t be your best one, and that’s fine. The four numbers above exist to tell you what to fix, not to grade you on effort. Send it, check the numbers, and let campaign two be the one that’s actually optimized.

SiteGround Email Marketing keeps the whole loop, sending, tracking, and fixing, in one place, so you’re not piecing it together across separate tools.

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This article was originally posted in December 2024 and updated in September 2026.

Frequently asked questions about getting started with email marketing

Email bounce rate is a key metric in email marketing. If it’s too high, it could cause serious damage to your email campaigns and even your sender reputation. In this blog post, we’ll help you understand what email bounce rate is, what causes it, and how to keep it in check so you can enjoy high email deliverability.

What is Email Bounce Rate?

Еmail bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that were sent, but not successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes. More specifically, this rate tracks messages that were rejected by the recipients’ email servers but returned with an automated bounce message to the sender indicating a delivery error.

Note: The bounce rate will not take into account email messages that got flagged as SPAM and rejected at network level without any feedback being sent to the sending server. You may check out our article on How to Avoid Your Emails Going to Spam for more information on the topic of spam.

In email marketing, bounces aren’t just minor hiccups. They’re more like signals, telling you that something is not okay. It could be anything from a typo in the email address to an issue with the email content or the recipient’s mail server. 

Hence, recognizing and understanding your email bounce rate is crucial. It goes beyond just making sure your messages are getting through. More importantly, it helps maintain your reputation as a sender, moving your business communications up the ladder. 

Now, keep in mind that not all of your marketing messages will be delivered or bring conversions, and that is normal. (You may check out our article on email deliverability for an in-depth understanding of the email journey and the different obstacles on its way.) However, if the percentage of bounced emails is too high, your business will suffer.

How does the email bounce rate affect your business?

A high bounce rate blocks your marketing efforts and can damage your sender reputation with email service providers. That can even spiral into more delivery challenges and further lower your email campaigns’ reach.

As a provider of email hosting services, throughout the years, we’ve had clients contacting us in search of the reason for their messages coming back undelivered. And, we know how frustrating this may be as it affects their operations as a business. Sometimes, the reason for the bounce is simply a mistyped recipient’s address. On other occasions, the reason may be more complex.

Let’s first clarify how high email bounce rates can affect your business so you know what you may have to deal with if you do not take corrective actions.

Lowered Engagement & Conversion Rates 

When your email messages bounce back, they don’t reach the intended recipients and this naturally leads to lower open and click-through rates, which means reduced engagement with your content. If your emails aren’t getting through, this means that fewer people are seeing and interacting with your content. Consequently, this drop in engagement leads to fewer conversions, which in turn, impacts your bottom line. 

Wasted Resources 

Each email that bounces back is a waste of your time, effort, and money. You should know that even if you’re following all the best practices, there will still be messages that come back, so be prepared. Yet, you should strive to keep that count as low as possible. Practically, high bounce rates mean you are not maximizing the return on investment of your marketing efforts because a portion of your audience is not even receiving your messages. It’s essentially pouring your costly business efforts down the drain. 

Biased Analytics 

Bounce rates can distort the accuracy of your campaign’s analytical data. That happens because metrics like open rates and conversions can’t accurately reflect your audience’s behavior if a high number of emails never reach their destinations. Even if your other metrics look great, you must not leave the bounce rates unattended. 

If you ignore the bounce rate, that can lead to incorrect interpretations of the performance of your email campaigns. That, in turn, could lead you to make misinformed business decisions – not seeing the full picture can cause you to invest in the wrong areas.

Damaged Sender Reputation

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) track the number of bounces you generate in an attempt to prevent spam. The higher your bounces are, the more ISPs and ESPs would assume that you are buying email lists or scraping emails. Thus, they would start punishing you by flagging your emails as spam, and this can harm your reputation as a sender. That eventually results in reduced email deliverability.

To gain a better understanding of how spam filters take email bounce rate into consideration, read our blog post on How to avoid your emails from going to spam. 

Restoring a good sender reputation is hard, so, you better put your thoughts into preventing such an outcome.

Potential for Blacklisting 

Continuing to send messages to email addresses that consistently bounce can not just trigger spam filters with email service providers, but eventually get your domain and/or IP on a denylist. This means that recipient email servers will start rejecting all your messages as spam at network level, further plummeting your email deliverability. 

As you can see, keeping your eyes on the prize without considering the potential negative outcomes and not taking measures can cause lots of damage to your business. Thus, to take actions to minimize bounce rates, you must understand their nuances better.  

Types of Email Bounces

When it comes to email marketing, not all bounces are equal. You’ve got two main types to keep an eye on – hard bounces and soft bounces. Understanding the difference between these can help you improve your overall campaign results.

Hard Bounces

A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure. Hard bounces occur when you send marketing emails to:

• Inactive contacts – these are emails that are no longer in use. They were once active, valid addresses, but no more.
• Non-existent (mistyped) emails – these are addresses that are not registered. 
• Invalid email addresses – these include both inactive and wrong addresses, the two groups above.

If you think about it – why would you have such addresses on your email list? Maybe you have users who signed up too long ago and their addresses are no longer in use? Or, your subscribers left “fake” email addresses in your signup form contacts to make sure you won’t bother them? Like when you give the wrong phone number to a guy who you don’t like and want to get rid of. Or, you got your email list from somewhere and you didn’t know how these users got on the list in the first place, so maybe they tricked you with a bad list? 

Each hard bounce is a clear signal to remove the problematic address from your list ASAP. Email service providers would flag you if you get too many hard bounces since they would recognize a “spam pattern” – they would think you bought or scraped emails, or you are trying to “guess” emails within an organization, or else. Hence, failing to remove such emails immediately can harm your sending reputation with mail providers.

SiteGround Email Marketig users can safely rely on us to take immediate action and “suppress” hard bounce email addresses so you can never send emails to them again and thus avoid penalties. If we see an abnormally high rate of bounced emails while sending out a campaign for you, we would pause it in order to prevent any bad consequences. 

Soft Bounces

Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures due to issues that don’t necessarily indicate a problem with your mailing list, but usually result from full inboxes, messages exceeding mailbox limits, server problems and downtime, autoresponders, and others.

When these soft bounces occur, different email service providers may take different actions. At SiteGround we do not give up, but have a strategy to make multiple attempts to resend the email, starting with more frequent tries in the first few hours and then tapering off. This retry system is designed to deliver successfully your email campaign as soon as possible, ensuring it stays on track and reaches your subscribers’ inboxes in a timely manner. We aim to optimize email deliverability while maintaining the momentum of your email marketing efforts.

How to measure your email bounce rate?

Monitoring this metric is essential for a healthy email marketing strategy. To measure your bounce rate, count the number of bounced emails, divide it by the total number of sent emails and multiply by 100. Sounds like too much math, doesn’t it?

That is why our friendly Email Marketing platform does the math for you. We calculate the average email bounce rate that each of your email marketing campaigns generates, so we can help you with your campaign results analytics.

The email bounce rate, calculated in the Analytics section of the Email Marketing platform shows the percentage of bounced email addresses. The Bounce rate in the Analytics section is an average bounce rate that consists of both soft and hard bounces. 

How to reduce your email bounce rate?

After analyzing the negative impact of a high bounce rate on your business operations, we give you the strategies for reducing it effectively. ​​Follow these best email practices diligently, and you will get better results. 

Remove unengaged and inactive emails

Clean your email list from inactive and unengaged subscribers every few months. Users who do not open your emails are not simply unengaged, they are likely to soon become “inactive” accounts. 

Do not buy email lists or scrape sites for emails

Maintaining fresh and clean mailing lists is a key practice for achieving a low email bounce rate and ensuring list quality. Avoid purchasing mailing lists at any cost, since they will not bring you the desired results if the users in it have not consented to receive your messages.

Implement Double Opt-In

With double opt-in, subscribers confirm their email address after the initial sign-up by clicking on a verification link sent to their inbox. Double opt-in allows you to enroll only valid email addresses in your list and ensures that the owner of the email is genuinely interested in your content and willing to engage. It’s a powerful way to protect your reputation as a sender and keep your email bounce rate on the low end.

Avoid Spammy Practices

Steer clear of tactics that trigger spam filters and rack up spam complaints. If you’re too aggressive or irrelevant, your emails might end up in the spam folder. Obviously, that is not your goal, so you must pay attention to what you include in your campaigns.

Sending emails with misleading subject lines or stuffing your content with excessive trigger keywords and salesy language are classic spammy practices. 

Monitor and Analyze All Campaign Performance Data

Keeping tabs on how your bounce rate and other email metrics isn’t just smart—it’s essential. As you have already seen in this article, bounce rates and spam rates and all engagement metrics are correlated and work together to assist email marketers in creating better content and keeping engaged email list. 

SiteGround Email Marketing tool gives you a clear view of your campaign’s performance. Access the Analytics section to review key metrics like open rates and click-through rates, which help you understand audience engagement.

That is where you get to check what works, what doesn’t, and how your audience is really feeling about your emails.

Conclusion

To wrap things up, remember that keeping your email bounce rate low is crucial for robust email marketing. Understanding the why and how of bounces empowers you to maintain a healthy sender reputation and ensures your emails effectively reach your audience.

Stay on top of cleaning your lists and avoid anything that might trigger spam filters. With these practices in place, paired with consistent monitoring, you’ll keep your bounce rate low and your engagement high.

So, take these insights, put them into practice, and watch as your email marketing efforts yield better results. 

Email Bounce Rates FAQs

1. What’s an acceptable email bounce rate?

An acceptable bounce rate is typically below 2%. Rates higher than this may indicate issues that need to be addressed.

2. How often should I clean my email list?

List hygiene should be an ongoing process, but a thorough cleaning every 3 to 6 months is a good practice.

3. Can a high email bounce rate affect my entire email marketing strategy? 

Yes, a consistently high bounce rate can lower your sender reputation. Especially if you get many hard bounces. That can potentially cause more of your emails to be sent to the spam folder.

4. Is there a difference between cleaning an email list and segmenting it? 

Yes, cleaning involves removing invalid or inactive subscribers. On the other hand, segmenting organizes active subscribers into specific groups for targeted campaigns.

5. How do I fix a high email bounce rate? 

To fix a high email bounce rate, start by cleaning your email list to remove invalid or inactive addresses. Implement a double opt-in process to ensure subscribers emails are valid, and adjust your email content to avoid triggering spam filters. Finally, monitor your campaigns to identify which emails bounce back and why, then make data-driven adjustments to your strategy.