The Email Rate Measures

Email bounce rate

The Bounce Rate – Total number of the hard or the soft bounces divided by the total number of emails sent.

Average across all industries – 0.7%

1. Highest bounce rates by industry
2. Construction, Contracting, and Manufacturing: 2.2% (1.51% in 2018)
3. Real Estate, Design and Construction Activities: 1.4% (1.08% in 2018)
4. Government: 1.3% (1.08% in 2018)
5. Lowest bounce rates by industry
6. Food and beverage: 0.3% (0.64% in 2018)
7. Consumer Packaged Goods: 0.4% (0.67% in 2018)
8. Retail: 0.4% (0.69% in 2018)


A bounced email is the email that could not be delivered. The Hard bounces are permanent and immediately undeliverable. The Soft bounces are the temporary bounces that may be delivered on subsequent attempts.

The Bounce rates must be kept as low as possible and they are easily managed by making use of the email verification tool like the Bouncer.

The main factors that affect the email bounce rates are:

1. Stale email lists
2. Poor data from bought-in lists
3. Failure to cleanse invalid addresses
4. Failing to provide confirmed/double opt-in systems
5. Content that looks like spam
6. Email list health

The Email complaint rates

The Complaint Rate – The total number of spam complaints will be divided by the total number of emails that are sent.

It is not always added to or even featured in the main benchmark options, but it is a key indicator none-the-less.

The complaint rate of your email campaign is simply the number of emails that the recipients report as spam. The higher number of the complaints that is received will increase the chances of your email address being marked as spam by the major email service providers.

Email addresses that are determined as spam will find it almost impossible to get to their subscribers.

Studied carried out far back as the year 2018 almost all the email complaint rates in the Campaign Monitor data dropped below 0.01%. The acceptable rate is now considered to be 0.1%, so all the industry sectors are actively below the point to merit concern.

The main factors that affect the complaint rates are:

1. Emails that have the appearance of spam
2. Poor design
3. Irrelevant and poorly put-together content

Email deliverability

The Email deliverability is the ability to make delivery emails to your subscribers’ inboxes.

This is an option that many marketers are using to gauge the likelihood of emails that are being delivered against the actual data from their campaigns. It is a form of email delivery rate.

The metric is complex because it is depending on so many different elements. It also makes the finding of an average email deliverability rate to be difficult to produce.

If we are to consider the deliverability rate of the emails that are arriving in the inbox against those that do not, then the ideal is 100%. However, with the bounce rates, the spam protection and the other influences, about 95% is considered to be an acceptable score.

What is certain is that your email deliverability is linked directly to almost all your benchmark data.

The main factors that is affecting the email deliverability are:

1. Authentication of the sender’s email
2. Double/confirmed opt-ins
3. Sending from free domain addresses
4. Image heavy messages
5. Use of URL shorteners
6. Failing to provide an easy unsubscribe option

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