Overview
There are several factors to consider when you notice that lots of the emails you send from Apollo bounce. An industry-accepted average of about 10% bounce rate is considered normal. If your bounce rate is substantially higher, check out the following sections for more information about email bounces and their potential causes.
Soft vs Hard Bounce
There are 2 types of email bounces:
- Hard Bounce: A permanent issue prevents your email from arriving in the intended inbox. Reasons include:
- The email address is invalid or non-existent.
- The recipient's email server has blocked the delivery of your email.
- Your domain reputation is so low that your email is spam blocked. This means that it won't even reach the spam folder.
- Soft Bounce: A temporary issue prevents your email from arriving in the intended inbox. Reasons include:
- The recipient's email server is busy.
- The recipient's email storage is full.
- The recipient is not accepting emails for a temporary period.
If your email lands in the recipient's spam folder, the recipient can still view the email if they wish to. Therefore, this does not count as a bounce.
When an email hard bounces it can damage your email domain reputation. If you consistently notice a high bounce rate (more than 10%) across all your Apollo sequences, there could be several potential causes.
Potential Reasons For a High Bounce Rate
Third-Party Verification Services
Apollo has a robust algorithm for detecting valid email addresses. Often, this algorithm is more powerful than other third-party services like NeverBounce or ZeroBounce. Third-party verification tools may reject many valid emails as "catch-all" or "unknown." If you're using one of these tools, consider using Apollo as your verification tool.
For more information about email verification, refer to How Apollo Verifies Emails.
Sending to Unverified Emails
If you enroll contacts with an unverified or update required email status into your sequences, your emails have a higher chance of bouncing. Apollo strongly recommends that you only enroll contacts with verified or likely to engage email addresses into your sequences.
Spam Blocked Emails
Apollo offers comprehensive reporting about all of the emails you send through the platform. This includes reporting specifically related to emails that bounce as a result of spam blocking.
To access reporting for spam blocked emails:
- Launch Apollo and click Emails.
- Set the status filter to Spam Blocked.
Check out View and Respond to Emails to learn more about managing emails on Apollo.
The mailbox provider has blocked the email if it has a spam blocked status in Apollo. Reasons can include:
- Domain reputation
- Excessive send frequency
- Lack of personalization and other content bad practices.
To learn how to avoid having your email spam blocked, check out Avoid Spam Filters.
If you notice that a large number of emails sent around the same time have been spam blocked, you need to act fast and make changes to your email approach. Follow the best practices in the email deliverability checklist to keep your domain reputation safe and improve your email deliverability with Apollo.
Email Addresses Provided by Other Tools
As an all-in-one lead generation and engagement tool, Apollo allows you to send emails to existing contacts from your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot) or CSV uploads. Apollo cannot guarantee the accuracy of email addresses provided by other third-party tools or sources.
Determine Whether Apollo Provided an Email for a Contact
If you want to check a specific contact to see if Apollo provided their email address, search for that contact or browse directly to their profile from a sent email.
Scroll to the Activity widget on the contact's profile and look for a message that says:
Apollo's automatic email fulfillment found a verified email [email@domain.com] for [Contact Name].
View the Data Enrichment Request Log
If Apollo enriched a contact with a verified email address and charged you a credit, you can view a log of the activity.
To access the data request history:
- Launch Apollo and click Settings > System activity > Data requests.
- Apollo shows all data enrichment requests. You can see the number of contact emails requested versus the number of credits charged for verified emails in each request.
- Click a specific request to view the contact information you requested.
For more information about how data requests work in Apollo, check out How Do Data Requests Work?. If you want to learn more about Apollo credits in general, refer to What Are Credits?.
Natural Email Quality Decay
Email addresses are living entities. People may use them for some time and then may abandon them for any number of reasons, such as moving to a different job with a new email address. With this in mind, if Apollo provided you with a verified email address more than 6 months ago, we do not provide the same level of bounce rate guarantee. Contacts with verified email addresses older than 6 months may need additional enrichment.