In addition to opens and clicks, the Dutch Email Marketing Benchmark 2023 also provides information about the acceptance rate (AR). This ratio has been fluctuating around 99.3% for a number of years and will reach 99.38% in 2022, to be precise. There is a good chance that your AR will also come close to that. What then provides more insight is an interpretation of the bounce rate. If the AR comes to 99.3%, then the bounce rate is 0.7%. That doesn't seem like much, but if you send 10,000 emails, 70 of them will not be delivered.
The bounce ratio is made up of soft and hard bounces. And these two can also be expressed in a ratio number: the soft bounce ratio (SBR) and the hard bounce ratio (HBR). For the record: a soft bounce is always a temporary delivery problem in e-mail marketing, but a hard bounce is never delivered. The latter occurs when e-mail email leads addresses no longer exist or if there are errors in the address. You must take action on this. Perhaps a contact has gone to work somewhere else or there is gmial instead of gmail.
To take an example from the benchmark: look at the SBR and HBR in the construction, e-commerce and healthcare sectors.
Email marketing benchmark HBR and SBR in 3 industries
The differences in HBR and SBR in Construction & Real Estate, Retail eCommerce and Healthcare & Welfare in 2021 and 2022
As you can see from the examples from these three sectors, the HBR and SBR differ quite a bit. If you place multiple years next to each other, you can clearly see that the share of soft bounces and the share of hard bounces is not the same every year.
For example, if you compare 2021 with 2022, you will see a decrease in the HBR in the construction and healthcare sector, while this ratio increases in e-commerce. And for the SBR, the picture is: an increase in construction and e-commerce and a significant decrease in the healthcare sector. It is always useful to look up these kinds of figures for your own sector and assess whether your own AR, SBR and HBR show the same sizes and trends.