Two ways to reduce bounced welcome emails

We encourage our customers to think of Postmark is a “good senders club” for transactional email. ISPs base part of a sender’s reputation on things like spam complaints and bounces and Postmark helps you make sure that you can keep those rates low in order to keep deliverability high for everyone.

A common technique in email marketing services is to help customers with “list hygiene”, largely for the same reasons. An ESP will often provide tools to help their customers scan the list for emails that are likely to generate bounces. This means that the tool will highlight emails with commonly fake or likely misspelled domains.

Transactional email requires a different approach, because a user signing up for a service is much less likely to be using an intentionally fake email address. They are, however, likely to have typos.

A common technique to avoid email typos is to have the customer type their email in twice and verify, but that’s extra work that can slow a user down during signup. Instead, we recommend doing a little bit of extra work to help your customers sign up quicker and still proactively catch email typos.

Here are couple of techniques for catching and fixing typo’d emails for your users in a way that’s likely to surprise and delight them.

Client-Side Suggestion #

A brand new jQuery library authored by the developers at Kicksend allows you to specify a set of domains that are often mistyped, and it will catch domains that are similar enough to be a typo and suggest the correct domain to the user.

The library does require that you bring your own list of domains, which you can get ideas for from browsing your bounces in the Postmark activity filter.

This library - dubbed mailcheck - is new, so we strongly recommend testing it well before implementing it. Grab it on Github here.

Postmark Bounce Hooks #

Have you ever had a user who didn’t get their confirmation email, only for you to realize after investigation that it was because they had a typo in their email address? Or what if someone changes their email address and forgets to update it in your app, and then stops getting important notifications?

If you use Postmark for your emails, we’ll detects bounces and their cause, and provide information back to your app when the bounce is caught via a webhook, where you can parse information about the bounce from a JSON post. This information can be used any way you like, but one of the ways we recommend using it is to provide useful information to your logged in users.

As an example in Beanstalk, we parse bounces and notify users that are logged in about the bounce. We even make recommendations based on the bounce reason and recommend updating the address in Beanstalk while they are still logged in.

If the user logged in is an account owner, we let them know about any addresses in their account that bounced recently.

With just a little bit of work we’re able to reduce customer support by a lot, and help keep our customers happy and informed.

Take a look at our bounce hooks API to set this up.

Less bounces = happier customers #

Remember that reducing your bounce rate isn’t only a best practice for being a Postmark customer, but your customers will appreciate you being thoughtful and helping them catch their mistakes. Reducing their confusion and frustration will result in them spending more time enjoying your application, and little experiences like these help a lot!