Emails Delivered vs Bounced

Emails Delivered and Emails Bounced represent opposite outcomes in the email delivery process. Emails Delivered counts the number of messages that successfully reached recipients' inboxes after passing through email servers and spam filters. This metric indicates the portion of your send volume that had the opportunity to be seen by intended recipients. Emails Bounced, conversely, measures how many emails failed to reach their destination due to various delivery obstacles. Bounces are typically categorized as either "hard" (permanent failures due to invalid addresses or blocked domains) or "soft" (temporary issues like full mailboxes or server problems). Together, these metrics provide complementary insights into your email deliverability health.

When evaluating the quality of a newly acquired email list, monitor both metrics closely to assess list integrity. For example, if you send a welcome campaign to 5,000 new subscribers and record 4,600 Emails Delivered with 400 Emails Bounced (an 8% bounce rate), you should investigate the source of these addresses, as healthy lists typically maintain bounce rates below 2%. Alternatively, when troubleshooting a sudden drop in engagement metrics, analyse your Emails Delivered percentage over time. If your delivery rate has decreased from 98% to 85% while bounce rates have increased correspondingly, this indicates potential sender reputation issues or technical problems requiring immediate attention. While Emails Delivered helps gauge your overall reach opportunity, Emails Bounced provides specific diagnostic information about list quality and delivery problems that need remediation.