How The Links Guy Improves Email Bounce Rates with ZeroBounce

The first step to improving your email bounce rateⓘ

Companies use all kinds of methods to get backlinks, but email outreach remains a cornerstone. Whether they're connecting with bloggers or pitching media outlets, an agency like The Links Guy sends thousands of emails every day.

But when emails bounce, those efforts go to waste.

A bounce rate over 2% can set off Internet service provider (ISP) algorithms and land your emails in the spam folder – or block them entirely. And when that happens, every future campaign is at risk of never reaching the inbox.

So, where do you start improving email bounce rates and deliverability? According to TLG founder Amit Raj, first, you must understand your challenge.

Before planning an outreach campaign, we weren't able to find the right contact emails and make sure they were valid. Most of the email finding tools we tried weren't accurate enough, and validation was unreliable. This led to high bounce rates, which hurt our email deliverability and ultimately our ability to build links at scale.

Amit Raj, Founder The Links Guy

When bounces hit 10%, Raj knew something had to change. "We needed to get those rates down to less than 2% if we wanted to keep our emails out of spam."

Here's how Amit Raj and his team tackled the problem head-on – and got their bounce rates under control.

How the ZeroBounce email verifier turned bounce rates around

With his deep understanding of email deliverabilityⓘ, Amit Raj knew there was only one way to filter out obsolete data: an email verification tool. The right software could provide ease, speed, and accuracy.

For Raj and his team, ZeroBounce was "a natural choice."

"ZeroBounce was a tool we'd been aware of for a while," says the founder of The Links Guy. "It was a name that kept coming up when we spoke to people in the marketing industry. Its reputation spoke for itself."

The impact our email verifier made was immediate. After the first round of email validations, the agency saw a dramatic drop in bounce rates, and its outreach campaigns performed better than ever.

We've been using ZeroBounce for two years, and the results are consistent. Throughout 2023 and 2024, we've made ZeroBounce a critical part of our process for validating the emails we find. Our bounce rates are 1% or lower at all times.

ZeroBounce has been instrumental in helping us connect with the right people.

Amit Raj, Founder The Links Guy

Want to help your emails land in the inbox, too? Try our email verification tool to improve your bounce rate.

How The Links Guy streamlined email outreach and boosted results

Amit Raj's team at The Links Guy now follows a meticulous process for every email outreach campaign. Email validationⓘ is an essential part of their workflow.

"Our prospecting team finds the email contact of decision-makers in the organizations we target," Raj explains. "Then, we run those email addresses through ZeroBounce. This process has given us extremely accurate results."

ZeroBounce's 99.6% accuracy for email validationⓘ has made all the difference, and Raj enjoys using the real-time email validationⓘ API for instant results.

"It's helped us build backlinks more efficiently and reach writers and editors at sites where identifying the best point of contact would normally be difficult," Raj adds. "ZeroBounce has been instrumental in helping us connect with the right people."

This precision benefits not only the agency but also its clients. "As an agency, this means we can scale our outreach reliably and drive better results for our clients, which helps us retain them for longer," Raj concludes.

There are so many email validationⓘ tools out there, but ZeroBounce stands out as the go-to option. It's reliable, fast, and our tool of choice.

Amit Raj, Founder The Links Guy

Final tips to improve email bounce rates

Amit Raj's story isn't unique. Every email marketer out there experiences bounces – it's a natural consequence of data decay. Every year, at least 28% of your list turns bad. When contacts become obsolete, your emails will bounce back.

The best way to tackle this challenge is to have a good email verifier in your toolkit and use it regularly. But is cleaning your list enough to keep bounces at bay?

Here's what else you can do to improve email bounce rates, enhance your sender reputation, and land your campaigns in your customers' inboxes:

Do not purchase a list of contacts

You can never be fully confident in the accuracy of the email addresses. Also, those consumers never signed up for your emails, so reaching out to them will likely result in unsubscribes – or, even worse, lots of spam complaints.

Build your email list correctly

Do not add contacts to your list without express consent, and implement double opt-in. The double opt-in subscription method also works as a first layer of email verification and helps you avoid fake and invalid signups.

Use a real-time email verification APIⓘ

Verifying your database at least once a quarter helps you improve email bounce rates and strengthen your position in the inbox. In between these list cleanings, consider adding an email verification APIⓘ to your signup forms. It checks every new contact in real time and rejects invalid and risky addresses.

Beware of role-based emails

Role-based email addresses – like info@ or team@ – aren't the best types of contacts to keep on your list. They tend to receive a lot of emails and can end up soft-bouncing and affect your reputation. ZeroBounce can segment them from your list so you can remove them.

Want to try ZeroBounce for free? Start an account and validate your first 100 contacts on us.