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Understanding Click Rates and Bounces in Your New Indie Email Account

New to Indie Email? Learn why your click rate and bounce numbers may look unusual at first.

Updated over 4 months ago

Click Rate

When transitioning to a new ESP platform, initial performance metrics may not reflect long-term trends. The system requires multiple campaign sends to gather sufficient engagement data, allowing rates such as opens and clicks to stabilize into accurate, reliable averages.

💡 Where to find information on your campaign's performance

Your Indie Email displays your campaign performance in three ways:

  1. Overall Averages

    1. Location: On your website's main dashboard

    2. Key Info: Number of active contacts, average open rate, average click rate

      Note: The information there is not a real-time report. The data is updated every 30 minutes.

  2. Week-to-week engagement trends

    1. Location: Inside your Indie Email Overview dashboard

    2. Key Info: Number of emails sent, open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, audience growth, etc.

  3. Individual campaign reports

    1. Location: Go to the Campaign page, and then click on View Report for a specific campaign.

    2. Key Info: That specific campaign's total average and unique open rate and click rate, delivery rate, bounces, etc.


Hard & Soft Bounces

When moving to a new ESP platform like Indie Email, it’s normal to see some hard and soft bounces. The great news is that there’s no need to worry! as Indie Email automatically cleans your list to improve deliverability and ensure better performance with future sends.

Hard bounces

These happen when an email cannot be delivered permanently. This can occur after importing contacts if the list includes outdated or invalid email addresses—contacts who may have been inactive for some time but were still marked as active.

  • Our system automatically removes these addresses from future sends to protect your deliverability.

  • After a certain number of hard bounces, the contact is automatically cleaned from your list.

Soft bounces

These are temporary delivery issues that can happen for several reasons.

A few examples would be:

  1. Full recipient mailbox – the inbox has reached storage capacity.

  1. Temporary server issues – the recipient’s email server is down or overloaded.

  2. Message size too large – the email (including attachments or images) exceeds the recipient’s size limit.

  3. Spam filter blocking – the receiving server temporarily rejects the email due to content or sending patterns it flags as suspicious.

💡 View the type of bounce for a contact and the reason it occurred

Your Indie Email can show you the type of bounces and sometimes even the reason an email bounces for a contact:

Go to the corresponding sent campaign > Click on View Report > Scroll down to the Delivery Rate section > Click on the emails bounced number

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