We made our email bounce rate boring. On purpose.

The email deliverability topic is a hot one. It's an entire world of experts and SaaS tools promising us the world. But this is not a blog post about email deliverability.

This is a post about how we sliced a massive project into different parts and focused on solving one pain point first. We identified three pillars that needed to be addressed: mailing server infrastructure, email verification, and sales content strategy. This post covers pillar two.

The Problem

The big complaint from the Sales team was that their Google accounts were being suspended weekly. When you don't have access to your Google account, that's an issue all right. Every suspension potentially kills half a day of work: no email access, no calendar, no meeting bookings. Sales engagement and routing tools connect to the user's Google accounts, and they deauthorize the moment an account goes down. It's a problem.

The Pain Point

When a problem is presented to us, it's our job as RevOps professionals to dig deeper and understand the actual pain point before jumping into solution mode, or we risk solving for something that wasn't even the real problem.

Why are the accounts being suspended? What's triggering it?

Only when we pinpoint the actual issue are we prepared to design the right solution. And more often than not, it doesn't require a new expensive tool, or a big disruption to the team's workflow.

For us, one of the first culprits we decided to tackle was the bounce rate.

A high bounce rate is a problem in itself, but what made it urgent was that we were just not reaching our prospects — when an email bounces, the prospect gets automatically removed from its sequence of tasks to prevent repeat sends. Makes sense. But it meant reps were losing track of those contacts entirely. The prospect was still reachable via phone or LinkedIn, but in a numbers game, discipline loses to volume and those prospects quietly fell through the cracks.

High bounce rate

Our bounce rate sat within the healthy threshold at company level. But for the users getting suspended, it was running too high. And we found that in 80% of the cases the reason for a bounced email was an invalid email address.

A high bounce rate can be a red flag for email deliverability: it can undermine your reputation as a sender when you're flagged by the mailing server. But Google isn't the only one monitoring you. The companies you're sending to can block all future emails from your domain entirely, including the ones going to valid contacts, if they've flagged you as a bad sender. You haven't just lost one prospect. You've potentially lost the whole account.

Are we just blasting emails to everyone and anyone regardless of their address?

This is more important than just avoiding Google account suspensions, it's important for our overall success in reaching out to our potential buyers. If the outreach to the right prospect never happened, the deal never closed either.

The Solution

Our outbound team uses some of the most common and known enrichment providers for prospecting. They're popular in the market, used by many teams worldwide, but all these providers work with databases, not live data. Example: when a prospect changes jobs, their company email stops routing, and it takes time, sometimes a lot of time, for that change to propagate through the database. In the meantime, the email you sent them? Bounced.

We identified a workflow gap we could focus on.

Can we add an extra layer of verification right before we hit the send button?

Boring Plugins

When I came across Boring Plugins, I was at an Outreach webinar about email deliverability, and the conversation with their founder started very organically. Binny decided to focus on building small, focused add-ons for Outreach, one of the most widely used sales engagement platforms.

The plugin that got our attention did exactly what we were looking to solve. The email verification plugin acts as an extra layer of validation between the enrichment provider and the action of sending the email, and does not disrupt the outbound workflow.

The plugin validates email addresses automatically and continuously at three trigger points:

• When a prospect is added to Outreach
• Every time a prospect is added to a sequence
• Any time a prospect's email address is updated

Every email address gets marked with a status: 🟢 valid, 🟠 questionable, or 🔴 invalid.

When an address comes back invalid, the workflow kicks in automatically: the prospect is opted out of email communications via an Outreach trigger, a Boring Opt-Out tag is applied to distinguish these contacts from manual opt-outs, and the Invalid/Bounced Email field is set to true.

The Results

In just two months, the bounce rate for our repeat offenders dropped 44%, bringing it back within a healthy threshold.

The bounce rate drop happened without changing how anyone was prospecting, without retraining the team, and without a full review of our data sources and contacts architecture (other massive projects for another conversation). We added one simple layer, at the right point, and the results showed up.

Boring didn't promise to fix account suspensions, but a 56% drop in that same period told us our sender reputation was heading in the right direction. Even IT sent us a thank you note for the drop in support tickets. We'll take it.

The Hard Lesson

There is a temptation in this role to reach for big solutions. New tools or complete workflow overhauls sometimes are the right call, but often the problem can be tackled at a large scale by just solving a very specific variable. This is one of my hardest learnings, and simplicity became my north star.

This was one pillar of a larger project, but solving just this one created a cascading effect across the entire outbound team. That's worth remembering the next time a big problem lands on your plate.