The weather outside might be frightful this winter season, but nothing could be scarier for marketers than having unkempt customer and prospect email addresses. Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s certainly a reason for concern. The condition of your email data files has a big impact on your marketing ROI, and you may inadvertently be creating roadblocks for your email campaigns. So let’s discuss how you can start 2016 off right with optimized campaigns that are more likely to hit your target’s inbox.
Without any warning, email addresses can have short lifespans for a multitude of reasons. Your contacts may change employment, domain names become invalid and email inboxes are abandoned. Whatever the circumstance, keeping up with a clean database of emails is a must-do item in order to maximize your email marketing efforts.
Being at the mercy of details submitted via lead forms could clog your database with all kinds of interesting, yet invalid, email addresses. Some individuals enter fictitious email addresses, others use improper syntax either by accident or intentionally, and there are a few that create email boxes specifically for marketing emails. All of these scenarios could result in roadblocks for your campaign, and subject your email deployments to a barrage of dreaded bounce backs.
Too many emails that are returned to the sender could lead to those emails being flagged as SPAM. You may even get blacklisted by Internet Service Providers (ISP) if your overall sender score is rated very poorly due to a high percentage of invalid bounced emails. Whether sent directly or through a third party, your email sender score and reputation is tied directly to your brand in the Internet space.
As you can see, regular and systematic cleaning of your email database is essential for email marketing campaigns and your email reputation with ISPs. We’re talking quality over quantity here, and there’s simply no value in continuing to try to send to an email address that isn’t working for you. The higher your delivery rate, open rate and engagement, the better your email marketing campaigns will be.
AccuData Integrated Marketing can provide you with a quick and easy way to clean up your email data files to increase the likelihood of your emails making it to the intended inbox. Through our multi-step process, we execute a complex set of algorithms that test and identify each email address independently to ensure that it is viable for emailing. The tool can identify email address syntax errors, verify Domain Name Systems (DNS), distinguish unknown and/or invalid email addresses, recognize “role-based” email addresses and more. We even have the ability to replace those email addresses with better alternate email addresses based on frequency of use, and recency of use algorithim.
If you are not sure of the last time your email data was cleaned, or if you’ve never had your email data cleaned, now is the time to take the steps necessary to protect your sender reputation and increase the likelihood of your emails being delivered. Contact AccuData today and let us help you validate your emails and clear the roadblocks to the inbox.