If you’re confident that your email address database is clean, you’re probably kidding yourself. Not only does email data decay at a faster rate than postal data, it’s often laced with SPAM traps and invalid addresses that could even damage your brand’s reputation if you try to send to those addresses.
One of the things to consider when reviewing the hygiene of your email database is how those email addresses were compiled. If you’ve allowed customers to opt-in to your email program, chances are high that they have made mistakes when typing their email address.
Especially with more of us filling out forms on our mobile devices, the chances of missing an @ sign or typing one character incorrectly is almost ensured. And of course, you’ll always get the false email addresses and names that are entered simply to open a promotion.
If you’re using email addresses that did not have opt-in verification, it’s best that you stop employing that practice altogether. SPAM traps consisting of abandoned email addresses are used by email providers to target poor sending practices.
Once you start sending to invalid or inaccurate email addresses, you’ll experience a host of hard and soft bounces in response to those emails. But as a reputable email marketer, you want to ensure that your emails are delivered and seen by your intended audience. Bounces can damage your reputation and may actually prevent emails getting to your customers.
As global email volume increases, email service providers rely heavily on engagement activity of those emails to determine the legitimacy of the senders. As Email Marketers, we have to focus on creating highly engaging targeted email messages that create engagement actions including opens, click throughs and forwarding.
Sure, you receive a report after sending an email message showing you the engagement and deliverability of your email. But what does Bounce Rate really mean, and when should you be concerned? Some industries, like real estate, average high bounce rates exceeding 13%, while most bounce rates between 5 and 10%.
But all of this can be confusing when you aren’t sure which email addresses are outdated, which are potentially legitimate, but just in the wrong format, and which ones are dangerous SPAM traps. All you know is that they didn’t get through, and your efforts were wasted on those emails.
AccuData Integrated Marketing offers a tool called AccuValid that can verify all of the email addresses in your database and returns a result code based on the email’s deliverability. You can use AccuValid to maintain a clean email database, increasing your chances of making it into the inbox.
I used the AccuValid tool on our own internal customer database and discovered more than 20% of the email addresses were invalid. This gave our sales team an opportunity to reach out to their customers and ask for their updated email addresses. And by sending to only valid email addresses, AccuData is protecting its brand reputation.
Our mission of customer service at AccuData is to continue providing our customers with marketing Best Practices to assist in improving their results. AccuValid is an important way to prevent your emails from being blacklisted and to increase the deliverability of your emails.