For even the most digitally-adept channel businesses, email is still the best way to reach prospects and customers. But to have the best possible impact, email campaigns need to be delivering the right content, to the right people at the right time.
This article focuses on your email lists i.e. the right people and the importance of regular verifying and cleansing your data.
The impact of poor data quality
You work hard to grow your email database but you should also you should work equally hard to protect your email reputation. Fake or stale email addresses can cause a devastating impact on this reputation, jeopardising your connection with your valid email contacts.
Ensuring your email addresses are valid before hitting send will maintain your solid email reputation.
Reputation in email marketing
When sending emails, all factors involving the sending domain, domain reputation and the message itself are evaluated by servers when a message is received. Factors such as delivery rate, the amount of bounces, number of interactions, number of opt-outs, number of spam complaints and the email content itself. All of these affect the reputation of your email account. This reputation determines how the email server of your recipient sees your email and decides on whether to let it through or not.
Email senders who are considered suspects are at risk of being marked as spammers – which harms the open rate. But, with good email reputation, i.e. emails which are regularly opened and engaged with, your results will be infinitely better, due to the assurances that the delivery of the emails to the recipients’ inbox. ISPs, servers, will positively reward email domains serving good email content to qualified and engaged email addresses.
Cleaning your email lists to improve the performance of your email marketing
Performing periodic cleaning of your email lists to identify potential spam traps, bounces or unknown users will help to avoid putting your emails at the risk of being directed to junk/spam or even be blocked by email servers.
But how do you clean your email data in bulk, because, let’s face it, cleaning 0000’s of records by hand is an impossibility?
Answer: run your data through an email data cleaning service like Briteverify.
How does it work? Simply load up a csv file of email addresses into the tool, press the button and then act on the results.
What results can you expect to see from Briteverify?
BriteVerify sorts emails into different categories, where emails marked as “Valid” are not risky at all and “Invalid” emails are the ones you should obviously remove from your list.
How do Briteverify determin the validity of an email address?
The platform tests the validity of an email address, in real time, in 3 simple steps:
- Firstly, if the email address follows the correct syntax and has the physical properties of an email address i.e.does it have a username and an @ symbol? Is the suffix a recognised email format, such as .com, .co.uk .org, .gov, etc
- Secondly it verifies the validity of the email domain (MX record) for the email address. This prioritises the delivery of email messages on behalf of the recipient’s domain to make sure the email domain can send and receive emails.
- Lastly, the platform uses custom integrations developed in conjunction with Mailbox Providers (MBPs) to communicate with their mail servers via their preferred method. BriteVerify communicates directly with the MBP to authenticate if an email address exists on the email server. The technology works with all global MBPs and is constantly updated for changes in existing MBPs and new MBPs. This method is 97%+ accurate and averages 0.5 seconds per verification.
That’s it. However, in a perfect world a list of email addresses could be verified with only two outcomes. Valid or Invalid. You could simply keep the good and delete the bad.
The reality is that all email servers are not created equal and a complete confirmation of deliverability is not possible with some domains. Those domains return information which Briteverify flags as “Risky”.
These “Risky” email addresses fall in to two categories: “Accept All” (sometimes referred to Catch All) and “Unknown”.
What are “Accept All” and “Unknown” email addresses?
For “Unknown” emails, the email address looks good, but the associated domain is not responding. This could be a temporary status for domains having intermittent issues or a permanent issue for dead domains. Since the platform is not able to conclusively determine the result, they mark it as unknown.
“Accept All” email addresses are when a server is set to receive all emails at a specific domain, meaning these domains accept any email you send to them at first.
So it appears as if all of the emails are valid at that domain, but the company actually has a firewall or another spam tool that may remove the email message or send a bounce message at a later time. Typically, these are associated with business email addresses.
Our advice on “Risky” Accept All and Unknown addresses? Delete them. Chances are you will receive a high proportion of bounces when sending to these addresses which will impact you email reputation. Alternatively, if the list of risky addresses isn’t very big, take the time to research each email address individually via google, linkedin and the associated company website.
When to verify your email lists?
It sounds overkill, but ideally before every email send. This is unrealistic however therefore we suggest running your email lists through a tool like Briteverify:
- Every 3 months and/or
- When you’ve added a significant number of addresses to your list
What else?
We didn’t what to teach you to suck eggs with this section but we have thus far neglected to mention a few obvious things. Giving your email addresses a once-over in Excel is always worth the time. Here’s a few simple, yet obvious things you can easily rectify in your data:
sales@, info@ email addresses
Remove all of the generic email addresses from your file, typically things like:
- sales@domain.com
- info@domain.com
- admin@domain.com
- contracts@domain.com
- Etc etc
Anything that isn’t a person’s name – remove. There is no benefit in sending emails to these addresses as the email will be ignored and thus have a detrimental effect on your email reputation due to the lack of engagement.
Email address errors
Fix any syntax errors in the data i.e. remove spaces, illegal punctuation, sometimes you’ll find “ in place of the @ symbol. We’ve got another article with some great tips on how to fix contact data in excel.
Hotmail, gmail (B2B)
If you are a B2B business you’ll be focussed on leveraging business email addresses rather than personal email accounts. Unless the @hotmail or @gmail account is a subscriber to your content (i.e. they have opted-in), remove these addresses as they are just “noise” and unlikely to be potential customers.
Summary
Running you email address lists through a verification tool like Briteverify takes just minutes and it is inexpensive too. This makes it a no brainer if it means you can maintain or improve your email reputation, increase deliverability and therefore the opportunity to generate leads.
