For a long time, we have recognised email to be a core communications channel. With 37% of UK companies stating that email is the most important means of communications with their customer base it’s a key channel for generating revenue.

We also know that something with an everyday core value comes with everyday problems, which brings us to the subject of email list hygiene. Keeping your email list clean, verified and up to date is very important.

A company’s email list will become obsolete over time. This is due to people moving jobs, changing email providers, and using new email addresses. In fact, more than 22% of an email list goes bad within a year!

This can leave businesses with more bounces than genuine subscribers, resulting in falls in delivery rates and a bad reputation.

So, what’s the simple answer to fix this issue? Email Verification!

Keeping a verified and clean email list means scrubbing it through an Email Verification Service to cleanse out the old and ugly addresses. These are the invalid, abandoned, catch-all, or spam emails that are preventing your efforts from reaching a live inbox.

Below is a list of benefits of an email verification service.

Lower bounce rates:

 The most obvious and immediate benefit of an email verification tool is that it reduces bounce rates.
Stats show that a bounce rate greater than 5 – 6% indicates that your list is out of date and needs to be cleaned to prevent that figure from increasing, and protect your email marketing ROI.

Highlights and prevents errors:

Acting like a filtering mechanism, embedding an email verification API tool will highlight any typographical errors which can be made in the signup stage, or when entering contact information for further communication efforts. It ensures that correctly formatted and correctly spelt emails are entered into your database. The services should also be able to ping an email to verify that the email address is accurate, the inbox is live and can receive mail.

Sending reputation:

Marketers should make sure they have a good reputation with recipients they are sending their message to. This means delivering to active inboxes or they could be penalised.

Inboxes tend to have spam filtration systems which train themselves how to handle certain pieces of mail. This links back to the IP address and domain you are sending from, which considers the number of live inboxes that sender is reaching. This tends to leave some businesses in the ‘spam trap’ if their email lists are out of date.

By sending communications to verified audiences it will lower the chance of your IP address being identified as spam. This leads to a higher inbox deliverability score, resulting in being a trusted sender, which ultimately gives you more space in your subscriber’s inbox!

Blacklists:

Becoming blacklisted impacts on your sender score. Eventually an inbox can only accept so many emails marked as spam until the sender ends up blacklisted. Like a spam trap, a blacklisting is designed to stop criminal, fraudulent and spam activities happening within email systems. Getting blacklisted will prevent your messages from reaching that server and it could take some time to be delisted. Legitimate businesses need to make sure to avoid being blacklisted by practicing list hygiene.

Save money, make money, and maximise on your revenue opportunities

No one wants to send messages to non-existent or inactive email addresses, put their business at risk of being blacklisted, and damage their sender reputation.

This blog showcases the importance of having an email validation tool embedded into your organisation. It guarantees a cleaner, more up to date email list leading to better inbox placement, and engagement; resulting in greater revenue opportunities.

This blog was written by Melissa – are pound supplier of global data quality solutions, if your email campaigns are lacking or your email data needs cleansing, contact us for a free trial.