Want to Increase Your Deliverability Rate? Stop the Robbers
at Your Front Door!
What happens when a customer enters an invalid email address into your online
registration or enrollment page? When we ask our clients “What’s your
typo rate?” most people's response is: "If it bounces, my ESP filters it
out and eliminates it from my list. It’s not a big deal." The reality is
far more complex - and should be cause for concern for any savvy email
marketer.
An Expensive Mistake
The true cost of bad email addresses entering your database
through a typo, a simple mistake, or malicious activity is far higher than you
might expect. Consider these obvious ramifications:
- Wasted marketing investment: Chances are, that lead didn't
simply happen upon your site. Your marketing dollars inspired them to take
action and provide you with their email address and other personal information.
If you can't continue the conversation, your precious marketing dollars have
been wasted.
- Unmet expectations: By definition, a registration typo is a
mistake. Anyone entering their email address on your site or in your store does
it with a clear expectation in mind. Perhaps they’re anticipating receiving new
product updates, an email action alert, or a promotional offer. When that
expectation is not met, an implicit promise has been broken. Registrants aren’t
aware that your brand’s failure to respond was the result of their typo or
oversight. They assume your brand has simply failed to follow through. Their
response: disengagement, dissatisfaction, and a customer left wondering “What
happened?” Given the power now vested in each individual through social media,
the potential damage to your brand cannot be underestimated.
- Diminished ROI: In addition to missing the mark on customer
expectations, bad email addresses diminish the efficacy and return on
investment of your email campaigns. Whether your goal is to increase sales,
drive social engagement, or solicit donations, undeliverable emails are a bane
to your ROI.
- Increased expense: Don’t forget the additional cost of
servicing those disappointed customers. Call center time and customer follow-up
can tie up valuable resources.
Email File Health Hazards
If your site has functionality to catch common errors, such
as missing @ signs, or multiple periods, you still aren’t off the hook. Simply
screening for deliverable email addresses is not enough.
An inadvertent mistake or misspelling can transform an
innocent customer email into a hazardous spamtrap. Customer
typos – as well as the outlying “web vandal” entering a spamtrap purposefully
on your registration page – can have disastrous consequences.
Hitting just one or two spamtraps can literally bring down
your entire email program. Without rigorous email validation tools in place,
even Fortune 50 companies have seen their email programs blacklisted by
organizations such as SpamHaus and others – resulting in millions of dollars in
lost revenue.
The Solution: Validation and Correction Tools
Based on our 10+ years of experience monitoring and studying
email addresses and client databases, 2% to 20%+ of email addresses entered on
websites are invalid or bogus. In our 2010 Email Address Validation Study of 50 Leading Retailer Websites, leading retailers failed to block invalid addresses in
approximately 64% of cases. That’s a shocking statistic especially considering
that these are leading internet retailers.
Fortunately, REACT (Real-time Email Address Correction
Technology), our cloud-based email validation and correction tool, literally
corrects problematic emails at the point of registration on your site – before
they even enter your file. A customer enters their email address, and within
milliseconds, their entry is either validated and accepted into your database,
or a pop-up window appears offering a suggested correction or, in the case of
invalid entries, requesting a valid address.
Some examples of the errors and problematic addresses REACT weeds
out include:
Keep Those Thieves Out of Your File!
Whether you have customers entering their email addresses on
a registration site, or you have sales associates registering them in a POS
system or call center, typos and less desirable visitors will always appear.
Take heed, and remember that the costs of just one malicious or misspelled
email can be enormous. Email validation and correction tools are a great
investment to keep the robbers at bay while improving lead quality and
deliverability rates. A small investment upfront could save you ten-times that on
the backend.