email validation for improved deliverability and marketing results
DESCRIPTION
Email is quickly becoming the preferred method of communication for businesses across the world, regardless of industry. Email is faster and less expensive than traditional mail, and many customers choose to receive messages from the companies they do business with through the email channel.TRANSCRIPT
Email Validation for Improved Deliverability and Marketing Results
An Experian QAS White Paper
Email Validation: How to Improve Deliverability and Marketing Results
Reduced inbox delivery and performanceInternet Service Providers (ISPs) like AOL, Hotmail and Gmail actively screen and filter incoming mail for their users. Increasingly, ISPs rely on a mailer’s “reputation” to determine what email messages will get through to users’ inboxes. In fact, a study by Return Path found that 77% of delivery problems were based on sender reputation. Sender reputation is based on several factors:
Bounce rate- the number of messages that are returned as undeliverable divided by the number of emails sent. Complaint rate- the number of people who report your messages as spam divided by the number of emails delivered.
Spam trap hits- the number of emails delivered to addresses that are explicitly used to trace and catalog spam.
With all of these metrics, the higher the numbers are, the worse the sender reputation. A slightly poor reputation will cause some messages to go into the spam folder, and, as reputation worsens, messages may be partially or fully blocked. With AOL, for example, a complaint rate over 0.1% may cause some messages to go into the spam folder, and a rate over 0.3% may lead to messages being blocked.
For most ISPs, a double digit bounce rate or mailing to a single spam trap can lead to some blocking. Once sender’s reputation has been damaged, it takes time and effort
to return to a positive relationship with the ISP. This means that while messages in the current campaign receive less-than-desirable inbox placement, future email campaigns may also be negatively impacted.
Email marketers looking to improve and/or maintain positive reputation, to ultimately improve marketing results should evaluate potential email validation tools to improve the quality of email lists.
Improved reputation and resultsEmail validation starts with the identification of undeliverable email addresses, but more comprehensive validation services can also flag spam traps and addresses that are likely to generate complaints. A full suite of validation services leads to:• Reduced bounce rate-Removing
Email is quickly becoming the preferred method of communication for businesses across the world, regardless of industry. Email is faster and less expensive than traditional mail, and many customers choose to receive messages from the companies they do business with through the email channel.
The success of your email marketing program depends on your subscribers seeing and responding to the messages you send. Effort spent optimizing the content, relevance, and timing of emails is wasted if subscribers never actually see these communications. Getting email messages into the inbox is essential for email marketing success, and mailing to undeliverable emails, people who will mark your messages as spam (a.k.a. complainers and screamers), and spam traps can cause emails to be lost in the spam folder or even blocked. Email validation tools enable you to prevent bad addresses from permeating your list, improve deliverability, and capture more leads – ultimately leading to stronger ROI on email communications.
invalid email addresses from your list or preventing them from getting onto the list in the first place means that a greater percentage of emails sent will be delivered.
• Fewer complaints and spam trap hits- Not mailing to people who will mark your messages as spam and avoiding traps results in a lower complaint rate and a better sender reputation.
• Increased inbox delivery and results- With a better reputation from fewer bounces and complaints, more–if not all-messages will make it into the inbox of your subscribers, resulting in greater open, click, and response rates.
• Lower mailing costs- If you use an Email Service Provider (ESP) to send email, fewer messages sent translates to lower costs. Improved deliverability also means less effort managing your mailings and infrastructure.
• More usable leads- Validating emails when they’re entered on your website ensures that you capture a working address, increasing data quality and the number of deliverable addresses on your list.
After implementing email validation, companies have reported as much as a 75% reduction in bounce rates and 20% growth in open rates. For a retailer, higher open rates mean additional sales that directly benefit the bottom line. For email newsletters, more opens result in greater brand exposure and better response rates to ads, thus repeat advertisers and higher advertising rates.
Validating emails at the point of entry online reduces data entry errors and fraud, resulting in fewer lost leads and a larger email list. In an analysis of real-time validation results across its clients, Experian QAS has found that as much as 8% of emails entered on websites are incorrect or invalid. If you pay a penny every time you validate an email, catching bad emails and capturing good ones has a positive ROI if the lifetime value of an email address is at least $0.125. For businesses that measure the value of an email in dollars, money is clearly being lost if email validation has not been implemented.
How to validate email addressesEmail validation can be as simple as checking if there is an ‘@’ sign in the address. But to achieve the cleanest and most mailable set of email addresses, there are several steps that should be performed.
Catch and correct syntax errorsThe proper syntax for email addresses is defined by the Internet standards document RFC 5322, yet it is important to note that there are some email address formats that are used in practice that do not meet the standard. For example, the RFC prohibits the use of a period before the ‘@’ symbol, but some domains allow it. It is therefore
essential to use a validation tool that is sophisticated enough to both accept the full range of valid email addresses and also catch emails that on the surface look acceptable, yet in fact will never work.
Free email validation programs do a relatively simple series of checks to see if there is a single ‘@’ and a period in the domain, and ensure that the email as a whole uses an accepted range of characters. Often, these free scripts permit emails with syntax errors, but also reject perfectly valid ones, leading to lost customers. For example, certain web forms will not accept emails that contain a plus sign, even though domains such as Gmail permit these email addresses. However, a plus sign cannot be used in a domain name, and other validation programs will let this through.
Most ISPs enforce their own format rules, which are stricter than the overall standard. For example, AOL email addresses never start with a number, and a plus sign cannot be used in a Hotmail address. By using email verification that incorporates accurate ISP format rules, you can minimize bad data and capture more valid emails. By correcting email addresses with syntax and spelling errors, you can recover otherwise invalid emails and
assist visitors to your website. Email syntax errors can appear because addresses were mistyped by customers online, improperly entered by customer service representatives, or incorrectly scanned from product registration cards. Domains could be misspelled, someone might type ‘2’ instead of ‘@’, or a comma appear used instead of a period. Advanced email validation solutions can fix these errors, allowing the sender to either prompt a customer with a suggested correction or update the email list prior to the next mailing. Here are some examples:
Invalid Email
“Smith, Bessie” <[email protected]>
fred;[email protected]
john_doe2hotmale.com
joseaol.com
Corrected Email
Confirm email domains workProperly validating email domain names–the portion of the email to the right of the ‘@’ sign-further increases the number of addresses flagged as invalid. For many lists, proper domain validation can find three times more “dead” emails than syntax checks alone.
A valid domain both exists and is enabled to accept email. Many domains have been registered, but email servers have never been set up, so these domains cannot accept mail. However, email marketers are cautioned not to rely on solutions that verify domains in real time. Network outages are a fact of life on the Internet. If there was any network interruption during a real-time domain check, all addresses at that domain would be falsely categorized as “dead.”
Enterprise validation services maintain a domain database and monitor the status of a domain over days, not seconds. A domain is classified as invalid only if it fails repeated checks over several days, which ensures that no valuable data is lost.
Verify mailboxes existThe most important component of email validation is verifying the mailbox at the domain. For example, with the address [email protected], is sarah667 a working account at Hotmail? Experian QAS has typically found that invalid mailboxes consistently account for over 70% of the undeliverable emails found during email validation. The most accurate way to validate a mailbox without actually sending an email message is to “ping” the mailbox. This is done by pretending to send to an address without actually doing so. It uses the same process as email delivery software to check for a hard bounce, and it can be just as accurate, as long as the solution can accurately differentiate the myriad status codes returned by email servers.
It is important to note that this is not a process that can be carried out by any organization. Pinging a domain many times without actually sending any email can cause an IP address to be blocked. Using an email validation provider who uses their own dedicated IPs and conforms to best practices will insulate you entirely from any risks. Mailbox pinging will find most, but not all, undeliverable emails. The administrators of each domain control whether the domain will provide hard bounce information during an email delivery session (using the SMTP protocol). While the majority does this, some domains use catch-all accounts and never generate a single bounce, and some domains only send a bounce email if an email is actually sent.
Suppress spam traps and risky email addressesEmailing certain kinds of addresses can hurt your reputation and ability to communicate with subscribers. Here is a description of each kind and how you should handle them:
Types of spam trapsSpam traps are working email addresses that are used to identify spam messages and senders of spam. Mailing to them can get you blacklisted and blocked. Because spam traps are supposedly never actively subscribed to a mailing list, the reasoning is that any email sent to them must be unsolicited, i.e. spam.
Traps may appear on your email list as a result of abandoned emails, malicious activity, or harvested data. Old, once valid emails are sometimes converted into spam traps. Someone could deliberately poison a list by subscribing a known spam trap to it. Emails harvested from the Internet frequently contain spam traps, and data should never be purchased from a disreputable source.The creators of spam traps do not want them to be discovered, so it is impossible to build a comprehensive list of these damaging addresses. However, by working with a validation provider that has a long history in the industry, you can minimize the risk. Its important to be aware of the following types of spam traps:
Role-based accountsMailing email addresses that represent a group of people or a job function such as [email protected] or [email protected] is not recommended. Because multiple people frequently receive messages sent to such accounts, those messages are more likely to be marked as spam. In addition, role-based email addresses for old domains are more likely to be repurposed as spam traps.
Fake emailsWhile not nearly as harmful as the categories above, allowing fake addresses onto your list ties up resources and allows people access to information you wanted to protect. Fake addresses can be as simple as [email protected] or contain vulgar words. Using the proper email validation on a web form will stop a list from being polluted.
Complainers and screamersWithin the email industry, “complainers” are people who habitually report commercial email as spam, and “screamers” are the dreaded individuals who angrily call to complain about unwanted email and sometimes even threaten to sue. When working with a large or historical email list, it is better to be safe than sorry and weed out addresses that may increase your complaint rate, ruin your mailing reputation, and cause your messages to be filtered or blocked.
Known bouncersWhile real-time mailbox validation is highly accurate, it is a resource-intensive process and may not be cost-effective for large email databases. A quicker and more affordable solution for reducing your bounce rate is to match your list to a file of emails that are known to have bounced when mailed. Any company that does large volume email delivery maintains such a list, and some email validation providers aggregate this data and offer it as a service. It is important, however, to use only lists that are recent and were collected using accurate bounce tracking technology. All known bouncer lists suffer from false positives, i.e., they incorrectly contain some working email addresses, and the problem gets worse with older lists. When working with bounce suppression, you should be wary of match rates that are too high. You can test the vendor’s bounce list against emails you’ve recently mailed to see how many deliverable emails were improperly flagged as dead. Depending on the size of the subscriber list, the value of an email address for your business, and your specific deliverability challenge, a bounce suppression file can either quickly ready your list for mailing or cause more problems than you had anticipated.
Do Not MailThe Direct Marketing Association maintains a list of people who have contacted the DMA and asked to not to receive unsolicited commercial email. By matching prospect email lists against the DMA file, you can avoid complaints and support industry efforts to reduce spam and avoid legislation.
Wireless domainsAs part of the federal CAN-SPAM legislation, sending unwanted commercial email messages to wireless devices without prior permission is against the law. The FCC maintains a list of Internet domain names that are used to transmit email to wireless devices, and prospect lists should be matched against the list to avoid complaints and fines.
When to use email validationThere are a variety of tactics for keeping your email list clean, but when should you use them?
At the point of entryValidating email addresses as they are collected is the best way to prevent bad emails from getting on your list. In addition, by prompting users as they enter invalid emails, you can increase the number of working addresses added to your list, which translates to increased revenue and brand awareness.
Emails actively submitted to your list are fresh, and those customers have a confirmed interest in subscribing. In this setting, the best validation techniques are:
• Syntax, domain, and mailbox validation• Email correction• Suppression of spam traps, role-based accounts, and fake emails
Prior to mailing dormant dataIf you have an email list that has not been mailed in months or years, scrubbing it before mailing it will greatly increase the chance that you will be able to successfully deliver emails to those subscribers. Some ESPs shut down mailings that exceed their thresholds for bounce and complaint rates, and only by validating the list first will you be able to use it.
All of the tactics reviewed in this white paper are relevant to email data that hasn’t been recently mailed, and, for very old or large lists, suppressing known bouncers and complainers can be a very effective and low-cost way to avoid damaging to your sender reputation.
For regular email hygieneOnce you’ve cleaned your house list and are checking emails as they come in, validating unmailed addresses on a quarterly or semi-annual basis will keep your list in optimal condition and ready for mailing. As dead addresses are removed from your list, consider an Email Change of Address (ECOA) service to replace abandoned email addresses with the current addresses of your subscribers.
How to use emailvalidationEmail Validation can be accessed in any of three methods:
• In Real-Time- Using an API or web service is the best tool for validating email addresses on a website, mobile device, or anywhere an individual email address needs to be checked instantly. Choose an API that has all the functionality you require, is easy to integrate, and has a reputation for reliability.
• In Batch- The batch process is the simplest validation method with limited requirements. It is best suited for companies with occasional projects, limited database administration resources, or that do not have a sense of urgency. Depending on the size of the file, the lead-time is typically 2- 5 business days.
• Automated Batch- For frequent submission of email lists, batch processing can be automated using FTP file delivery and file naming and format conventions. Files are detected and submitted for processing every few minutes and results are ready for retrieval within hours. Retailers who collect data from their stores nightly, for example, use automated batch processing to validate and correct data the day it was collected, prior to integrating it into their central database.
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ConclusionDeliverability is an essential component of email marketing success. By consistently and thoroughly validating the emails on your list, you can keep it clean and improve your sender reputation. A cleaner email list will deliver to inboxes more frequently. Improved inbox placement means more opens and clicks, and ultimately, better marketing results. Email validation is a fast, easy-to-use, and cost-effective solution for significantly boosting the performance of your email marketing and communication programs.
Experian QAS Products and ServicesExperian QAS provides software and services to capture, validate, cleanse, standardize and enrich customer contact information. We are dedicated to helping our 11,000 customers worldwide improve the quality of their databases. For more information visit our website at www.qas.com or call us at 1-888-322-6201.
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