As an email marketing agency or an organisation, there is no greater asset than a healthy email list. Your list should be full of fresh, active, and accurate email addresses.
Unfortunately, creating email addresses is quite simple and people often fake them. If someone is browsing and gets to a site that needs their email address for sign-up, chances are they might fake it (if they are disinterested). This leads to deliverability problems as well as negatively impacting your sender’s reputation.
So, how can you optimise your email list? Here are a few strategies you can employ in your quest for address verification.
1. Use an Email Verification API
Commonly referred to as email validation, email verification is the process of ensuring that all the addresses in a database are right. The process often classifies the addresses as active, inactive, or fake. One of the most effective ways to do this is by using an email verification API.
Usually, this email address checking API offers real-time insights on every email across the integrated platforms. You can use it on your free trial sign-ups, gated content forms, and any registration pages you may require clients to include their email addresses.
By validating the addresses at the collection point, you yield higher-quality email lists.
2. Avoid Buying Email Addresses
In a bid to broaden your email list, you may be tempted to buy addresses. Most people think that buying them for marketing is an easy way to expand but it may be leading you to more harm than good. This is because the users may not have voluntarily signed up to receive your marketing emails. As a result, they are likely to view them as spam.
If the spamming continues, your company may get a significant number of complaints and unsubscribes. All this goes to altering your brand’s trustworthiness and image.
3. Get the Right Data Acquisition Practices
If you are familiar with computer programming, you must have heard about ‘GIGO’. This is an abbreviation meaning Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you are collecting your data in the wrong ways, you have a high chance of landing inactive or burner addresses.
To mitigate such instances, consider setting up your forms and collection systems in the right way. Incorporate real-time validation during the collection process so that if the address cannot be found, a client corrects it. Depending on your scope of work, you can play around with words for more engagement.
For instance, if an email is wrong, the system could prompt something like, ‘Oops, we cannot find your email. Retry?’ or ‘Did you mean. Such practices check for errors and send a prompt to clients to correct the issue. It may be as small as a missed hyphen or dot but its potential to ruin your email list is immense.
4. Practice Email List Hygiene
There is no point in having more than a hundred addresses if only ten of them are active. After identifying the inactive and fake emails, you need to let go of them. Some of these processes can be automated whereby an address is deleted if it has bounced more than twice.
If a client was responsive to your emails and is no longer interested, consider following up on them with an offer. Depending on the nature of your business, you may give them a discount, merchandise, or send them a free trial for your service.
If you still don’t get a response after a while (preferably six months), you can proceed to delete them.
5. Combine All the Verification Methods
Each of the above methods is effective and will help you improve your email list. However, combining a few of them will deliver a longer-lasting impact on the health of your email list as well as better marketing results.
For instance, while you have email verification API at all entry points, you must also ensure that your data acquisition practices are right. It would help if you used the right tools but still went around buying addresses.
After collecting the email addresses and putting them into use, you must also perform regular clean-ups. This is because sometimes people cease to use particular addresses or lose their access to them. It means that the email address is still subscribed to your service. If addresses have become invalid over time, it is okay to get rid of them to avoid list degradation.
Conclusion
As you can see, healthy email lists not only contribute to more success in email marketing campaigns but also give you a more accurate picture of how your campaigns perform. This saves you from driving resources to fake or inactive addresses.
Additionally, it reduces your hard and soft bounce rates and keeps your reputation solid. It is a huge win for you as a business.
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