Introduction Savvy marketers devote a great deal of attention to crafting their email campaign. They scrutinize the subject line, care about the content, and carefully control the timing of delivery. Once the perfect message has been created, it’s just as important to focus on its successful delivery to its intended recipients. Unfortunately, your current email address list is likely to have a number of major problems. Your list has inappropriate addresses The beauty of the Internet is that it connects you with everyone. The danger is that there are people you would rather not be connected with. Obviously, you want to keep these people and their moments of mischief off your list. Some common situations include: 1. Fake addresses Some of your visitors will never reveal their email address to you. If an input is required, they will make something up. A frequent occurrence is some variation of “[email protected]”, which happens when the user presses random keys. 2. Prank Addresses An innocent person can be added to new lists every day, simply because they fell out with the wrong person. Sometimes the abuse is a joke subscription from one friend to another; other times it is addressed to a public figure (for example, [email protected]). 3. Malicious addresses Another common type of abuse is when someone addresses your company. Without you realizing it, your email message is addressed to someone who will make your life miserable. This could be an email address to report spam (eg your list has old addresses). Unfortunately, people change their email addresses all the time, when they change jobs, move, change Internet service providers, or enter or graduate from school. Technical advances like cable modems, as well as ISP price competition, mergers and failures continue to fuel this movement (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), and even pagers and cell phones. According to IDC, registrations for webmail accounts are growing at 91% per year, now exceeding 100 million addresses. Changes in email addresses are also being driven by the growth of unsolicited email, as users switch email accounts to escape “spam.” Services like AOL allow users to create and manage separate screen names and associated email addresses, which can be used and abandoned at will As people change addresses and keep multiple email addresses going for multiple purposes, it is unlikely that they will be dedicated to updating it. Recent studies indicate that almost 35% of Internet users change their email addresses each year, and this does not take into account the multiple email addresses that are added every day. Ideally, you are aware of this issue and monitor the percentage of your database that is bouncing. Each bounce address is an unread message. After several tests, you may determine that some addresses are actually “dead” (rather than just a short-term bounce) and be tempted to remove them from your list. It’s equally important to pay attention to a much harder-to-trace statistic: what percentage of your database are old addresses that aren’t bouncing? These are messages that end up in abandoned or discarded Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you modify their text, change their subject line, etc. Or even worse, the email account has been recycled and you are actually reaching the wrong person. Your list has typographical errors No list is immune to the introduction of typographical errors. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms: 1. User-caused If you accept email addresses from your website, you will probably experience a typo rate of 1-8% (or more!), depending on the strictness of your email address validation routines. and the carelessness of your visitors. Typical errors include: joesmith@aol – missing “.com” [email protected] – input box too small, user stopped typing [email protected] – double periods, sticky keyboard joe smith @ aol.com – extra spaces [email protected]” – invalid quotes [email protected] – transposition error [email protected] – probable misspelling of hotmail2. Internal input Many companies collect email addresses through call centers, mail , query cards, etc. addresses is another common source of typos, as validation routines are often much less stringent internally than on your website.In addition to the challenges of reading and interpreting handwriting, misunderstandings hearing aids can enter their database One of our favorite typos, entered from a customer service agent phone, is “joesmith@yahoodotcom” 3. Data manipulation and corruption Regardless of how careful your company is to validate or accepting each email address twice, the list is still vulnerable to errors in ongoing database management. For example, on several occasions we have seen forced record truncation, resulting in the last few characters of long email addresses being removed. Other times, a well-meaning database administrator will design a quick (but under-targeted) query to clean up or correct a typo he has seen in the data. Unless the error is dramatic, faulty data manipulation or data corruption can go undetected in a list for many months. Your list has duplicates Duplicate email addresses can lead to unhappy customers and database management challenges for your business. Obviously, it’s unprofessional to email your customer multiple copies of the same message. Although many duplicate addresses are the result of double entries by your customers, these same people often get so irritated by receiving multiple messages that they unsubscribe from your list entirely. These “obvious” duplicates are easy to spot and most DBAs can quickly scan their list. Ironically, not all companies catch these duplicates, especially if they maintain multiple lists and forget to de-duplicate each other. The hardest duplicates to spot are multiple unique email addresses that are owned and read by the same person. Imagine if your customer initially gave you their Hotmail address and later gave you their AOL email address. You need access to a sophisticated and comprehensive database of email addresses to discover these duplicates and decide what the customer’s current preferred email address is. And now that? Now that you know your list has inappropriate addresses, old addresses, typos, and duplicates, what can you do? There are a number of solutions, including: Improving your email address validation routines Worth looking into, but is this really your area of ​​expertise? Switch to double subscription Has pros and cons; won’t solve all your problems Manually review all email addresses for accuracy and appropriateness Requires considerable effort from your staff Start creating your own block list and use e-MPS suppression lists (and other ) from DMA Smart idea Consider sending a separate message to confirm your customer’s current preferred email address and request any updates Keep a list of alternate contact methods for your customers to ensure you get in touch with them Make phone calls and send letters to get updated email addresses will be expensive Remove all typos and bounced email addresses from your list NO! Forgot the cost of acquiring your customers? What about the projected revenue a typical customer generates each year? Each lost customer is costing your company $10 to $50 or more. Removing an email address from your list simply because it’s undeliverable is wasting your marketing dollars! Welcome to NCOA for Email You may already be familiar with NCOA for Your Mailing Addresses, a service that corrects and updates your postal mailing list. What you may not know is that since the year 2000, this service has also been available to update your email address lists. A typical NCOA for the email service includes the following functions: Identification of addresses that should be removed from your list. These can be addresses that match a list of suspicious addresses (for example, [email protected]”, “[email protected]”, etc.), match a block list, be hard bounces, or be duplicates. person, so you don’t send double messages to these people Marking addresses that need to be reviewed manually These can be addresses that meet certain rules maintained by the provider, or simply violate standard guidelines for email addresses (for example, that they contain unusual characters, etc.) Typo Correction Using tables of known typos as well as heuristic rules, your provider can help you recover customers lost to “dead” addresses as a result of thousands of typos and syntax errors, including all examples of typos presented above Some providers even offer recursive processing, which can intelligently correct multiple typos in a single pass Updating old addresses All true NCOA providers for email operate popular consumer websites designed for for people to use when they change their email addresses. These updated addresses, in addition to general domain changes, are made available to you. Typical providers offer pay-for-performance pricing. On average, this works out to less than fifty cents per address retrieved. Depending on the type and quality of your list, initial match rates will range from very small to over ten percent. Your relationship with a vendor can be a simple one-time run or a contract-based relationship where they will help you keep your list up to date over time. Do not wait! Your customer database is one of your most valuable and expensive assets. Letting it burn out at a rate of 25-33% per year is not a viable way of doing business. You should start thinking now about the problems lurking in your database and decide to fix them as soon as possible. Using an email provider NCOA can help you reconnect with customers lost to “dead” addresses right away and ensure that your well-crafted messages get the most ROI. Austin C. Bliss President FreshAddress, Inc. FreshAddress, Inc., The Email Address ExpertsTM, provides a comprehensive suite of industry-leading email delivery services and databases to help businesses grow their eCommerce revenues . To learn more about how we can help “build and update” your email list, visit http://freshaddress.com/biz or email [email protected]. (c) 2002 FRESHADDRESS.COM