Why you need to validate your emails ahead of Black Friday

When you also consider the increased level of competition and saturated inboxes,  the opportunity for your message to grab attention and create action is going to be difficult, especially if a recipient decides within three seconds whether to open the email or not!

For this reason, many companies are investing time and effort into personalisation, subject line design, mobile-friendly websites, frictionless checkout and segmentation to ensure the message and offer resonate to maximum effect.

However, what if this effort all went to waste?

Many companies invest in their email content but don’t invest in the email address itself, which renders many of those emails undeliverable. Research conducted by GBG shows that emails degrade by 7% per annum. An invalid email will bounce, and any bounces have the detrimental impact of decreasing your sender reputation, and more importantly, your customer does not get to see your message.

Running a live email validation (checking that the email is deliverable to the mailbox) process before Black Friday tells you:

• Which of your emails are invalid and not to send
• Which of your emails are valid and ready to send
• Which of your emails require further consideration before sending

This information allows you to focus on valid emails, reducing bounce-backs and providing you with more pertinent marketing metrics.

The invalid emails allow you to create a process for capturing alternative email addresses or utilising alternative marketing channels. Getting the channel right the first time reduces the delay in your customer receiving the message. This is especially important if the message is time-sensitive, as is not having to re-process the returned data internally. Of course, if you move to alternative channels, data quality is just as important to ensure delivery. Royal Mail updates between 3, 000 and 7, 000 addresses a day, and telephone numbers degrade typically at 6% per year.

Loqate also reports on catch-all and role email addresses, which can lead to higher bounce-back rates. Therefore, these emails can be throttled accordingly, managing the send volume and measuring the returns.

This approach allows a company to contact as many customers as possible whilst maintaining its sender reputation. However, validating emails on your customer database is just half the story. With the IDM recording that the average email costs £30 to acquire in the UK, why allow mistyped and invalid emails into your system? Deploying email validation at the point of capture can help reduce up to 18% of mistypes Loqate is seeing. This level of error means an email costs £36.58 to acquire and it causes down-the-line issues of poor customer service (they don’t receive the emails they have signed up for, especially annoying if it is for a money-off voucher) which also leads to loss of sales, and bad quality data entering your customer database.

In summary, email live validation is essential to ensuring your emails reach the mailbox and your customers and prospects receive the important messages and offers that will make your Black Friday campaign a success!