You’ve got mail: email send volumes on the rise
With the growing popularity of social channels and messaging services, you’d be forgiven for thinking that email is decreasing in popularity.
However, it’s quite the opposite. Email remains the channel of choice for many businesses and it’s easy to see why. There are currently over 3.8 billion email users globally, a number set to increase to 4.3 billion by 2022.
What’s more, with the pandemic triggering a boom in eCommerce spend, email send volumes have soared in the last 12 months. According to Campaign Monitor, 2020 email volume grew 7% from 2019 compared to 2.5% the year before, and consumers responded with a 13% increase in open rates.
Invalid email: your email couldn’t be delivered
While universally popular with businesses and consumers, email is not without its issues. Of the billions of email users worldwide, 17% of email address data is actually incorrect.
This is caused by customers making genuine mistakes or typos or – more commonly than you might think – because fake email addresses have been given.
In fact, almost one in five consumers admit to deliberately entering an incorrect email address, with the majority stating that falsifying their email address was an attempt to protect their privacy.
Users may also register an email account to access or redeem an offer or service, only to never use that email address again.
On top of that, emails degrade at a rate of around 7% each year, meaning that if you were to capture 100 emails accurately now, only 93 would be useable in 12 months’ time.
Sifting through the junk: the importance of data quality
Keeping in touch with customers has never been more important. Whether it’s communicating new product offers or service updates, email is a vital tool in maintaining brand awareness and generating sales.
But when email addresses are incorrect, poor delivery and response rates occur, leading to wasted marketing campaigns, loss of money, negative brand reputation, mistrust and frustration.
It’s vital therefore to make sure you’re capturing valid email addresses in your online forms. And the most effective way to do this is by implementing a trusted email validation tool.
As with address verification, it’s easier and more cost-effective to validate an email address at the point of capture rather than cleansing it further down the line.
Allowing customers to free-type their email address without validation means you run the risk of collecting useless data, which can have a devastating impact on your customer marketing ROI.
The benefits of email validation
The use of email validation is by far the most effective way to ensure quality email address data.
As well as verifying that an email looks correct, email validation checks whether an address really exists and is able to receive incoming mail.
If an email address is mistyped, email validation software lets customers know at the point of entry so they get a chance to fix it before submitting.
By using an email validation tool, you increase email deliverability which, in turn, leads to:
- More customers reached
- An uplift in successful email marketing campaigns
- A reduction in hard bounces and emails being blocked
- Positive sender reputation
- More efficient onboarding for new customers
- A decrease in fake registrations that will clutter databases
What type of email validation is right for me?
Regex email validation
Regex, or regular expression, is a string of characters that is used to describe a search pattern. A regular expression can be used to validate the format of an email address.
However, regex is extremely restrictive and fails to cater for rare email addresses. Characters such as !#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{| }~ are all valid, but not recognised by regex when used before the @ symbol, meaning any email address that includes these before the local string will not be recognised as valid.
Regex email validation also fails to check several important factors, such as whether the email domain or user account exists.
Post email validation
A second option when it comes to email validation is post validation, or double opt-in, where an email is sent to the email address that was provided and the user then clicks through to confirm their email address.
While this is obligatory in many European countries, if an email address is mistyped, the user won’t receive a confirmation email, meaning you will never capture the email address.
Checking the syntax is important but it shouldn’t be the main or only characteristic. Investing in a tool that conducts additional, rigorous checks in order for accurate and valid responses to be returned is essential and should not be disregarded.
Real-time email validation
A real-time email validation tool checks and verifies email addresses as it happens to prevent incorrect or fake accounts being registered. As well as flagging any typos or errors to the user, real-time email validation checks whether the domain exists and if the email address is able to receive inbound messages.
By verifying email addresses in real-time, you not only ensure you’re collecting genuine email addresses from real customers, you also provide the customer with a better user experience.
Real-time email validation is also an elegant alternative to CAPTCHA – a preventative measure that can be frustrating and cause friction for customers.
Batch email cleanse
Batch cleanse is a method that can be used to clean the email addresses you already hold in your database. This is a good idea if you have never validated email data as it gives you a chance to reduce bounce rates and avoid complaints.
However, it is better to use a real-time email validation tool from the start that will allow you to capture only valid email addresses to avoid further costs, customer frustration and the risk of poor reputation.
