With the advent of social media and the rise of prominence of those channels of communication, you might think email is dead. In this post let’s discuss why email as a channel of communication is (still) so important to businesses.

Email is the most important communication channel for businesses. A recent survey by Experience says that:

37% of UK companies said email is the most important means of communication with the customer base.

When we consider email worldwide; we have 2.9 million live active accounts and 180 billion emails issued every day. Compare that to Facebook and Twitter that have 900 million and 300 million accounts respectively, the comparison becomes clear. Email is quite significantly and clearly the largest communication on earth and will remain so for a long time to come.

These numbers are just reinforcing the message that it's on the way back up rather than underneath them. Even to be on those social media platforms you need an email in the first place. At least for the foreseeable future email will continue to be the most important communication channel available.

Email Accuracy

When looking into the issue of email accuracy, the cost of getting this wrong from a pure sending an email perspective is negligible. Sending the email to the wrong place only really costs organizations fractions of pennies per email sent to the wrong place.

What should organizations really care about email accuracy? There are a number of factors that come into play here. The cost of it is fractions of pennies when sent to a wrong email but the risks that sit behind are significant.

You've got to consider the company's reputation itself and ascend the reputation of a user of the email system. If you send the email to the wrong person, with time the emails accumulate. This destroys your reputation as a sender. An inaccurate email address can impact your reputation. It depends on the number of factors like the number of spam accounts you have, the number of unknown users and the number of complaints generated against you.

Complaints are not someone sending emails to Yahoo telling them about a wrong email sent to them; but the ability of the consumer to hit a button on the email system to deliberately mark something as junk or spam.

Sender Score Matters!

In the UK the average sender score is 51%.

When you consider that against the deliverability of emails as a consequence, for a score of 51, around 21% of your email campaigns will hit the inbox of the consumer. If you compare that to Canada where the score is 70% the volume of emails hitting the inbox is 68%.

The importance of sender score and sender reputation becomes really clear here. 21% vs 68% is a good difference. The higher the score, the more emails are delivered to the inbox of your consumer.

Spam Traps and Honey Pots

There is a lot of jargon involved in the whole system. ESPs are your email service providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail.

The more a company issues an email to invalid addresses the more they will hit areas called spam traps and honey pots.

Spam Traps are previously used emails. It’s an email someone used for a period of time. After a certain period of time, the ESP will close it down. Hotmail might reopen it and set an email system called the spam trap to catch spammers sending emails to email addresses they shouldn’t be sending emails to. As a consequence, a legitimate business can get caught up in issuing emails to people who used to use a service but stopped using it some time ago.

Honey Pots are emails that have never been used. They are not legitimate email addresses. They have been set up by ESPs deliberately to catch spam emails. It should never receive a single email.

There are organizations that monitor these traps and honey pots and they create a blacklist of organizations that continually email to these traps.

These traps are designed to stop criminal and spam activities in the email systems. Legitimate businesses need to make sure they avoid these traps. Having too many of these traps can get your entire email campaign blocked. So, one moment you are sending 20 million emails and the next moment you are getting 20 million bounces. That is if you are not being careful.

Buying lists of emails?

In terms of email validation, marketers really need to understand that sometimes less is more. By buying endless you are also buying historic problems contained in all those lists. If you are involved in email list poachers, you really have to maintain a significant hygiene campaign against all those listings.

If you don’t then, you are running the risk of completely blocking your next email campaign or having every email message filtered into the junk box of the recipient. Email purchases are quite dangerous in terms of email marketing. They have significant risks involved.

Email Quality Vs. Email Quantity

Email quality is far more important than email quantity.

That is one aspect that marketers need to address. DeBounce is a very comprehensive tool in terms of email quality. It can be utilized in a number of different ways.

There is a system to collect emails as they are being typed into the database. This can be implemented on your website or at your cosigners. You’re ensuring that the information placed in your database is clean at the point of collection.

For historic data sets, there is an automated batch cleanse service where you can take your existing emails and have they cleansed. The advantage is that you get clean emails that you know you can use in your campaigns. It checks for a number of things. It validates the email to be correct in terms of its structure. That it has a username and a domain name.

It commits transactions to the ISP to determine whether or not the email is live and active within the system. And as a consequence whether or not that email will be delivered to the user in that system. There is a huge problem inside a number of email services such as Yahoo, where they are known to be what’s called ‘accept all’. When you call a transaction to Yahoo and ask it whether an email is valid, the answer will always be yes. Even when it’s not.

Most email services stop their email validation at that point. The email validation tool from DeBounce is able to conduct further transactions with the ISP to determine even on the accept all email address whether it actually exists on the system and that whether an email can be sent to it or not. Accuracy and simplicity are what make someone get DeBounce as opposed to other email validation systems out there in the market. The system provides accurate results even with accept-alls. It can provide an uplift of 35% in terms of those accept-alls.

What to look for?

So, when looking for an email validation company, always go for a vendor who provides an overall solution to your problem and not a limited solution. Look for one that will give simple clear results that you can understand and your company can apply to your own data systems.