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.
Email is by far the largest form of communication worldwide. According to recent estimates:
- There are over 2.9 billion email users, sending and receiving around 180 billion emails per day.
- In contrast, Facebook has only around 2.8 billion users and Twitter has ~330 million monthly active users.
Even though social media platforms have grown rapidly in recent years, email still outpace them in terms of scale and reach. Several reasons explain email's continued dominance:
- Email has been around since the 1970s and is an entrenched habit for billions of people. Old habits die hard.
- Email is universal. Almost everyone with an internet connection can access email while social media platforms cater to specific audiences and demographics.
- Email remains the most reliable and effective way to communicate directly with someone, whether for personal or business purposes.
- You need an email address to sign up for most social media platforms in the first place!
While social media and messaging apps continue to grow, it seems email will remain the most important and ubiquitous form of digital communication for the foreseeable future. It has withstood the rise of new technologies due to its reliability, effectiveness, and reach. Email's reign may not be flashy or glamorous, but it shows no signs of being dethroned anytime soon.
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 several 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 a 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 the sender score and sender reputation becomes really clear here. 21% vs. 68% is a big 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, and 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 has 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. ESPs have set them up 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 these traps.
These traps are designed to stop criminal and spam activities in 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?
When it comes to email validation, marketers must understand that less can be more. While it may be tempting to purchase endless email lists, doing so can bring with it a host of historic problems that can negatively impact your campaigns. Specifically, if you're involved with email list poachers, you must maintain a hygiene campaign against all those listings to ensure your email efforts remain effective.
If you fail to do so, you run the risk of having your next email campaign blocked entirely or having your messages filtered into your recipients' spam folders. The dangers of email list purchases are significant, particularly when it comes to email marketing.
Instead of relying on purchased email lists, marketers should focus on building their own email lists through organic methods. This means engaging with potential customers and encouraging them to sign up for your email newsletters or other offerings. By doing so, you can ensure that your list is composed of engaged, interested parties who are more likely to respond positively to your email campaigns.
Furthermore, maintaining a healthy email list requires ongoing effort. Marketers must regularly clean their lists and remove invalid or inactive email addresses to maintain their deliverability rates and avoid being marked as spam. By focusing on quality over quantity and consistently maintaining a healthy email list, marketers can maximize their email marketing success and avoid the risks associated with purchased email lists.
So, marketers must be aware of the risks associated with purchased email lists and focus instead on building their email lists organically. By doing so and maintaining a healthy email list, marketers can avoid negative impacts on their email campaigns and maximize their chances of success.
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 them 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.
The easiest way to verify an email address is to simply send an email to that address.
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.
Conclusion
If you're in the market for an email validation company, it's important to choose a vendor that offers a comprehensive solution to your needs, rather than a limited one. This means looking for a company that provides clear and easy-to-understand results that your company can apply to your data systems.
The right vendor should be able to offer a range of services that go beyond simple email validation. They should be able to identify and correct invalid email addresses, identify duplicates, and remove spam traps and other harmful email addresses from your database. This will not only ensure that your emails reach their intended recipients but also protect your company's reputation and avoid potential legal issues.
In addition to their services, the vendor should be able to provide you with clear and easy-to-understand results that you can use to improve your data systems. This means providing reports that are intuitive and actionable, so you can quickly identify and address any issues that arise.
Ultimately, the right email validation company will provide you with a comprehensive solution that goes beyond simple validation and ensures that your data is clean, accurate, and up-to-date. By choosing a vendor that offers clear and easy-to-understand results, you can be confident that your data systems are in good hands and your company is well-positioned for success.
