Introduction Marketing experts devote a great deal of attention to crafting your email messaging campaign. They scrutinize the subject line, care about content, and carefully monitor delivery time. Once the perfect message has been created, it is equally important to focus on its successful delivery to its intended recipients. Unfortunately, your current email address list is likely to have several major problems. Your list has inappropriate addresses. The beauty of the Internet is that it connects you to everyone. The danger is that there are people with whom you would rather not be connected. Obviously, you want to keep these people and their moments of malice off your list. Some common situations include: 1. Fake addresses Some of your visitors will never reveal their email address to you. If input is required, they will make up something. A frequent occurrence is some variation of “[email protected]”, which occurs when the user presses random keys. 2. Prank addresses An innocent person can be added to new lists every day, simply because he made an enemy of the wrong person. Sometimes 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. Unbeknownst to you, your email is going 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 service provider Internet access or entering or graduating from school. Technical advancements such as cable modems, as well as ISP price competition, mergers, and glitches continue to fuel this movement. Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), and even pagers and cellphones. According to IDC, webmail account registrations are growing at 91% annually, and now exceed 100 million addresses. Email address changes are also driven by the rise in 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 dropped at will. If they change addresses and keep multiple email addresses running for multiple purposes, they are unlikely to go out of their way to update it. Recent studies indicate that almost 35% of Internet users change their email addresses every year, and this does not take into account the multiple email addresses that are added every day. Ideally, you are aware of this problem and monitor the bounce rate of your database. Each bounced address is an unread message. After several tests, you may determine that some addresses are truly “dead” (rather than being 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-track statistic: what percentage of your database is old addresses that don’t bounce? These are messages that end up in abandoned or throwaway Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you modify your text, change your subject line, etc. Or worse yet, the email account has been recycled and you are actually communicating with the wrong person. Your List Has Typographical Errors No list is immune from introducing typographical errors. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms: 1. Caused by the user If you accept email addresses from your website, you will probably experience a typographical error rate of 1 to 8% (or more!), Depending on the thoroughness 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 joesmith @ aol..com – double dots, sticky keyboard joe smith @ aol.com – additional spaces joesmith @ aol.com “- invalid quotes [email protected] – transposition error [email protected] – probable misspelling of hotmail2. Internal input Many companies collect email addresses through telephone centers, post offices, look-up cards etc. directions is another common source of typos, as validation routines are often much less strict internally than on your website. In addition to the challenges of reading and interpreting handwriting, auditory misunderstandings can enter your database. One of our favorite typographical errors, entered by a customer service agent over the phone, is “joesmith @ yahoodotcom.” 3. Data tampering and corruption I Regardless of how careful your company is to double-validate or opt-in for each email address, the list is still vulnerable to database management errors. For example, on several occasions we have seen forced truncation of records, resulting in the removal of the last characters from long email addresses. Other times, a well-intentioned database administrator will design a quick (but not targeted enough) query to clean up or correct a typo that they have seen in the data. Unless the mistake is dramatic, faulty data manipulation or data corruption can go unnoticed on a list for many months. Your List Has Duplicates Duplicate email addresses can result in unhappy customers and database management challenges for your business. Obviously, it is unprofessional to email your customer multiple copies of the same message. Although many duplicate addresses are the result of double entries from your customers, these same people are often so irritated by receiving multiple messages that they unsubscribe from your list entirely. These “obvious” duplicates are easy to spot, and most database administrators can quickly scan their list. Ironically, not all companies detect these duplicates, especially if they maintain multiple lists and forget to eliminate the deception between them. The most difficult duplicates to detect are multiple unique email addresses that the same person owns and reads. Imagine if your customer initially gave you their Hotmail address and then gave you their AOL email address. You need to access 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 that your list has inappropriate addresses, old addresses, typos, and duplicates, what can you do? There are a number of solutions, including: Improving email address validation routines Worth looking at, but is this really your area of expertise? Switch to dual subscription It has pros and cons; it won’t solve all your problems Manually review all email addresses for accuracy and adequacy Requires substantial effort from your staff Start building your own block list and use e-MPS (and other) suppression lists from the DMA Smart Idea Consider sending a separate message confirming your customer’s current preferred email address and request for updates. Are you willing to dedicate an entire message to this? Keep a list of your customer’s alternate contact methods so you can be sure to reach them. Making phone calls and sending letters to get up-to-date email addresses will be expensive. Eliminate all typos and bouncing email addresses from your list. NO! Forgot your customer acquisition cost? What about the projected revenue a typical customer generates each year? Each lost customer costs your business between $ 10 and $ 50 or more. Removing an email address from your list simply because it is undeliverable is wasting your marketing investment. Welcome to NCOA for Email You may already be familiar with NCOA for your postal addresses, a service that corrects and updates your email list. What you might not know is that since 2000, this service has also been available to update your email address lists. A typical NCOA service for email includes the following functions: Identification of addresses to remove from your list. These can be addresses that match a list of suspicious addresses (eg [email protected] “,” [email protected] “, etc.), match a block list, are hard bounces, or duplicates. Some services they can also detect different addresses that belong to the same person, so you don’t send double messages to these people. Marking of addresses that need to be reviewed manually. These can be addresses that comply with certain rules maintained by the provider or simply violate standard guidelines for email addresses (eg, containing unusual characters, etc.) Correcting typos. Using tables of known typographical errors and heuristic rules, your provider can help you recover lost customers in “dead” addresses as a result of Thousands of typographical and syntax errors, including all typographical error examples presented above. Some providers include They do not offer recursive processing, which can intelligently correct multiple typos in a single pass. Update old addresses. individuals to use when their email addresses change. These updated addresses, in addition to general domain changes, are made available to you. Typical vendors offer pay-for-performance pricing. On average, this equates to less than fifty cents per recovered address. Depending on the type and quality of your list, initial match rates will range from very small to more than ten percent. Your relationship with a supplier can be a simple one-time performance or a contract relationship where they will help you keep your list current 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% to 33% per year is not a viable way to do business. You should start thinking about the problems lurking in your database now and decide to fix them as soon as possible. Using an NCOA provider for email can help you reconnect with customers lost to “dead” addresses right away and ensure that your well-crafted messages get you the most bang for your buck. Austin C. Bliss President FreshAddress, Inc. FreshAddress, Inc., The Email Address ExpertsTM, provides a comprehensive suite of industry-leading database and email delivery services to help businesses increase their e-commerce revenue . For more information on how we can help “Build and Update” your email list, please visit http://freshaddress.com/biz or email [email protected]. (c) 2002 FRESHADDRESS.COM