NCOA for Email: Is Your Email Address List Clean and Up-to-Date?

Introduction Savvy marketers devote a great deal of attention to crafting their email campaign. They scrutinize the subject line, care about the content, and carefully control the timing of delivery. Once the perfect message has been created, it’s just as important to focus on its successful delivery to its intended recipients. Unfortunately, your current list of email addresses likely has a number of 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 you would rather not be connected with. Obviously, you want to keep these people and their moments of mischief 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 something up. A frequent occurrence is some variation of “[email protected]”, which happens when the user presses random keys. 2. Prank addresses An innocent person can be added to new lists every day, simply because they fell out with the wrong person. Sometimes the abuse is a prank 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 targets your company. Without you realizing it, your email message is addressed 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 Internet service providers, or enter or graduate from school. Technical advances like cable modems, as well as price competition from ISPs, mergers, and failures continue to fuel this movement (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), and even pagers and cell phones. According to IDC, registrations for webmail accounts are growing at 91% per year, now exceeding 100 million addresses. Changes in email addresses are also fueled by the growth of 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 abandoned at will. As an individual By changing addresses and keeping multiple email addresses up and running for multiple purposes , it is unlikely that they will dedicate themselves to updating 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 percentage of your database that is bouncing. Each bounce address is an unread message. After several tests, you may determine that some addresses are actually “dead” (rather than 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 aren’t bouncing? These are messages that end up in abandoned or discarded Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you modify their text, change their subject line, etc. Or worse yet, the email account has been recycled and you are actually reaching the wrong person. Your list has typos No list is immune to the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms: 1. User Caused If you accept email addresses from your website, you will likely experience a typo rate of 1-8% (or more!), depending on the stringency of your email address validation routines. and carelessness of your visitors. Typical errors include: joesmith@aol – missing “.com” [email protected] – input box too small, user stopped typing [email protected] – double dots, sticky keyboard joe smith @ aol.com – extra spaces [email protected]” – invalid quotes [email protected] – transposition error [email protected] – likely misspelling of hotmail2. Internal Entry Many companies collect email addresses through call centers, post office , query cards, etc. addresses 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, misunderstandings hearing aids can get into their database One of our favorite typos, entered by a phone customer service agent, is “joesmith@yahoodotcom” 3. Data tampering and corruption Independent Regardless of how careful your company is to double-validate or double-subscribe each email address, the list is still vulnerable to ongoing errors. database managment. For example, on several occasions we have seen forced truncation of records, resulting in the removal of the last characters of long email addresses. Other times, a well-meaning database administrator will design a quick (but insufficiently targeted) query to clean up or correct a typo he has seen in the data. Unless the error is dramatic, faulty data handling 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’s unprofessional to email multiple copies of the same message to your customer. Although many duplicate addresses are the result of double entries by your customers, these same people are often so irritated by multiple messages that they unsubscribe from your list altogether. These “obvious” duplicates are easy to spot, and most database administrators can quickly scan your list. Ironically, not all companies catch these duplicates, especially if they maintain multiple lists and forget to remove duplicates between them. The hardest duplicates to spot are multiple unique email addresses owned and read by the same person. Imagine if your customer initially gave you their Hotmail address and then gave you their AOL email address. You need access to a comprehensive and sophisticated database of email addresses to uncover these duplicates and decide on the customer’s current preferred email address. And now that? Now that you know your list has inappropriate addresses, old addresses, typos, and duplicates, what can you do? There are a number of solutions, including: Improving your email address validation routines It’s worth a look, but is this really your area of ​​expertise? Switching to double subscription Has pros and cons; won’t solve all your problems Manually review all email addresses for accuracy and appropriateness Requires considerable effort on the part of your staff Start creating your own block list and use e-MPS suppression lists (and other ) from the DMA Smart Idea Consider sending a separate message to confirm your customer’s current preferred email address and request any updates Keep a list of your customers’ alternate contact methods to ensure you reach them Make phone calls and send letters to get updated email addresses will be expensive Remove all typos and bounced email addresses from your list NO! Forgot the cost of acquiring your customers? What about the projected revenue a typical customer generates each year? Each lost customer is costing your company $10 to $50 or more. Removing an email address from your list simply because it’s undeliverable is wasting your marketing dollars! Welcome to NCOA for Email You may already be familiar with NCOA for Your Mailing Addresses, a service that corrects and updates your postal mailing list. What you may not know is that since the year 2000, this service has also been available to update your email address lists. A typical NCOA for email service includes the following features: Identifying addresses that should be removed from your list. These can be addresses that match a list of suspicious addresses (e.g. [email protected]”, “[email protected]”, etc.), match a block list, are hard bounces, or are duplicates. so you don’t send double messages to these people Marking addresses that need to be manually reviewed These can be addresses that meet certain rules maintained by the provider, or simply violate standard guidelines for email addresses (for example, that they contain unusual characters , etc.) Correcting typos Using tables of known typos, as well as heuristic rules, your provider can help you recover lost customers from “dead” addresses resulting from thousands of typos and syntax errors, including all examples of typos presented above Some providers even offer recursive processing, which you can correct manually it was smart multiple typos in a single pass. Updating old addresses. All true NCOAs for email providers operate popular consumer websites that people use when they change their email addresses. These updated addresses, in addition to general domain changes, are made available to you. Typical providers offer pay-for-performance pricing. On average, this works out to less than fifty cents per address retrieved. Depending on the type and quality of your list, initial match rates will vary from very low to over ten percent. Your relationship with a vendor can be a simple one-time run or a contract-based relationship where they will help you keep your list up to date over time. Do not wait! Your customer database is one of your most valuable and expensive assets. Letting it be consumed at a rate of 25% to 33% per year is not a viable way of doing business. You should start thinking now about the problems lurking in your database and decide to fix them as soon as possible. Using an NCOA for your email provider can help you immediately reconnect with customers lost to “dead” addresses and ensure your well-crafted messages get the maximum return on your investment. Austin C. Bliss President FreshAddress, Inc. FreshAddress, Inc., The Email Address ExpertsTM, provides a comprehensive suite of industry-leading email delivery services and databases to help businesses grow 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