Email rehab: Staying clean

In our first blog post in this three-part series, we discussed how you can take the first steps in your email rehab program: admitting you have a problem and cleaning up your database with email validation. The next step in email rehab is to start verifying data at the point of collection.

Staying clean

After validating your existing database, the last thing you want to do is continue feeding bad data right back in. All of your hard work “getting clean” would have been for nothing. According to Juniper Research, more than 20 percent of email registrations contain typos, syntax, domain and other errors. Implementing a real-time email validation solution to validate emails as users are entering them will help catch these common mistakes. 85 percent of businesses are working to prevent invalid email addresses from entering their database at the point of collection.

How does it work?

If a customer enters an invalid email address into a form, the website immediately prompts them to enter a valid email before they can continue. Real-time email validation asks for a correction while the user is still engaged and likely to give accurate information. At Experian Data Quality, we've seen this real-time check correctly verify over 97 percent of consumer email addresses.

Now what?

The first two stages of email rehab help marketers verify that their legacy email lists and the emails they are collecting in real time are valid and deliverable. The final stage of email rehab is to revamp your reputation. Monitoring your sender reputation and putting an ongoing strategy in place to maintain that reputation are critical parts of your email rehab program that cannot be overlooked.