How healthy is your email list?

Email is the top communication channel for many organizations as they look to stay in touch with customers and promote products and services. However, many companies are dealing with poor email list hygiene that can disrupt communication through this critical channel.

According to a recent Experian Data Quality study, 66 percent of companies have experienced email deliverability issues in the last 12 months. Those issues have resulted in an inability to communicate with customers and poor customer service.

The troubling part is that many of these issues could have been prevented if organizations had done a better job maintaining an accurate email database. In any email database, there are percentages of records that were incorrectly entered, have become outdated or are individuals who have opted-out of receiving messages. If your email lists are left unchecked, they can result in an inability to stay in touch with a large percentage of individuals who have opted-in to receive your email communications.

This is because bad email addresses don’t just affect your ability to communicate with individual consumers; it also affects your ability to communicate with all consumers in your email database. On a very basic level, the ability to have email messages delivered is dependent on a domain’s “sender reputation.” A sender reputation is based on things like the content of your messages, the number of bounces and how users interact with messages.

If that reputation is damaged for any reason, it can negatively affect the delivery of all communications. It can cause them to be delivered at off times, land them in the spam folder or they just won’t be delivered at all. And what many companies don’t realize is email list hygiene is one of the leading factors in sender reputation.

Email deliverability is a complicated process and you can learn more about it by checking out one of our white papers around email deliverability.

The bottom line is that companies need to improve the hygiene of their email database. Organizations need to identify which emails in their database are valid, deliverable email addresses before sending email marketing campaigns. There is now a quick and easy way to check the health of your email list.  

Experian Data Quality just released a new self-service email verification tool online. This allows you to upload a list of email data for validation. A sample of the results are returned so you can see the percentage of your database that is invalid. To find out the specific emails that are inaccurate, the file can be purchased and downloaded instantly. This allows you to test the health of your organization's email list and then improve it based on the results.

By validating email addresses, your organization can better understand the health of your email database and take action to improve its accuracy. This ensures more accurate and deliverable communications, and an improved sender reputation. 

Upload your email list today!