Email is the fastest and most cost effective way to stay in touch with your customers, suppliers, employees and associates. Keeping your email list current and accurate is critical to keeping in touch with the people that matter in your business.
Unfortunately, email lists can go out of date. People change email addresses as they (for example):
- Move to a new employer
- Changes name (and email address) after getting married
- Move Internet providers
If your business relies on email lists for key activities such as marketing, it’s important that you keep lists current and “clean”.
Good Decision Making
Some questions that your business might face:
- What return can we get from an email marketing campaign?
- What emphasis should email marketing get in comparison to other forms? (e.g. telephone calls, postal campaigns, radio or TV advertising)?
To help answer these questions, you need the answer to this key question:
- How many emails on our list are valid?
Many businesses have email lists but, as these lists get progressively more outdated as time goes on, have no idea how many email addresses are “current” / valid.
Having a regularly cleaned email list helps you understand your client and prospect base and therefore to make better decisions on how much effort to put into email marketing.
Reduce Operational Costs
What happens when you send out an email campaign?
One of the issues is that you get a number of emails returned (or “bounced”) to you as being undeliverable.
What do you do with these “bounces”? Ideally (to avoid future “bounces”), you should go through each one and remove the email address from your list(s).
For many businesses, the time and effort in doing this for potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of emails is simply not possible and email “bounces” get ignored. The problem with this approach is that the problem becomes worse as time goes on. As your email list grows, so does the number of bounces. Before too long, you might find that the number of bounces far exceeds the number of emails successfully delivered.
Stay On Top
Imagine the not uncommon scenario of having an email list where the number of bounces exceeds those successfully delivered. One day, you receive a surprise visit from the CEO of Marketing who asks the question:
- “How many people are on our email list?”
If you have a validated email list, answering this question is no problem. Without a validated list, it might be time to wheel out the “smoke and mirrors”!
How Often To Validate Emails
Everyone has email lists that are different. Your business is unique and you have your own “profile” of typical types (e.g. business or consumer) of email addresses in your lists. Depending on the “profile”, there are different answers to the question of how often to validate emails.
However, we can give some general guidelines based on our experience with email validation:
- For large (i.e. > 10,000) lists, we suggest checking every 2 weeks.
- Smaller lists can be checked monthly.
We’ve found this works well with most lists and ensures that your business keeps a current and valid email list.
