How to Validate and Verify Your Email Database

When used effectively, email marketing will increase customer loyalty and make you an authority in your business niche. In order to enhance the effectiveness of email marketing programs, you have to constantly scrub your email marketing database to ensure that only valid contacts receive your emails. 

Practicing good email database hygiene will help you to protect your brand and online reputation. Internet service providers are constantly on the lookout for untidy and corrupted email databases with a view to assigning them low reputation scores which ultimately affect the delivery rates.

According to Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, only 20.2 percent of the emails sent are opened. This means that businesses both small and large have plenty of room to cover as far as email list maintenance is concerned.

How to Scrub Your Email Marketing Database

There are several techniques available that you can use to clean your database and validate your email list. Some of the methods involve the use of third party software that is customized to identify and root out undeliverable, duplicate, invalid and BOT email data.

Remove Duplicates and Improperly Formatted Addresses

Duplicate email addresses make your recipient receive more than one mail from you with the same content. Improperly formatted email addresses will either deliver emails to the wrong person or fail altogether. Both cases can make the recipient react negatively to your marketing campaign or see you as being negligent and inefficient in your operations thus harming your reputation.

Clean Role Account Email Addresses

Role account email addresses represent departments within a business organization instead of individuals. When your email marketing list is populated with role account email addresses such as info, admin, sales, enquiry and many others, it becomes ineffective. This is because organizations go through changes that may affect the validity of these email addresses. In addition, some of the role account addresses are linked to computer software programs instead of individuals.

Keyword Scrubbing

This is the practice of cleaning your email database through the removal of non-converting keywords from your list. Some of the keywords to target include spam, abusive terms, junk and keywords that are unreasonably long. Also, if you are running a geographically targeted campaign, you may want to scrub keywords that do not relate to the region where you are running your campaign. This will ensure that only targeted recipients receive your promotional emails.

Create a Bounce Email Register

Whenever you send out emails, not all of them are delivered. There are different reasons why emails bounce. Some of the reasons could be related to servers where certain URLs are blocked due to filter issues and authentication errors. Where the recipient is unknown or the domain is not found, an email server can permanently reject an email resulting in a hard bounce. To clean your database, create a bounce email register that filters out bounced email addresses.

Use a Complainers List

Not all emails you send out in your marketing campaign are opened. Some of them are treated as spam or unsolicited emails by the recipients. When this happens, the open rate of the emails goes down and as a result your message does not reach the recipients as intended. To solve this, you need to clean your email database to eliminate these email contacts, so you’re left with only those who bother to open and read your emails. A complainers list can help you in the cleaning process. This list is populated with all those recipients who don’t open your emails because they’ve complained about them as spam.

Purge Disposable or Throwaway Email Addresses

Disposable email addresses are used by spammers and one-time visitors to subscribe to your marketing campaign in place of their primary and valid email addresses. The danger posed by disposable addresses is that they affect the delivery rate of your emails to the genuine subscribers. With time, this can create a domino effect where your real email recipients become inactive and cold to your campaigns because of not getting your emails on a regular basis. You need to isolate and identify these email addresses and delete them from your list.