Some people say that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. As morbid as it may seem, let’s set aside the tax part of the equation and focus on death for a minute, and how this will negatively affect your business.
Just to clarify, I’m not talking about the death of important stakeholders of your company. I’m talking about the death of email addresses.
We all know that our loyal customers are the lifeblood of business. Without repeat business, our entire marketing budget would be exhausted in an effort to try and attract new visitors to our website and grab fresh eyes and ears on our products and services. As it costs approximately 10X as much money to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one, why do the majority of businesses fail to cater to their existing customer database?
The Dark Side of Email Contact Lists
Businesses spend decades collecting email addresses of past customers. However, when they try to maintain contact with these individuals, they eventually become blacklisted or labeled as a “spammer” by major ISPs because such a large percentage of email addresses they are mailing to don’t even exist anymore. Living with the reality that they are now blocked from sending mass emails to their most prized database of consumers, any hopes of keeping in touch with them go out the window, and your bottom line takes a heavy beating.
According to reported statistics, about 30 percent of all email addresses die within a one year period. Just to put a few things in perspective, here are a few other statistics that might surprise you.
- A new business goes bankrupt every 32 minutes
- More than 6,000 new companies enter the global marketplace every day
- More than 1,900 companies change their names every year
Would you venture to take a guess how quickly old email addresses are disposed of, and how frequently new email addresses are created? I’m not even taking into consideration the email addresses in your list that may have been entered incorrectly in the first place by customers or by data entry operators.
The Ever-Present Email Trap: Changed Addresses
Email is, by far, the preferred method of contact between business professionals and their loyal subscribers. However, you can’t deny that people shut down their email accounts as often as they change their brand of shampoo. If you’re anything like me, that’s simply too many times to count. Eventually, people also move on from their corporate jobs where their previously active email address was hosted. They might even choose to abandon their email address altogether strictly due to the fact that their mailbox becomes too full of junk and can no longer accept incoming mail.
When you have aggregated a large list in the thousands or millions, it is physically impossible to keep track of abandoned emails or keep constant tabs on those who have moved around the corporate world.
That’s why investing in a reputable company to verify your customer database is such a vital component in your email marketing strategy. Email list cleaning and validation will identify and purge bad, invalid, undeliverable, seed, duplicate, and BOT email data from your email list to ensure that you are mailing to valid and deliverable email addresses. This gives you the opportunity to continue mailing to these subscribers without the risk of damaging your sender reputation or getting shut down by your ESP (Email Service Provider).
We all know that email list cleaning can be a dirty business. Many list validation companies are in business for the wrong reasons, in that they make high in the sky promises and fail to deliver. If you want to protect and safeguard your list from spam offers and also ensure that you are getting your money’s worth, it is important to do your research beforehand.
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