Email marketers are spending time and money creating campaigns, hoping to reach subscribers’ inboxes. Sometimes these efforts may go to waste, with emails ending up on the spam folder, or worse – placing you on a blacklist. In order to avoid this dreadful outcome and preserve their IP reputations, marketers should eye email data hygiene solutions.
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Is Email Verification Enough to Protect You?
We find ourselves constantly debating the merits of verification only solutions – is it still enough to tackle our constantly evolving email list needs? The answer to this question is increasingly becoming an obvious ‘No’. There is a need to evolve beyond verification, and this need is met by a bundled verification and hygiene solution, or in other words – Multi Method Email Hygiene
The Relevancy Group recently conducted a research and came out with a report titled “The Power of Email Verification and Multi-Method Email Hygiene”, co-sponsored by Webbula, The Data Quality Experts. The report discusses several important points that every email marketer should take into consideration when searching for a verification provider: Why deliverability rates have declined, why marketers must move beyond verification and embrace Multi-Method Email Hygiene, and how verification and hygiene bundled together equates to approximately $2 million additional dollars in monthly revenue. Hygiene is not a cost after all, it is actually a profit center.
But first things first, let’s go over the differences between verification and hygiene.
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What is Email Verification?
Email Verification is a service that helps you identify if an email is real or not. It essentially verifies that an email address on your list connects to an active inbox and doesn’t “bounce”. That is the extent of the intelligence that verification can provide. Email hygiene, on the other hand, goes above and beyond that.
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What is Email Hygiene?
Email hygiene has the power to identify “problematic” email accounts from your email lists. There are many types of hidden email threats in your list just waiting to destroy your sender reputation or send you on a blacklist. Some of the threats you should be concerned about are spam traps, moles, bots, disposable domains, seeded trackers, and much more. In order to avoid sending to these threats, regular hygiene checks will help your sender reputation, deliverability, and get your campaigns off on the right foot.
The Problem: Deliverability has Declined
According to the study, Email delivery rates have fallen when compared to 2015, and as of the second half of 2018 are at a reported 87%. One of the reasons for this decline is that inbox providers are finding it harder and harder to battle the amount of fake emails that are coming to their servers. The Relevancy Group mentions, “The filters and algorithms that inbox providers leverage to protect recipients often result in false positives. Legitimate messages are often blocked, sent to the bulk folder, or quarantined in such a way as to render them virtually inaccessible to end users, who expect and rely upon these emails”.
The Solution: Multi Method Email Hygiene – Eat Your Cake and Have it too
You’d be surprised by how many marketers aren’t doing enough verification and hygiene, or even planning for it in their marketing budget. With email marketing being a popular way of communication, you would think more and more marketers would be looking into freshening up their lists, especially if they are buying lists (which you should never do). According to the research report, “Forty-one percent of marketers are utilizing real-time verification at the time of opt-in with another 46 percent planning to utilize this tactic in the next 12 months. (But) just 14% of Marketers state that they are utilizing email hygiene to ensure the email is not toxic or a spam trap”.
Although verification is a necessary tactic to ensure that your email addresses are valid or invalid, it does not guard against malicious fraud and reputation threats. That’s something that only hygiene can provide. Spam traps such as honeypots, recycled, pristine and others are only avoidable when utilizing hygiene. These threats will pass a verification test, because these are real emails with real people are behind them. Email marketers who opt for a verification only solution risk in damaging their sender reputation and deliverability.
With so many email threats waiting to destroy your reputation, marketers must adopt a solution that combines both verification and hygiene services. With Multi-Method Email Hygiene, marketers can protect themselves from most threats to their IP reputation.
When marketers were asked, 53 percent stated they were very confident in the power of verification and hygiene bundled solutions, and that it could positively impact their deliverability and improve revenues. So what are you waiting for?
The Result: Higher KPIs
The results of using Multi-Method Email Hygiene speak for themselves.
- Getting More Out of Larger Send: Those utilizing these data quality tactics had larger monthly send sizes. Verification and hygiene deliver a higher quality audience and one that has positive delivery and engagement can be mailed at a higher frequency. Marketers using these data quality tactics are driving higher revenue per subscriber.
- Better Delivery: Those that embrace these data quality tactics on average had a deliverability rate that was 1.27 percent higher than those that did not utilize this tactic.
- Higher Engagement: Open and click-through rates for data quality-minded senders were on average about one and a quarter to one and three quarters above those operating without hygiene. The conversion difference was just under one half point but still favored those senders spending on verification and multi-method hygiene.
- Higher AOV: The mean AOV (average order value) overall was $137, or 3.9 percent higher for those that embrace data quality. This indicates that purging unnecessary and erroneous subscribers puts the focus on more valuable email subscribers.
- Higher Revenue: Those utilizing verification and hygiene together had a 38 percent higher email marketing monthly revenue than those that did not implement the same tactic. This equated to approximately $2 million additional dollars in monthly revenue in the report. This was based on reported data among those participating in the research survey and may not be indicative of individual results.
Wrap up
Email marketers need to utilize both real-time verification and multi-method hygiene together to ensure success. One is simply not enough. Marketers must use bundled hygiene and verification to guard against all of the malicious threats in an ever-changing and evolving data climate, and as we’ve shown – the research proves this tactic generates higher KPIs when compared to those who do not implement it. Multi-Method Email Hygiene is the bundled solution that email marketers of all sizes should be relying on.
About Webbula
Since 2009, Webbula has offered the world’s’ most comprehensive email threat identification solution, Webbula cloudHygiene. The combination of Verification and Multi-Method Email Hygiene has the power to safeguard against everchanging email threats.
You can now download to the report for free, without having to fill out forms, now on Webbula.com Read more.
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