Invalid email addresses are costing you
- January 23, 2015
The very unsexy “Real-time Email Address Validation” has a very big impact on your business efficiency.
Q1. Do you ask for emails in store &/or online?
Q2. Do you check if the email is valid when the customer is still present?
If you answered Yes to Q1 and No to Q2, then you need to look into validating email addresses in real-time and you are wasting time & money processing email addresses that were incorrectly entered by the customer or your staff.
At checkout, an incorrect email address means the customer doesn’t receive their order or delivery notifications. He/she ends up contacting customer service and wasting your team’s time. Multiply this by hundreds of orders per week and you will have up to 1 FTE answering calls just on this subject.
“This certainly has been a worthwhile implementation, I am sure that this has stopped al lot of the issues with incorrect emails being entered” Henry Otto, Managing Director, Stringers Sports
Example Scenario
- You go to an event and meet someone interesting.
- You ask him/her for their phone number.
- They give it to you BUT you don’t write it down correctly and don’t double check the number with them.
- A few days later you try contacting him/her but your call goes to the wrong person’s message bank and your texts are not answered.
This is the same as when a customer walks in to your physical store, event and/or shops online. He/she registers with an incorrect or invalid email address and walks out of your store. Maybe for good.
What is Real-time Email Validation?
It’s when your website checks if the customer’s email address exists while they are typing it into your website.
Benefits
1. Better quality data: This means less time spent by your people, your most expensive resource, following up customers which also means better customer service.
2. Improved Sending Reputation: Your email marketing sender reputation will improve because you are removing invalid email addresses from your send list &/or preventing them from getting there in the first place. A Return Path study shows email reputation not content is responsible for approximately 80% of all cases of non-delivery.
3. Reduce costs by:
a) Collecting email address correctly the first time.
b) Eliminating time and money spent fixing typos and other common errors.
c) Sending less emails because they are correctly entered
Make sure you make a great first impression. If you are interested in real-time email validation call us on +61 3 9820 2111 or enquire online.
Questions to ponder…..
- Have you used real-time email validation?
- If so, has it been effective for you?
- Do you know or measure how many email addresses are invalid from the moment they enter your database list?
- How much time and money do you spend cleaning email address and/or other demographic information.
- Does your business spend time and money synchronising information between different systems and you don’t know which one is correct?
- How many orders do you receive with an incorrect email address?
- What impact does this have on your customer service team, especially in busy periods?
- Do you know how much poor data is costing you at the checkout because people who signed up to receive your email marketing communications aren’t receiving your emails.