4 Ways to Clean Up Your Email Database
Cleaning Address Errors
To ensure deliverability of communications via email, retailers need to clean their email database. Doing so will allow them to market more effectively to more customers and prospects. There are several ways that companies can go about cleaning their email database; here are four of them:
1. Remove inaccurate email addresses from mailing lists. Consistently bounced emails will hurt a retailer's reputation with ISPs. By removing inaccurate email addresses from mailing lists, retailers can clean them and limit bounces from known bad addresses, helping to improve that all-important sender reputation.
2. Clean up the formatting of existing email addresses. Most errors are caused by formatting issues — e.g., having the @ symbol in the wrong place or two characters mixed up. Software tools can identify and correct most of these errors quickly and without any customer interaction.
3. Ensure that new email addresses are entered correctly. Verification tools can be implemented at the point-of-sale in retail stores and on e-commerce sites. These tools can prevent syntax errors and malicious emails from entering a contact file, ensuring the accuracy of data before it enters business processes.
4. Use third-party data to update email contact information. Third parties can identify if a contact has changed their email address, and can sometimes pull a contact's updated email address. Retailers can update files based on this information.
By ensuring the accuracy of email addresses, marketers can deliver relevant communications to as many customers and prospects as possible. A certain amount of email bounce is to be expected, but retailers can even reduce this total by putting a few simple safeguards in place.
Beatriz Santin is director of marketing and product at Experian QAS North American, where she's responsible for all product, marketing and teleprospecting activities. Beatriz can be reached at beatriz.santin@qas.com.
