Poor Data Quality Creating Challenges for Email Message Delivery

Email is still a top communication channel for retailers looking to stay in touch with customers and prospects. In fact, 98 percent of retailers collect email addresses through a variety of channels, with the most popular being their websites and point-of-sale locations. Retailers use these email addresses to send a high volume of messages to consumers for operational and marketing purposes in an effort to drive additional revenue.

However, many retailers aren't capturing accurate emails or managing their email database effectively. Correctly captured email addresses ensure quicker online account creation, faster checkout and increased effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. These factors are critical when interacting with today's consumers, and help retailers to improve overall customer satisfaction.

Yet many retailers struggle to deliver messages because of poor data quality. According to a recent Experian Data Quality study, 67 percent of retailers have experienced email deliverability issues within the last 12 months. This has led to an inability to communicate with subscribers, poor customer service and damages to sender reputation.

A majority of email deliverability issues result from poor sender reputation. Internet service providers (ISPs) all calculate sender reputation differently, which is why addressing all the underlying factors is so important.

On average, U.S. organizations believe a quarter of their database contains inaccurate data. An email database riddled with inactive or invalid email addresses can lead to spam trap hits, high bounce rates, email complaints and blacklisting. All of these can have a dramatic effect on a domain's sender reputation.

While 88 percent of organizations manage their email database in some way, many don't implement basic techniques that can have a dramatic impact on complaints and bounce rate. Only 47 percent of respondents follow CAN-SPAM requirements for unsubscribe and only 44 percent remove hard bounces from their email list.