4 Ways to Clean Up Your Email Database

With over 1.4 billion users of email, it's not surprising that businesses are using this channel for more communications. Email is relatively inexpensive and generates a high return on investment, with the Direct Marketing Association estimating a 43 to one return on every dollar spent on email marketing campaigns.

Retailers in particular use email to communicate with customers and prospects, from order confirmations to seasonal coupons to special targeted offers. Email has become a core part of retail operations, with email addresses collected everywhere from the point-of-sale to a call center to a website.

Unfortunately, email addresses are often riddled with errors. Just like any piece of contact data, email addresses are frequently mistyped during data entry. Staff members are concerned with reducing wait times and consumers online are often distracted. Furthermore, email is very dynamic — addresses can change frequently based on life events and employment.

Errors in email addresses hamper businesses, preventing them from communicating with a large percentage of their database. Retailers need to understand how inaccurate email addresses hurt their marketing efforts, as well as what steps they can take to clean their data and ultimately improving marketing results.

Inbox Placement
Every marketer worries about whether their message actually reaches the customer. They ensure that advertisements are targeted and direct mail reaches the correct physical address. With email, marketers do worry about having the correct address, but what they may not be aware of is where the email goes once it reaches the consumer's inbox.

Most retailers send a lot of email to customers and prospects. As with any large emailer, a retailer's domain has a ranking from the major internet service providers (ISP). ISPs hold each domain to a certain deliverability threshold, meaning that a certain percentage of the domain's emails must reach a valid and deliverable email address.

If too many emails bounce because of inaccurate data, future emails from that address may receive poor placement in consumers’ inboxes. This means that all future mailings, even to accurate email addresses, may be placed in the spam folder — or not delivered at all if the domain has been blacklisted. Accurate email addresses not only ensure that communications reach the intended individual, but they also impact all future deliverability.

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.