5 Ways Email Validation Can Help All Types of Marketing

There is only one drawback to data-driven marketing: It requires conclusive, comprehensive data to be effective.

While this may seem obvious, some brands continue to make important decisions about their marketing with an inaccurate or incomplete email database. Unfortunately, if they don’t do anything to verify their data (particularly user email addresses), they’ll be unaware of one of the primary reasons their marketing efforts failed.

Email validation (which removes invalid emails from a brand’s database and corrects misspellings as well as syntax errors) can certainly boost a brand’s email marketing efforts, but it also can help the brand’s marketing as a whole. Here are five ways email validation can improve all types of marketing.

More Accurate Email Statistics

Invalid emails not only hurt email deliverability, they also distort engagement data. And without accurate data, there is no way for the brand to know which types of messaging are resonating best with its audience. Here’s an example:

• A brand has been sending emails with a particular theme to one audience segment – empty-nesters who live in the Midwest and are nearing retirement age. Unfortunately, that email list contains a large percentage of invalid email addresses.
• Because of this, the number of opens and clicks is deceptively low and makes it appear as if this segment is not interested in the types of emails being sent, which is not the case.
• As a result, the brand decides to change its strategy and offer different content which turns out to actually be less effective and turns away those members of the segment who enjoyed the content that they had been receiving.

Improved Cross-Channel Marketing

The key to cross-channel marketing is an email address. With a user’s email address, the floodgates of data open, giving marketers insight into a user’s behavior, preferences, interests and lifecycle stage. With this information, they can deliver consistent, relevant content across every channel, not just email.

However, invalid emails stop this strategy dead in its tracks. Without a valid email address, marketers have zero visibility into those critical data points which allow them to create the most targeted campaigns in any channel. Additionally, the brand can’t remarket to potentially high-quality buyers.

Strengthened Brand Loyalty and Evangelism

Users appreciate receiving emails with relevant, helpful content and offers. And if a brand consistently sends a user emails they enjoy, it builds brand loyalty and he or she will be more likely to forward those emails to friends or sing the praises of the brand on his or her social media accounts.

But if the user never receives those emails due to a typo or syntax error, there is no opportunity for them to be a brand evangelist on other mediums. And if the buyer is the brand’s ideal customer and has a large social media following, it’s a major missed opportunity.

Better Segmenting and Targeting

The more data a brand has on individual users, the more conclusions the brand can draw about the overall audience segment. But invalid email addresses provide no data, at the individual level or otherwise.

In addition to skewing engagement statistics, invalid emails distort demographic data. Here’s an example:

• After reviewing its database, a brand discovers it has hundreds of emails belonging to a particular demographic – females between the ages of 25 and 35. Based on this, the marketing team decides to focus on targeting this segment.
• In reality, males aged 30 to 40 actually interact with and purchase from the brand more often. But because too many of the email addresses belonging to these male buyers are invalid, the demographic is not properly represented in the brand’s database.
• As a result, they don’t target this group as aggressively as they should and are missing out on potential revenue.

Higher ROI and More Resources

Email marketing is generally inexpensive, but if a brand’s domain is added to a blacklist due to low deliverability rates, it’s costly and time-consuming to have it removed from the list.

Marketing to invalid emails wastes time, budget and resources. Removing invalid email addresses allows the sales team to focus on legitimate leads.

Mistakes happen. There will always be buyers who mistype when registering accounts online. And customer service representatives will misunderstand someone and enter an email address incorrectly into the database. But to keep these small mistakes from having a big impact, brands must invest in email validation services. Without a database of valid emails, brands don’t have the data they need to make good decisions. The result? A snowball effect that hurts the marketing as a whole.

Get started with TowerData’s Email Validation service today. Request your free email validation report.