Client Success Story: A Clean Email List is a Happy Email List

For over fifty years, this global expert in 21st century science education has been designing, developing, and supporting innovative education technology solutions for primary, secondary, and university level science.

The Challenge

Michael B, a Life and Environmental Sciences Education Manager, was concerned about the cleanliness and deliverability of a segment of his house file. Specifically, his company had approximately 60,000 customer email addresses that he feared had been incorrectly categorized in their CRM system and had not been sent any recent communications. Michael suspected that most of these records were riddled with syntax errors and therefore undeliverable.

Michael did not want to arbitrarily throw out tens of thousands of addresses, nor did he want to risk an email campaign. He decided to utilize an email hygiene service to clean the list and salvage as much of this vital information as possible.

The Solution

During the vendor research process, Michael interviewed four different vendors. AtData far and away gave him the best email knowledge and solution-based approach.

“The AtData staff clearly explained the process and the features of the service above the other vendors.”
– Michael B, Life and Environmental Sciences Education Manager

Michael also noticed a great difference in the quality of AtData services compared to the other vendors in the industry.

“The other vendors only offered a simple [validity] check; you offered your massive background knowledge and all the features we needed to get the job done correctly. No one else offered that and your costs were very comparable”
– Michael B, Life and Environmental Sciences Education Manager

Michael decided to utilize AtData’s SafeToSend® Deliverability Solution to check, correct, and protect his email database. AtData’s proprietary email hygiene and validation service was not only able to flag undeliverable email addresses, but also helped identify suspect and malicious addresses, frequent complainers, and known spamtraps. Additionally, AtData went above and beyond any other validation service in the industry by not only identifying his syntax errors and typo addresses, but providing verified suggested corrections as well.

The Results

AtData’s service found that approximately 34% of his list size was actually SafeToSend®.

“We were able to salvage emails we thought were bad, gain back customers lost through syntax errors, and customers otherwise that
had fallen off our list.  We sent a clean deployment through our ESP
and greatly reduced the risk of sending in the future.”
– Michael B, Life and Environmental Sciences Education Manager

In addition to the 19,468 email addresses that the service identified as ready for an email campaign, the input file was coded with a finding for each email address.  These codes revealed to Michael other systemic issues in the data entry process, including:

• Typos for AOL.com, such as “a0l.com”
• Bad domains in his list such as “attbi.com”
• Role accounts, such as email addresses that start with “info@” and “sales@”
• Spamtraps and other addresses that, although deliverable, should never be mailed

As a result of running AtData’s SafeToSend® service, Michael was able to gain valuable insight into the deliverability of his email list and capitalize on the benefits that a true list hygiene service can provide.  His subsequent email deployment went through without a hitch and enabled him to reconnect with some of his lost clients.  In the case for the leader of 21st century science education solutions, a clean email list was a happy email list.