by Rozina Hussain, Product Manager
Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. According to a survey by Econsultancy, 74 percent of marketers think that in five years email will still be one of the channels with the highest return on investment. But each month, your email list slowly dwindles email address by email address. Every month, 2.1 percent of your email addresses decay. This means your well-crafted message doesn’t land in the inbox of a prospective customer, and each undeliverable email hurts your sender reputation, which can eventually hinder your deliverability.
Why does your list decay so rapidly? Here are the three main reasons for email list decay:
People change jobs
Unlike a generation or two ago, people don’t stay in the same job for their entire career. When someone changes jobs, their email address changes too, meaning the old one becomes invalid and ultimately undeliverable. If anything, expect “undeliverables” for this reason to increase in the coming months — a Career Builder survey found that 21 percent of employees made leaving their current job a 2016 New Year’s resolution, a 5 percentage increase over 2015.
Email accounts are abandoned
Think about how many times you set up an email address for a specific purpose and are no longer using it. You are not the only one to do this. If you think that your list has 20,000 names but 5 percent of the emails are abandoned, you get the false sense that your list is more robust than it actually is. While these may not bounce depending on the status of the account, the main point is that your message isn’t being read.
Invalid form entries
Typos and fat fingers happen, especially with the rise of mobile. But each time someone makes a typo on your submission form, they enter an invalid email address into your list from the start. This paves the way for high bounce rates on your next email campaign and someone who wanted information, does not get it. By using email form verification, invalid emails are flagged at the point of entry and never make it into your database.
These three things are inevitable, but BriteVerify can help. BriteVerify checks for valid, invalid & unknown addresses which helps you avoid the bad ones and focus on the good ones. Most importantly BriteVerify lets you stop dealing with hard bounces so you can do your job – getting your message to your audience.