With so many strategies to implement in the market these days – marketing automation, personalization, mobile experience — it can be tough to truly understand them all. If the importance of validating contact data has fallen into that mix for you, look no further. As the trailblazers of list verification, we are here to be your experts on this area of marketing and database management.
We’ve answered a few questions below that we hear most frequently around list verification.
1. What is List Verification and Why Is It Important?
Even the best admins and marketing teams struggle with invalid contact information. Stale email addresses, misspelled mailing addresses, and fake phone numbers impact critical efforts across the company. These prevent you from reaching your customers and prospects and have direct impact on customer experiences, your ability to hit sales numbers, and ultimately the bottom line.
List verification directly solves these challenges, ensuring you’re collecting and utilizing valid contact information across the business.
Our list verification solution helps you validate data in three different ways.
- Verify addresses live, at the source of input. If the email entered is not real, there is an immediate prompt for correction.
- Drag and drop existing lists into the web application and receive a breakdown of the validity of each email address.
- Verify email addresses directly within Salesforce and get warned when one is invalid, keeping your CRM data clean.
Whether you implement just one or, ideally, each of the three options above, you’re on your way to maximizing the customer experience, protecting the email experience, and increasing ROI.
2. What are Invalid Emails and Why Does It Matter if I Send to Them?
Simply put, an invalid email address is an email that does not exist.
Stale or invalid email addresses negatively impact your sending reputation, raising a red flag to blacklists and mailbox providers as spammy behavior. In turn, this jeopardizes your connection with valid email subscribers.
There are three ways we determine an invalid email address:
- Invalid Format
The email address format is incorrect. For example, james0uwerwe#com is not in the correct email format of [email protected].
- Invalid Email Domain
The email address is associated with a domain that doesn’t exist. For example, briteeeeverify.com is not a real domain capable of sending and receiving email, so [email protected] is an invalid email.
- Invalid Email Account
The email account does not exist at the given domain. This can be due to a typo upon collection, the entering of a fake address, or an address that was once valid, but churned over time as mailboxes naturally shut down.
3. Is There a Way to Verify Phone Numbers and Mailing Addresses?
Yes! With BriteVerify’s real-time API, you can not only verify email addresses, but also ensure both phone and mailing address contact fields are complete and accurate at the point of capture. The API can verify mailing addresses in the US and phone numbers in the US and Canada. This includes determining if a phone number is a cell, landline, or VOIP as well as its location: residential, business, or small office.
4. How Does the Security Around List Verification Work?
One of your most valuable assets is the personal data of your customers and subscribers. To help keep that data secure, we limit how long we retain your verified lists in our system for download. After your records expire, you can still access your detailed results for each verified list, keeping your aggregated data close at hand for analytics, but personally identifiable information is removed for the safety of your subscribers.
Additionally, we are proud to operate in the most privacy-conscious, industry-tolerant, PII-sensitive, way possible. We practice the GDPR principles of data minimization and pseudonymization. We only store enough information to deliver our solutions. All data is encrypted in transit, and any personal data we receive is also hashed and encrypted at rest as well.
5. Why Do I Need a Subscription Instead of a One-Time Run?
This is kind of like asking, “Why do I need to clean out the refrigerator? I did so 6 months ago.” Just like with your aging produce that has been sitting in the vegetable drawer, contact data goes stale. Some of this you may need to toss out while adding fresh items back in.
By verifying your list only one time, you’re harming your efforts in a couple ways:
- Point-of-collection captures are left out
Capturing accurate data real-time from point of collection ensures your data is clean from the start. By only allowing accurate contact data into your CRM, you’ll reduce maintenance costs and gain better customer insights to leverage for crafting relevant, meaningful, and timely customer experiences and services.
- Lists are constantly growing and evolving
Ideally, your subscriber list will constantly be growing in an organic way. As this takes place, new data is infiltrating your database. At the same time, already-captured data is aging and possibly becoming invalid. It’s crucial to stay on top of these changes with constant verifications.
6. I Already Use a Marketing Automation Tool. How is This Different?
In its simplest form, the main job of a marketing automation tool is to send your email. However, steps are not typically taken within this solution prior to a send to verify the addresses you’re sending to are valid. By integrating list verification with your ESP, you’re able to ensure you’re sending to real email addresses before you hit send.
7. How Do I Justify the Cost?
A fake email is not just a lost opportunity. 25% of all email addresses collected are invalid, making it a financial liability. Sending to valid addresses increases engagement rates, improves reputation with mailbox providers, and drives more conversions. Want to see how it could impact your program specifically? Hop into this ROI calculator to run your numbers and see the potential impact.
Whew, that was a lot! Hopefully that helps clarify any questions you may have had around list verification and its value to your email program. When implemented, list verification streamlines your subscriber list, improving your reputation and impacting conversions and ROI. It’s a must-have for any serious email marketer.
Ready to verify your data? Click here to learn more about BriteVerify, the industry’s longest-standing and most complete email and contact verification solution.
Have a question we didn’t cover? Contact us and we’d be happy to help.