There’s gold in them thar rejected email addresses, and most businesses don’t mine for it.
List clean up is never fun, so it gets deferred to the bottom of the to-do list. But cleaning up your email list after each marketing email gives you additional insight into your customers and the kinds of information you should or should not be emailing to them. These are the 4 kinds of undeliverable email addresses you should clean up:
1. Bounced emails come in two flavors: Soft bounces are technically correct email addresses that temporarily don’t deliver because the recipient’s email server may be busy or their email inbox is filled up. Or the internet gods are just having a bad day–who really knows? But the next time you send email to these addresses, they deliver with no problem.
Hard bounces are dead email addresses (they’re what Swiftpage calls “3 bounces” because they’ve tried and failed to send this address three times without success. Continuing to transmit bad email addresses is a flag that you’re a spammer and is one of the ways you can get your mailings blacklisted). In today’s business environment, a hard bounce probably means the recipient no longer occupies the chair at his former company or the company itself has gone out of business.
Hard bounces must be updated so you don’t lose future opportunities. If your specific contact is no longer there, who took his place? If no one did, who’s now in charge of the decision making for your product and service? Find out and you can add them to a new prospect drip marketing campaign.
2. Invalid email addresses. Sometimes a missed keystroke can render a good email address worthless. Maybe *someone* left out or added a character or transposed characters. Often you can fix these email addresses just by looking at them. If not, sometimes they can be corrected by looking up the company’s website to see what naming convention is used.
If you have very many invalid addresses, however, that’s a sign that *someone* is not being careful with data entry. Check the record creator field in your ACT! database to see who entered these contacts. If you see a trend, have a data quality conversation.
3. Duplicate email addresses often indicate a global duplicate problem in your contact database (where there’s one, there’s many). But regarding emailing them, most email service providers, like Swiftpage, won’t send the same email address more than once in a single email transmission, although they will document them so you can clean them up.
But if you segment your list, as you should, you could be over-mailing these duplicate addresses, and that could lead to higher opt-outs. Sometimes duplicate emails are caused when multiple people at the same company share an info@ or sales@ address. In my opinion, you should never mail these addresses anyway because they’re used internally by the company to filter solicitations from true inquiries from their customers.
Instead, be more proactive at point of data entry to get your customer’s personal email address. In fact, set up a dynamic group in your contact database, like ACT! 2010, to pull these kinds of addresses for targeted follow up. For your bigger, global duplicate problem, use a duplicate checking tool like Patricia Egen’s Duplicate Remover Expert Wizard or Ingo Lange’s Workflow IT.
4. Opt-outs are a great excuse for mini-market research. Call them to find out why they asked to be removed from your list. Do they not want to receive your emails (why?) or did they fire you as their vendor? Many times when I follow up, I find out my reader mistakenly hit the “leave this list” button because he didn’t know the email was from me or he thought he was opting out of a single promotion instead of opting out forever. Ouch. That means I must make adjustments to how I present my messaging. An opt out is just the canary in the mine; there are possibly hundreds more who may not have understood something I wrote which led a reader to think what I wrote wasn’t relevant to them.
Sometimes when I follow up with a contact who opted out, he tells me he switched to a competing service. While I’m angry with myself for not uncovering this defection sooner–or getting the opportunity to prevent it–it does give me a chance to find out why I lost the business.
More important, I uncover market trends or gaps in my service I may not have been aware of. Might I be at risk to lose other customers for this same reason? How can I course correct moving forward? I may even schedule a follow-up call for 11 months from now. I already know my customer won’t find a pot of gold using my competitor, but I’ll give him a chance to find that out on his own, then be there to win him back. (And I’d be willing to bet money that my competitor won’t follow up in 11 months!)
One of the biggest mistakes I see emailers make is not cleaning up their bad email addresses. Besides the list clean-up benefits and finding new opportunities at companies where previous contacts are gone, keeping a clean list actually improves your tracking metrics. When the number of emails you send is closer to the number of emails that get delivered, you’re golden.
