When your contact database is clean, you enjoy higher email deliverability rates, which improves the ROI of your email campaigns and prevents wasting data investment. Therefore, when your contact is unclean or dirty, it can lead to unnecessary spending, missed opportunities, productivity loss, damaged reputation, and poor decision-making. Here’s why you should prioritize the validity and quality of your contact data.

Prevent high spam complaint rates

High spam complaint rates lead to compliance issues, the risk of having your account suspended, reputation damage, and long-term deliverability issues.

The most common way contacts report email as spam is by clicking the button that indicates the email is spam. Another way is for the recipient to click the unsubscribe link and mark the reason for why they’ve unsubscribed as “spam.” There’s also the possibility that the email recipient unintentionally marked the email as spam. Whichever way the email was reported as spam, the action goes to your spam rate. But why would any of your email recipients mark your email as spam or unsubscribe and take the extra step of reporting you as spam?

The reality is that people change their minds. At some point, your emails may no longer be relevant to them. And when that happens, the easiest way to remove themselves from your email list is to unsubscribe. A simple unsubscribe shouldn’t hurt you. And if you’re using a service to send your email marketing campaigns, the email address will be automatically removed from your sending list. But what if you’re not using a marketing automation platform. And what if you’re not cleaning your contact database regularly, and their email addresses remain on your list? Not removing uninterested contacts from your list means you continue to send unwanted emails.  

Reduce high email bounce rates

High email bounce rates hurt your sender reputation. The worse your reputation is, the more likely your emails will end up in the spam folder. And when that happens, your email marketing campaigns will start to suffer lower open rates and, consequently, lower conversion rates.

Emails bounce for a variety of reasons, including full inboxes and unresponsive servers. But one of the main reasons why emails bounce back has to do with the validity and quality of your email list. And you will suffer from a high email bounce rate when your contact data is riddled with invalid email addresses, fake addresses, and addresses that no longer exist.

But how do these types of email addresses end up in your database? Unfortunately, people have been known to give fake email addresses, particularly when their email address is asked in exchange for something; they may want what is promised but aren’t prepared to give their real contact data. Incorrect email addresses can end up in your database due to human error. Even with spell check, it’s hard to tell if an email address has a typo or misspelling, especially since people get creative with their email address names all the time.

Keep your email bounce rates low by maintaining a clean database. Email verification services can help you clean your email databases by pinging each email to ensure it is active. Email verification services can also correct typos and illegal characters in incorrectly entered email addresses.

Runner’s EDQ Email Verification Service can remove up to 95% of bad email addresses to increase deliverability, avoid high bounce rates and blocklisting, and protect your valuable sender reputation.