Email has always been an effective way to reach clients and potential customers. Even amidst the chaos of all the Tweets and Facebook posts and Instagram pictures, email continues to be one of the most consistently dependable ways for companies to communicate with customers and prospects.
In fact, because of the rise of various social media platforms, one might agree that the personal email inbox has become somewhat of a safe haven – a place of seclusion amongst all the online mayhem.
Why Email?
One thing is for sure. Email marketing is still very effective. According to The Direct Marketing Association, email delivers the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel. On average, email marketing campaigns produce an ROI between 21 and 23 percent.
According to a recent study by MarketingSherpa, 72 percent of adults in the United States prefer to communicate with companies via email. The same study showed U.S. adults preferring social media or text messaging at under 20 percent. And another study done by Adestra, an email marketing company, showed that 73 percent of millennials prefer email as their primary brand communication channel.
Why is Email Validation So Important?
While email is a great channel to communicate with your customers and prospects, it’s not going to do you a bit of good if your message never reaches them, or worse, you have an invalid email address.
But the reasons don’t stop there. Many email marketers who are just starting out, or have little experience, are unaware that attempting to send an email to an invalid address can do harm to your campaign on a universal level.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook or Hotmail create a Sender Reputation Score. This is a score based on many different metrics that the ESPs analyze on how their users – your subscribers – are interacting with your emails.
If your emails are being sent to nonexistent or “fake” accounts, your score will be negatively affected. It may also take a hit if users are not opening your emails, if they are reporting them as spam, or if your domain has been added to any industry blacklists.
When your score becomes too low, the ESP may elect not to deliver the email to their user inboxes. This can become very expensive to your marketing and begin skewing your ROI as messages never arrive in your prospects’ inboxes and less revenue is generated.
Because of this, having a solution in place to confirm you are sending to opted-in subscribers at valid email addresses is not only smart, it’s absolutely necessary.
What You Can Do To Ensure Email Validation
If your email list isn’t very large, your first step would be to go through your list and remove any obviously bogus email addresses. While going through your list, you should also check to make sure that first and last names are correct and capitalized.
Unfortunately this practice can become rather time-consuming, and it obviously isn’t foolproof. Even if an email address looks legitimate, there’s no way for you to know for sure if it is real. The only way to know your database is clean is to enlist the help of a third-party email validation service and/or select a marketing solution that validates emails prior to being added to your database.
Is There a Solution for Restaurant Marketers?
Restaurant marketers can benefit from email list building, email marketing, and marketing automation as much as, if not more than, ecommerce and online businesses. Since emails have traditionally been tougher to obtain at a brick-and-mortar business, they’ve become even more valuable to offline companies. Fortunately, they don’t have to be difficult to obtain anymore.
Through WiFi marketing, you can now build an email list passively. Without lifting a finger, your list grows every time a new customer logs into your guest WiFi.
But how do you know if the email address the customer enters is valid? Well, you don’t – unless you’re using Bloom Intelligence. Bloom is the only WiFi marketing and analytics solution that has built-in email validation. If a user enters a bogus email address, they will be given a message asking them to enter a valid address before they can access the WiFi – all in real-time.
Bloom is the only current solution that understands the importance of email validation and built it into their software, resulting in significantly higher deliverability rates and improved ROI with no extra effort on the part of the marketer.
When you know your email addresses are properly validated, you will feel more confident configuring your automated campaigns, or blasting a message to your entire list. You’ll know that the maximum amount of people will receive the email and the ESPs will give you a higher reputation score every time you send a message.
Your email list is one of your most powerful marketing assets. Take care of it, nurture it carefully, and validate every email to ensure optimal marketing success.
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