There are many things that can impact the success of your email campaigns — and one of the biggest downfalls of any campaigns is bad email data. Whether you’re sending out a business or consumer email campaign, if your data is bad it can cause all kinds of problems.
So, how do you ensure that your data is of the best quality? Well, the first step is to ensure that you are licensing data or using an email append provider that uses cleansing technologies or processes to keep their email data as pristine as possible. For example, for our B2B database, we have built verification and validation processes that ensure that our B2B email data is very accurate — 92%+ on average when we deliver a data file to a Client.
It is definitely trickier with B2C email data — but it can be done. For our B2C database, we clean and update it on a monthly basis. This means that it is consistently being validated and updated. Additionally, we have joined a consortium of quality email data providers and have built with them a Suppression Database that is constantly updated with all types of “bad” or negative consumer email data — like spam traps, foreign IP addresses, bad domains, etc. We clean our consumer data against this suppression file on a monthly basis to keep it free of as much negative data as possible. And, our consortium adds between 10 and 15 million records to the database on a monthly basis — so you can see the amount of volatility that exists within consumer email data and the reason that this is so important.
Ask your email provider about the processes that they employ to keep their data clean — and insist on using a provider who has these practices in place. Doing so is one sure way to increase the effectiveness of each email campaign — and get as many of your marketing messages to the Inbox as possible. Kristin Hambelton from Neolane recently wrote an article for BtoB Online that talks about data quality, along with other ideas on how to improve the effectiveness of your B2B email campaigns. This time of year it is good to re-visit methods to help each campaign be as effective as possible, and Kristin makes some great points and provides some good advice for email marketers to consider. While I don’t particularly agree with all of her points (double-opting in for example) — I think it’s a great article to read for general advice.
Have a great weekend!
Filed under: B2B email Best Practices, B2C Best Practices, B2C Email Database, email Data Quality, email Effectiveness | Tagged: Business-to-business, data quality, E-mail appending, Email address | Leave a comment »