NCOA for Email - Is Your Email Address List Clean and Up-To-Date?

Introduction

Shrewd marketers devote a great amount of attention to crafting their email messaging campaign. They scrutinize the subject line, fuss over the content, and carefully monitor the timing of delivery.

Once the perfect message has been created, it is just as important to focus on its successful delivery to the intended recipients. Unfortunately, it is likely that your current email address list has a number of significant problems.

Your List Has Inappropriate Addresses

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects you to everyone. The danger is that there are people out there you would rather not be connected to. Obviously, you want to keep these people, and their moments of malice, off your list. Some common situations include:

1. Bogus Addresses

Some of your visitors will never disclose their email address to you. If an entry is required, they will make something up. A frequent occurrence is some variation of asdf@asdf.com, which happens when the user hits random keys.

2. Prank Addresses

An innocent person may be getting added to new lists daily, simply because they made enemies with the wrong person. Sometimes the abuse is a prank subscription from one friend to another; other times it targets a public figure (e.g. billg@microsoft.com).

3. Malicious Addresses

Another common type of abuse is when someone targets your company. Without you noticing, your email message is directed to someone who will make your life miserable. This might be an email address to report spam (e.g.

Your List Has Old Addresses

Unfortunately, people change their email addresses all the time - when they switch jobs, move, switch Internet service providers, or enter or graduate from school. Technical advances such as cable modems, as well as ISP pricing competition, mergers and failures continue to encourage this movement.

In addition to their ISP-provided email address, users acquire additional email addresses from their jobs or schools, hundreds of free web-based email services (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), and even pagers and cell phones. According to IDC, registrations for webmail accounts are growing at 91% annually, and now exceed 100 million addresses.

Email address changes are also fueled by the growth in unsolicited email, as users switch email accounts to escape spam. Services such as AOL allow users to create and manage separate screen names and associated email addresses, which may be used and abandoned at will.

As individuals change addresses and maintain multiple working email addresses for multiple purposes, it is unlikely that they will make a point of updating you. Recent studies indicate that nearly 35% of Internet users change their email addresses each year, and this does not account for the multiple working email addresses being added every day.

Ideally, you are aware of this problem, and monitoring the percentage of your database that is bouncing. Every bouncing address is an unread message. After repeated testing, you may determine that some addresses are truly dead (rather than being a short-term bounce) and be tempted to remove these from your list.

It is equally important to pay attention to a much harder statistic to track - what percentage of your database are old addresses that arent bouncing These are messages that are ending up in abandoned or throwaway Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you tweak your text, change your subject line, etc. Or worse, the email account has been recycled, and you are actually reaching the wrong person.

Your List Has Typos

No list is immune from the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms:

1. User Caused

If you accept email addresses from your website, you probably experience a 1-8% typo rate (or more!), depending on the stringency of your email address validation routines and the carelessness of your visitors. Typical mistakes include:

joesmith@aol - missing the .com
joesmith@aol.c - input box too small, user stopped typing
joesmith@aol..com - double periods, sticky keyboard
joe smith @ aol.com - extra spaces
joesmith@aol.com - invalid quotes
joesmith@aol.cmo - transposition error
joesmith@hotmial.com - likely misspelling of hotmail

2. Internal Entry

Many companies collect email addresses through phone centers, mailings, inquiry cards, etc. The data entry of these addresses is another common source for typos, as often the validation routines are much less stringent internally than on your website. In addition to the challenges of reading and interpreting handwriting, auditory misunderstandings can enter your database. One of our favorite typos, entered by a phone customer service agent, is joesmith@yahoodotcom.

3. Data Manipulation & Corruption

Regardless of how careful your company may be to validate or double opt-in every email address, the list is still vulnerable to errors in ongoing database management. For example, on several occasions we have seen a forced truncation of records, which results in the last few characters of long email addresses being dropped. Other times, a well-meaning database manager will design a quick (but insufficiently targeted) query to clean up or correct a typo they have seen in the data. Unless the error is dramatic, faulty data manipulation or data corruption may remain unnoticed in a list for many months.

Your List Has Duplicates

Duplicate email addresses can result in disgruntled customers and database management challenges for your company. Obviously, it is unprofessional to email your customer multiple copies of the same message. Even though many duplicate addresses are the result of double entries by your customers, these very same people often become so irritated by receiving multiple messages that they unsubscribe from your list altogether.

These obvious duplicates are easy to catch and most database managers can quickly do a scan of your list. Ironically, not all companies catch these duplicates, especially if they maintain several lists and forget to de-dupe between them.

The more difficult duplicates to detect are multiple unique email addresses owned and read by the same person. Imagine if your customer initially gave you their Hotmail address, and then later gave you their AOL email address. You need access to a sophisticated and comprehensive database of email addresses to discover these duplicates and to decide which is the customers current preferred email address.

So Now What

Now that you know your list has inappropriate addresses, old addresses, typos, and duplicates, what can you do There are a number of solutions, including:

Improve your email address validation routines
Worth looking at, but is this really your area of expertise

Switch to double opt-in
Has pros and cons; wont solve all your problems

Manually review all email addresses for accuracy and appropriateness
Requires substantial effort by your staff

Start building your own block list and use the DMAs e-MPS (and other) suppression lists
Smart idea

Consider sending a standalone message confirming your customers current preferred email address and requesting any updates
Are you willing to devote an entire message to this

Maintain a list of your customers alternate contact methods so you can be sure to reach them
Making telephone calls and sending letters to get updated email addresses will be costly

Remove every typo and bouncing email address from your list
NO!

Did you forget your customer acquisition cost How about the projected revenue a typical customer brings in each year Each lost customer is costing your company from $10 to $50 or more. Removing an email address from your list simply because it is undeliverable is throwing your marketing investment away!

Welcome to NCOA for Email

You may already be familiar with NCOA for your postal addresses, a service that corrects and updates your snail-mail list. What you may not have known is that since 2000, this service has also been available to freshen your email address lists.

A typical NCOA for Email service includes the following functions:

Identification of addresses that should be removed from your list. These may be addresses that match a list of suspicious addresses (e.g. abuse@aol.com, none@none.com, etc.), match a block list, are unrecoverable bounces, or are duplicates. Some services can also catch different addresses belonging to the same person, so that you dont double-message these people.

Flagging of addresses that should be manually reviewed. These might be addresses that meet certain rules maintained by the provider, or simply violate standard guidelines for email addresses (e.g. containing unusual characters, etc.)

Correction of typos. Using tables of known typos as well as heuristic rules, your provider can help you recover customers lost to dead addresses as a result of thousands of typos and syntax errors, including every typo example presented earlier. Some providers even offer recursive processing, which can intelligently correct multiple typos in one pass.

Updating of old addresses. All true NCOA for Email providers operate popular consumer websites designed for individuals to use when their email addresses change. These updated addresses, in addition to across the board domain changes, are then made available to you.

Typical vendors offer pay for performance pricing. On average, this works out to less than fifty cents per recovered address. Depending on the type and quality of your list, initial match rates will vary from very small to over ten percent. Your relationship with a vendor may be a simple one-time run, or a contract-based relationship where they will help you keep your list fresh over time.

Dont Wait!

Your customer database is one of your most valuable and expensive assets. To let it waste away at a rate of 25%-33% per year is not a viable way to do business.

You should start thinking now about the problems lurking in your database, and resolve to take care of these as soon as possible. Using an NCOA for Email provider can help you reconnect with customers lost to dead addresses immediately, and ensure that your well-crafted messages earn you the maximum return on your investment.

Austin C. Bliss
President
FreshAddress, Inc.

FreshAddress, Inc., The Email Address ExpertsTM, provides a comprehensive suite of industry leading database and email deliverability services to help companies increase their e-commerce revenues. For more information on how we can help Build and Update your email list, visit or email .

Austin C. Bliss is President of FreshAddress, Inc.

FreshAddress, Inc. is a privately held company, founded in 1999, helping business and individuals stay connected when email addresses change.

Could This Be The End of Sp^am?

The war on sp^am has so far been waged on two fronts:legislation to make sp^am illegal and filters that prevent sp^amreaching its destination.

But neither approach has worked.

Even if US anti-sp^am laws succeeded, they would notstop sp^am that originates outside the US.

As for sp^am filters, the sp^ammers are constantly devising newways to defeat them. The people who are really being affectedby the filters are web marketers with legitimate optin lists - howmany of your subscribers are receiving your newsletter

But now, two researchers at IBM - Scott Fahlman and MarkWegman - have come up with a completely different approach.

The idea is very simple.

Software located between your email client and your serverwould intercept all incoming email. The software would containa white list of email addresses that you want to receive emailfrom.

Any incoming email that is not recognized by your white listwould be bounced back to the sender with a message directingthe sender to a website where they could purchase a charity stampfor a small fee - between 5 and 25 cents.

The proceeds would go to charity. The charity stamp would be a10-digit code that allows the email to pass through the software toyour email client.

This would kill sp^am almost overnight.

Why

Because sp^ammers have an extremely low conversion rate - aslittle as one sale for every 10,000 emails. But that doesnt worry them,because they send millions of emails at a time - and it costs themnothing. Now multiply 2 million emails by 5 cents per email - Joe Sp^amis out of business!

The flood of sp^am that is now choking up the Internet only proveswhat economists have long been saying - any resource that is freeand unregulated becomes exploited to the point where no one canuse it anymore.

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Michael Southon has been writing for the Internet for over 3
years. He has shown hundreds of webmasters how to use this
simple technique to build a successful online business. Click
here to find out more:
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