How Disposable Email Addresses May Ruin Your Online Marketing

Recently I asked several email marketing professionals how they handled non-existing, fake and disposable email addresses. It turns out that the most common strategy is to clean up the email list. Obviously, this is a good solution. However, would not it be better not to collect useless email addresses in the first place? Let me show you why this matters and why rejecting useless email addresses is a better approach than cleaning up the subscriber list later. Keep on reading.

How Email Marketing Databases are Created

When it comes to email marketing, you, as a marketer have two options. The first option is to buy a ready database of email addresses. The other option is to create one yourself. The later is a better approach. A popular strategy for collecting email addresses is to offer your website visitors something for free. People love getting free stuff. When you give your website visitors something useful at no cost, you get their attention. Moreover, they provide you with an email address and a permission to get in touch with them. Not so fast!

The Problem

Biggest problem with email marketing is that it has been seriously abused. People and sick and tired of getting spammed. It should not come as a surprise that more and more Internet users resort to using disposable email addresses. I have devoted a separate post to disposable email addresses, so I will not be discussing them here. Just remember that a disposable email address, often called a throwaway email, is a temporary email address. Most often, disposable email addresses have a single use.

In the above scenario your website visitor does the following. She gets a disposable email address, which requires almost no effort. Why? Because there are dozens of disposable email address providers and almost all of them are free. Further, the user enters her disposable email address on your website. She gets the free stuff from you and totally ruins your well thought out online marketing strategy. You get nothing. I mean literally nothing. A disposable email address is trash.

Does Post Clean Up Work Here?

Now imagine that hundreds or even thousands of your website visitors do the same. Ironically, you may not even know this. Why? Because it is virtually impossible to detect disposable email addresses just by looking at them. Worse. When you send emails to disposable email addresses, unlike non-existing mailboxes, they DO NOT bounce. It means that even though you may send a newsletter or a follow up email to say 10K subscribers, only a fraction of them really gets it or reads it. This is where post clean up of the email marketing database fails, big time.

Our research shows that over 95% of websites that employee the above mentioned marketing strategy do not validate email addresses. The feedback forms literally eat whatever email addresses visitors provide. Many websites don’t even validate email address format. Unbelievable! That was my first reaction too.

A Better Solution

If your marketing is based on trading some free stuff in exchange of a visitor’s email address, you absolutely need real-time email validation. As a part of Actamos Email Security solution we provide an API for validating and verifying email addresses in real-time. Actamos uses intelligent algorithms to get the work done. Actamos not only checks the format of email addresses but it also detects disposable email addresses and checks if a mailbox physically exists. When you start using Actamos email verification API, you can easily reject useless email addresses.

Click here to stop collecting useless email addresses and defend your marketing strategy now.

Thank You

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