The opportunities email marketing presents

Why is there a growing demand for email verification among British businesses? It’s because of the pivotal role that email marketing plays in many companies.

That’s because, when selling to businesses, schools, and the public sector, email marketing has long been a significant and commercially important driver of leads and sales. For some companies, it is responsible for more than half of their new sales and overall revenues.

Time after time and in survey after survey, email marketing has been proven to produce a greater return on investment than any other form of marketing – whether online or offline, traditional or emerging.

The 5 reasons you need to invest in email verification and validation

1. On your customer database, 1% or more of all client information including their email addresses will have been incorrectly entered by your staff.

2. If you have forms on your website inviting people to leave their contact details for you to get in touch with them, did you know that around 8% of them are entered incorrectly? Most companies retain this data but never get around to correcting it because they lack the processes to do so.

3. B2B email databases, school email address lists, and public sector email addresses are very easy to come by and there are many providers offering them for next to nothing.

The problem is that many of these databases have been stolen from employers of the people who have been selling them so that you never own the licence to use them. In addition, the data is years old and because marketing data decays at around 22.5% a year, most of it might be functionally useless by the time you come to acquire it.

4. Many of the companies and organisations on these databases will no longer be trading. Many ISPs and organisations buy the domain names of these now non-existent companies to reuse their email addresses as “spam traps”. They wait for unsuspecting companies to send an email to these addresses and, when they do, they make life difficult. Not only is your email account under severe threat but your website might be too because “spamming”, as they would classify this, is against the terms and conditions attached to renting webspace from your provider.

5. Finally, there’s GDPR.

Up until May 2018, it was legal to send email without requiring permission to sole traders and to partners within unincorporated partnerships. Now it isn’t. If you’ve got databases pre-dating May 2018, you have to make sure that the companies and organisations on them are “bodies corporate” – in other words, not private individuals even if they run a sole tradership or are in an unincorporated partnership.

This is more important than ever – so much so that, for our customers, our GDPR policy is available online for existing and potential customers to view it.

Are you worried enough about the consequences of email marketing that you’re considering abandoning it?

Or have you already had a couple of scares with campaigns you’ve carried out in the past?

If so, please get in touch with us and let us explain how you can continue to use email marketing to sell your company’s products and services. We’re the email marketing agency for over 2,000 UK companies – a number growing quickly every month – and we’d appreciate the opportunity to verify and validate your email addresses.

Our email appending service – what you need to know

Send us your customer database.

Send us your prospect database – the decision makers within businesses, schools, and public sector organisations who have left their details with you but who have not purchased from you yet.

Send us any marketing databases you have purchased from 3rd parties which you have either title over or permission to still use.

We’ll compare what’s on each with the over 650,000 direct decision-maker email addresses we have on our database and on the databases of our established media partners.

We’ll indicate each email which we’ve verified. We’ll also let you know when we’ve got a different record to the one you have and amend your database accordingly without deleting your original.

If it’s not on our databases, it’s almost certainly not a limited company, school, or public sector organisation. We’ll flag that record to let you know that there is a heightened risk in emailing that record because it could be a sole trader, a partnership, or a spam trap.

In addition to carrying out the email validation, we’ll give you our opinion on which emails are safer to use and which ones we would not recommend that you send campaigns to.

Additional options

If your databases are missing email addresses and you’d like us to match a particular record to our database and our media partners’ databases, let us know. You will likely end up with more email addresses than you had before you sent your original files to use.

We’re also able to perform reverse email verification too. If you have an email address or a website URL but little or no other supporting information, send them to us and we’ll compare what you have to what we have and what our media partners have.

Find out more about our email verification service

Generate the greatest number of leads and sales from your customer database, your prospect database, and any bought-in lists you have title over.

And, with our email verification service, you and your sales and marketing teams can approach existing and potential customers with benefits-led, response-driven email campaigns. And, if you want support and feedback on what you propose to send before you send it, take advantage of our advertising support service for a full year after your email verification project has been completed.

To speak with one of our account managers, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email our data enhancement team.

What is email verification?

With our email verification service, we check the following:

• the businesses and organisations for which the decision makers on your database work are limited companies or body corporates meaning that they are compliant with GDPR, and
• the ownership of the web address and email servers has not changed recently indicating that they have been bought by an ISP or spam-trapping organisation.

Although no email verification system is perfect, using ours will provide you with the reassurance you need that the email addresses which we flag as valid are safe to email to for sales and marketing purposes under the GDPR rules.

How email verification works

With More Than Words’ email validation service, we run your data through two separate processes to ensure that the email addresses you hold on your databases are correct.

More Than Words, together with its media partners, holds over 650,000 direct email addresses for decision makers within businesses, schools, and the public sector. We match your data against the data that we hold to verify that we have the same email address.

When the email address we have is different, we advise you of this. This is especially useful when you have a generic or a “catch-all” email address on file for a larger company or organisation – this is much less likely to reach a decision maker through colleague forwarding than sending to that decision maker’s direct email address.

If you would like us to add the email data we have to records on your database which are missing email addresses, please let your account manager know when you’re speaking with them.

Why is email verification important?

In addition to being able to state with confidence that your company abides not only by GDPR rules but also by best email marketing practice, the accuracy of the data you use in any email marketing campaign has a direct effect on the success you have as measured by number of leads generated and number of leads closed.

Email marketing data is an investment for all businesses which participate in it as is making sure that the data held is fit for purpose.

Add extra value to your customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases

More Than Words runs its own telemarketing and email marketing teams as well as hiring out their services to clients. More than most companies, we understand how important accurate and complete data is.

Within as little as 48 hours, many of the records on your customer, prospect, and bought-in marketing databases which are missing email addresses you’ll now be able to include in your email marketing campaigns and email newsletter campaigns.

We’re also able to verify the email addresses you do have as well as verify and update contact and organisation details across each of your databases.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email us.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you want to come and visit us. There is plenty of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk from North Shields Metro station.