How Does Email Verification Impact Your Email Marketing Campaign's ROI?
June 8, 2021
7 min read
Email marketing is a crucial resource that you have at your disposal when planning out your marketing efforts. In order for it to be successful, we must work towards boosting marketing campaign ROI.
Even today, decades after email’s invention, email marketing remains the most effective medium for reaching your audience. Look at the numbers below:
In fact, according to an eMarketer study, the median email marketing ROI is 122%. That’s four times higher than any other digital marketing channel!It is also an integral part of shaping customers’ experience with your business. You can do this by learning about your contacts’ needs and interests in order to send better campaigns.
To ensure success, many companies plan out comprehensive email strategies. However, many seem to neglect the importance of email verification, also known as email validation.
Over time, inaccurate and obsolete email accounts slowly fill up your database. Sending emails to these accounts is useless as they are doomed to bounce back.
Moreover, there isn’t much point in sending out email campaigns to everyone on your list, without analyzing its return on investment (ROI). This will help you understand how any given action helps towards reaching your goals.
There are quite a few factors that affect your email marketing campaign’s ROI, such as:
- The quality of your content
- Design and formatting elements
- The consistency and timing of your emails
- Level of personalization and segmentation
- The quality of your email list (i.e. if it has been verified or not)
You probably have sufficient information on the first four. That is why, for the purpose of this article, we will focus on the last (nevertheless very important) item on the list above.
Often people underestimate the need of email verification, and we will show you exactly how it helps boost your email marketing campaign’s ROI.
Let’s get into the specifics now, shall we?
What is an email marketing campaign ROI?
Return on Investment (ROI) is a measure used to evaluate the efficiency and profitability of any given investment. Thus, for email marketing, ideally, you want to know that to understand how well your efforts are doing.
As a marketer, every email marketing campaign should produce a healthy return. The basic formula to calculate ROI is the following:
However, just like some other marketing efforts, calculating the ROI of email marketing is not as straightforward as the equation above.To lay the foundation, you must specify for each email campaign the goal you are trying to achieve. Email Marketing can be used to achieve a number of goals such as:
- Website traffic
- Increasing sales
- Raising brand awareness
- Lead nurturing
Once you have a goal in mind, it becomes easier to calculate your email marketing campaign ROI.
However, there remain a few challenges. For example, every marketer knows it takes multiple touches to create a customer. A customer might read an email but only take action a few weeks later. This makes it harder to allocate revenue to a specific touch.
You can find more detailed material on how to best overcome these challenges and measure the ROI of marketing programs here.
What is email verification?
Put simply, email verification is making sure that the emails on your list are good emails, i.e. when you send a campaign, the email will be sent to a legitimate address.
If you’re wondering why you should verify email lists, you should know that 2% of your email list decays every month – that means over 20% of your email data becomes undeliverable in a year!
Your list can have undeliverables because of various different reasons; consider some of the scenarios given below:
- A user made a mistake and entered the wrong email address,
- After signing up, one day the user simply deleted their account,
- They changed jobs and the old email is no longer used,
- A user-provided a disposable email address that doesn’t belong to them.
While this is not an exhaustive list, you get the idea.
If you were to send an email campaign to any of these email addresses, not only would it be a waste, but you would inevitably increase your bounce rates and damage your sender reputation, and land your campaigns in the spam folder.
The picture we’re painting is not a pretty one - but fortunately, you have at your disposal, email verification tools such as Emailable, that can save you from going down that road.
If you are not sure how email verification works, you can find out more here.
How does email verification increase your email marketing campaign ROI?
As mentioned above, ROI is crucial to determining the efficiency of any action. Marketers want to ideally reduce their costs and increase their revenue through their email marketing efforts, which in turn will increase their marketing campaign’s ROI.
We saw the equation of ROI above; email verification helps you increase ROI in both ways – by increasing money gained and by reducing money spent.
Increasing money gained
Maximize email deliverability
Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to subscribers’ inboxes. With deliverability, engagement is the most important factor – since it directly impacts sender reputation.
For a stellar sender reputation, you must make sure you are verifying your email lists at regular intervals. This interval will depend on factors such as list decay (as mentioned above) and the frequency with which you are collecting new emails.
Every time you miss an opportunity to present your campaign to a subscriber, you lose out on a potential sale, or opportunity to build a relationship with them which might lead to a future purchase.
According to a report by TowerData, you can gain $750 for every dollar spent on validating emails. Mind-blowing, right?
The same is true for when you end up in the spam folder, where users most likely don’t even look anymore.
For example, if your email list has 80 percent unengaged subscribers (not opened / clicked in over six months) and sending with this ratio is too frequent, it can lead to rate-limiting or landing in Gmail’s spam folder.
While some individuals may unsubscribe, others will ignore your emails or mark them as spam. This is detrimental to your sender reputation, making your emails less likely to reach the inboxes of recipients, including those that actively engage with your messages.
In simple words: email verification is key to maintaining a good sender reputation, consequently avoiding the spam folder, thus maximizing email deliverability.
Better campaign performance and efficiency
Bounce rates, open rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates etc. give marketers insight as to how people react to and engage with their emails. Monitoring these metrics over time reveals trends in audience activity and engagement.
Your post-campaign analysis may not give you a correct picture if you did not validate your lists to begin with.
For example, your bounce rate might be higher, whereas your open and click-through rates are bound to be lower. Having a list with only genuine contacts ensures that your metrics give you a true picture of your email campaign results.
Reducing money spent
Cutting costs on CRM and other marketing softwares
You can cut costs by verifying your emails regularly. Many email automation services such as HubSpot or MailChimp charge you based on the emails in your database.
If you have emails that are simply not valid anymore (and chances are that you do), then you are wasting money on data that won’t provide you any results.
Always remember that you’re paying to send emails, track the analytics, and get your message in front of customers or prospects.
You know that every little bit counts. Email validation eliminates the risk of wasted money from sending messages to fake or toxic emails.
Avoid being blacklisted
An email blacklist is a real-time database of emails and IPs that, due to poor sending practices, were identified as spammers.
It is important to mention here that, even if you are a legitimate sender, you might still end up on a blacklist.
Finding out your IP or domain has been blacklisted is bad news. Apart from affecting your email deliverability, it takes a lot of time and energy to get out of a blacklist, not to mention the stress and costs.
However, the good news is that these extra costs and unnecessary stress can be avoided. By regularly verifying your lists, you reduce your risk of being blacklisted in the following ways:
- Removing invalid emails means reducing bounces. A high bounce rate is a major red flag!
- Removing as many spam traps as possible (as the name suggests, it’s a trap!)
- Having more engagement overall, which signals to ISPs that you are a legitimate sender.
Automate to save time and reduce man hours
To save time and effort, you can use Emailable’s solution called Monitor. This solution lets you work on another task, while it makes sure your lists are always clean. It’s like one of those fancy robot vacuum cleaners (but for emails).
As shown above, all you have to do is upload the lists you need monitoring, and choose the frequency with which you would like for it to be cleaned. Remember that previously valid emails might become obsolete in a week or even a day!Apart from saving time and man hours, you also save money with Monitor. Yes, it is actually cheaper to get Monitor than it is to get our Bulk solution.
All in all, the points mentioned above show you how you actually save money by investing in a good email verification tool.
Wrapping up
As discussed, email verification boosts email ROI in various different ways.
Without email verification, your email marketing campaign ROI will keep decreasing, as every month 2% of email addresses in your list become inactive due to various reasons.
Give your beautiful email campaign a real chance of making a difference, by validating your lists first!