According to Pardot, over 20% of marketers rely on email as their company’s primary revenue generator. To do this, marketers need—you guessed it—valid email addresses. Otherwise, their marketing emails might land them on a blacklist instead of in the inbox. As customer data collection is rapidly growing in importance and the technology landscape is ever-changing, data collection blunders are becoming more common for a variety of reasons. The good news is that there are tools out there to help prevent this, and in-form email verification is at the top of the list. Here are the top email collection challenges and details on how in-form email validation can help:
1. Typo Traps (aka Fat Fingering)
Try typing your email address five times fast. Odds are you misspelled it at least twice. Now try typing it on mobile. Even harder. The rapid growth of mobile has immensely changed the way users type and enter information online, leading to the coining of the term “fat fingering.”comScore found that the average Internet user spends 51% of his or her time on mobile devices. While this opens a huge window of opportunity for marketers, it also opens the door to more typos and misspellings of common domains like gmail.com. By using in-form email validation, the email address is verified in real time, which means these typos are caught immediately and never make it into your database.
2. Subscription Bombing
In its simplest form, subscription bombing happens when spammers or malicious persons subscribe large volumes of email addresses to mailing lists through online forms. As a result, the subscribed email addresses receive unwanted confirmation emails, and targeted companies and ESPs (email service providers) often land on a block list, or real-time database of IP addresses of spam sources. The fight against subscription bombing is led by several organizations, most notably the nonprofit Spamhaus, that work to prevent inbox overflow and to communicate these addresses to the public. Though the SBL (Spamhaus Block List) is effective in convincing ESPs to stop the abuse, real-time email verification is a way to help prevent the problem from happening in the first place. How? Many in-form verification tools, like BriteForms, monitor each web session to help identify and stop bots from spamming web forms. If a human identity can’t be verified, a verification code will be sent to the email address for confirmation.
3. Fraud
As easily as an email address can be created, it can just as quickly be doctored. Since customer acquisition is an important part of marketing strategies today, a fraudulent email address can result in a missed opportunity and lost revenue. With this, it’s important to understand that an email address is not only a way to communicate with customers but also a way to confirm transactions and verify identify. Using in-form email verification, like BriteForms, allows you to immediately screen an email address for validity and patterns indicative of fraud. For an extra layer of security, consider sending an immediate follow-up email to the recipient to verify the purchase.Every company wants to positively impact its bottom line, and ensuring you have the best quality data is an important step in that direction. Using Formstack and BriteForms together can improve your data quality by blocking typo traps and fraudulent email addresses, ensuring your emails hit the inbox.
Click below to learn more about getting started with verifying email addresses on your forms in real time.
About the Author
Matt McFee is founding partner and CEO at BriteVerify. An experienced email guy, Matt cut his teeth working for companies like Yahoo! and 24/7 Media. Working alongside agencies and direct clients of all sizes prepared him for his position as founding partner of BriteVerify. Currently, Matt leads the BriteVerify team to discover and create innovative solutions to previously ignored email marketing problems.
