A Quora discussion recently got us thinking about the status of email in our day and age. As a company, we know how important email is, since we verify hundreds of thousands of emails a day. It’s clearly evident to us that people are still using it. But conversations like this made us wonder if email is actually on the decline after all. There seem to be new task management tools, messaging apps, and other alternative email tools that emerge every day that promise to rid us of the need for email, but will these tools eventually replace it altogether?
It turns out that not only is email not dead, it’s actually growing. It’s the way we’re using it that’s changing. Experts predict that by 2019, the number of email accounts will increase 26% to 5.59 billion. Consider even more statistics below:
- 88% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective lead generation tactic
- Marketers consistently ranked email as the single-most-effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention
- 42% of businesses say email is one of their most effective lead generation channels
- 122 billion emails are sent every hour
Given these numbers, email is clearly not dying. It is more important than ever before. Anecdotal evidence supports this, too. For example, think about how you use email in your own life. You subscribe to interesting newsletters, you get your receipts emailed to you, your bills arrive in your inbox, you get alerts from your bank, you correspond with friends and family members, customers contact you via your website and their messages arrive in your inbox. The list goes on and on…
Several new task management tools that intend to “replace” email still rely on you to sign up with your email address, and use your email for updates and notifications. If anything, these new tools and services are just a way to leverage and build off of your email, but certainly not replace it. Likewise, whenever you sign up for a new service, that service requires your email address. Your email address will serve as a communications channel between you and the service provider as well as, potentially, your username.
While social media, instant messengers, and online collaboration tools offer an alternative to email, they don’t come close to the ubiquitousness of email. Just about every Internet user has an email address, but just a fraction have SnapChat, Slack, or Asana accounts.
Email is alive and well, and it’s effective. However, email marketing is suffering from a common ailment you need to be aware of: bad data. For example, 88% of users admit to entering incomplete or incorrect data on registration forms. This is troubling for many reasons, but especially due to the fact that a recent study found that 74% of users become frustrated when websites display irrelevant content. How can you personalize your marketing and create a better experience when the data users give you is junk?
Junk data, indeed. Whether users type the wrong address by mistake, check the wrong boxes in your web forms, or fail to notice that auto-correct has changed their entries, this bad data means your marketing and customer outreach efforts will fall flat. It’s hard to make a good impression when you’re addressing them by the wrong name or sending mail to a non-existent address.
In contrast, when you capture correct data in lead forms and on eCommerce sites, not only will your marketing automation and CRM platforms have correct data in them, you’ll also be able to personalize their experience with your company and brand.
In a world where personalization can make a customer feel welcome and appreciated, you need to get good data — even if that customer actually provides you with incorrect data.
Service Objects can catch bad data and clean it in real time with our data quality tools. These data validation tools instantly compare entered data against a massive database containing millions of verified phone and address records, automatically validating, correcting, and appending the data to ensure that you have current, accurate information.
Email isn’t going anywhere, but if you want to ensure deliverability of your messages, you need good data. Our data quality validation tools are a must for any business that communicates with leads, prospects, and customers using email.
