Have you ever been to gamil.com? Or gmial.com? Or gmali.com? Well, many of your prospects and customers have, without even knowing it. These are just a few of the misspellings of “Gmail” alone that pop up regularly when people enter their email addresses on your squeeze pages and signup forms – in fact, according to one direct marketer, Lucidchart.com, roughly three percent of their leads provided addresses that bounced. (Believe it or not, many people don’t even spell “.com” correctly!)
Unfortunately, losses like these can be just the tip of the iceberg. When you follow your human nature and ask potential leads to try and validate their own addresses by re-typing them – or worse, ask them to respond to a validation email – many people will simply throw up their hands and not bother, with no way of tracking these losses. According to Lucidchart’s Derrick Isaacson, the more bandwidth you add to your signup process, the less likely someone is to complete it. And the one lead you can never sell to is the one who doesn’t respond in the first place.
Then there are people who intentionally try to game the system. For example, you are offering a free gift to potential qualified prospects, and someone wants to get the goodie without receiving the sales pitch. So they enter a bogus address directed to nowhere, or perhaps to Spongebob Squarepants. Or worse, your next customer transaction is a scam artist trying to defraud your company.
Is there any way around this lose-lose scenario? Yes. And it is simpler and less expensive than you might think – particularly when held up against the cost of lost leads, data errors and fraud. The answer is real-time email validation. By using an API that plugs right into your email data entry process on the Web, you create a smoother experience for customers and prospects while gaining several built-in benefits:
Accurate address verification: A real-time email verification service can leverage numerous criteria to ensure the validity of a specific address. For example, Service Objects’ email validation API performs over 50 specific verification tests to determine email address authenticity, accuracy, and deliverability.
Auto-correction: The right interface not only catches typical spelling and syntax errors but can also suggest a corrected address.
Improved lead quality: The very best tools not only check email address validity but can calculate a composite quality score based on its assessment criteria, which in turn lets you accept or reject a specific address.
Less human intervention: The cost of processing an incorrect or fraudulent email address goes far beyond lost sales or revenue. The time you spend pursuing unattainable leads and processing bad data in your sales process add up to a real, tangible human cost that affects your profit margin.
Blacklist protection: Automated email validation protects your mail servers from being blacklisted by verifying authentic email addresses while filtering out spammers, vulgar or bogus email addresses, and erroneous data.
Real-world numbers bear out the value of using automated email validation. For example, Lucidchart.com’s Isaacson noted that an A-B test showed a 34% increase in product re-use and a 44% increase in paid customers among the automated validation group. On top of sales results like these, you can also add in the cost savings from reduced database maintenance, manual processing, and fraud when you deploy these tools across each of your prospect and customer touch points.
We now live in an e-commerce world that competes on making the prospect and customer’s experience as easy as possible. Automated email validation helps you compete better by reducing their bandwidth and your costs at the same time. It is a win-win situation for everyone, as well as your bottom line.
