Have you ever been waiting for an important email and finally realized that it ended up in spam? That has probably happened to everybody, but you resigned yourselves since you didn't have a postman to talk to. But why didn't that email reach the inbox? Well, it all has to do with the reputation of the sender of the email, which means you need an email address verifier fast. Reputation is even more critical when you're a market research agency whose analysis depends mostly on primary data collected via email. Therefore, an email reputation check is a must.

It Would Help if You Had an Email Address Verifier

It is essential to establish and maintain an impeccable online reputation to ensure the effectiveness of your market research. Therefore, you need a team of specialists who can explain how an email address verifier works and how important is this part in a company. The reputation of the email sender or email sender reputation is a score established by Internet service providers or ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that is assigned to the organization that sends the emails. This score is a component that ensures the delivery of emails to the inbox.

Email Reputation Check Is Crucial

An email reputation check is a necessary policy to ensure inbox delivery standards of emails that matter to the recipient. Emails that contain unsolicited content by the recipient will be marked as spam by the ISP and, as a result, will end up in the spam section. The content of the message is incorrectly marked as spam and thus not delivered directly to the inbox. The higher the score, the more likely the ISP will provide emails directly to recipient inboxes and not to the spam/junk section. Each ISP has different standards when assigning a sender reputation score.

The score is determined by several factors, including:

•        The total number of emails sent by the organization;
•        How many of those who receive the email mark it as spam or complain to their ISP about it;
•        How often the provider's filter catches the organization's emails;
•        Whether or not the organization is on a blacklist;
•        How many of the emails sent were rejected because the emails were sent to unknown users;
•        How many of the recipients open, reply, forward, or delete the received emails;
•        How many of those who receive your emails click on the included links;
•        How many of the recipients of the emails unsubscribe from the organization's email list?

Why Is the Sender's Reputation Important?

If you've needed market data before, you know that data collection is an essential stage of research, which is the primary source of market analysis. Once the client approves the research design, the digital communication team starts the data collection campaign. You need a certain number of respondents, but how do you get them? Sometimes, the profiles of panel respondents need to meet your customers' needs. Be various:

•        The client's business is very niche.
•        The prospect's profile could be more realistic.
•        Their product/service is addressed to other companies.

In these situations, to collect the data necessary for the analysis, specialists use alternative methods to reach the respondents: a database provided by the client or a third party, or they collect the essential respondents with the help of relevant social media campaigns.  Suppose an external database (most often our clients) is used to collect primary data. In that case, the role of our specialists becomes even more critical because these databases contain errors or contact data that are out of use. Therefore, it is crucial to use an email address verifier.

Old or erroneous contacts affect the efficiency of data collection: they lead to an erosion of reputation, and as shown above, the reputation of the sender directly depends on the accuracy of the email list.  Digital specialists must ensure the database is clean before sending the email campaign, so an email reputation check must be performed. A clean database will respect the preferences of subscribing respondents. Remember, the sender can always control reputation. Companies must have access to various resources and tools to ensure the correct delivery of the survey email so that it reaches the recipient's inbox.

What Is the Bounce Rate?

Bounce, from the English language, means "to ricochet" or "to reject", thus it happens that emails do not reach the recipient. This phenomenon occurs when the email system rejects sent emails for various reasons, primarily technical: lack of space on the hard disk, the server is down, or the recipient's address is non-existent/wrong, and in less common cases, when the server directly rejects the sender's address.  The bounce rate, a quality indicator that analyzes the percentage of unique site visits, is critical in such cases.

In a digitalized world, users often change their email addresses so that no marketing campaign will have a zero-bounce rate. However, digital marketers' efforts should be focused on achieving the lowest possible bounce rate; that is where an email address verifier comes in handy. A high bounce rate affects the direct inbox delivery of emails in the current and future campaigns. Ignoring a high bounce rate can lead to negative labeling of the sender, and it can end up on a blacklist.

Working with Experts Is a Must

It is crucial to have specialists dedicated to maintaining your online reputation at the best possible level; one tracked indicator is a bounce rate as close to zero as possible. If the bounce rate is higher than 5%, then your email marketing account can be suspended. At the beginning of the collaboration with the client providing the database, any agency should make an email reputation check. If the database has a bounce rate of more than 5%, you can refuse to work on it until you receive a clean database.

Be committed to data quality. If you want to maintain an impeccable online reputation, that also means sending emails only to valid addresses. If the client is wondering if the database they own is up to date, an email address verifier can help in this regard. However, if he does not have such a tool at his disposal or, for various reasons, cannot clean the database to obtain a list of valid contacts, some agencies can help. I recommend they collaborate with specialists to clear their databases in a simple, inexpensive, organic strategy.