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Despite the arrival of newer technologies and marketing methods, email marketing has remained one of the most powerful and effective digital marketing strategies.
However, like other marketing methods, email marketing is not completely foolproof. And its success primarily depends on the mailing list of your business.
If your email list contains outdated or invalid email addresses, it can affect your returns on investment (ROI) adversely in multiple ways. This guide takes a look at how this happens and what can be done to prevent it. So, make sure to read until the end!
Email Marketing ROI – What Is It?
Before we discuss how invalid email addresses affect your ROI, it is vital to understand what the term actually means. Return on investment (ROI) refers to the gains or profit a business makes on any investment, so email marketing ROI means the returns it gets through its email marketing campaigns.
Any good email marketing campaign should ideally result in healthy returns for the business. However, what exactly counts as returns can vary depending on the business, its marketing campaign, and its goals and objectives.
The important thing to understand is that the email addresses obtained are the most important point of contact between the business and its customers. And herein lie the challenges that can affect the ROI of the marketing campaign.
How Invalid Email Addresses Affect Your Marketing ROI
In the digital marketing world, it is common knowledge that obtaining valid email addresses from target customers is one of the most difficult jobs. The majority of individuals tend to provide addresses that are not genuine, even if they may be interested in what your business is offering. This may be because they want to avoid spam emails or to ensure their privacy and security.
In any case, fake email addresses result in high bounce rates and may cause your internet service provider (ISP) to block your emails, considering them to be spam. In fact, according to Statista, more than 45% of all emails sent in December 2022 were spam messages.
Furthermore, without genuine email addresses, a business cannot connect with its target audience to build trust and loyalty. This results in low engagement levels, causing the audience to shift to products and services offered by the competition.
There is another way in which invalid email addresses can negatively impact your marketing ROI. This happens when your business continues to use outdated or fake email addresses when attempting to engage with its customers. Doing so will just result in a waste of time and effort, which could be put to more productive use elsewhere.
Avoiding A Negative Impact On Your Email Marketing ROI
The best and most effective way of avoiding impact on your email marketing ROI is through email validation. Email validation can be defined as the process of checking email addresses obtained from target customers to ensure they are genuine and deliverable.
There are various ways in which this can be accomplished, such as through certain software or by relying on an email validation API. Email validation tools help in identifying problems with email addresses before they can be caught by your ISP, helping reduce issues like bounce rates and spam. Besides that, they offer other benefits, which include:
- Improving engagement levels
- Enhancing deliverability
- Reducing the risk of being blocklisted
- Getting rid of temporary email addresses
- Increasing conversions
- Detecting errors like typos
- Making it easier to understand data quality
- Helping avoid fines and saving money
- Leading to better mail collection techniques
All these individually and collectively lead to better marketing ROI, boosting the performance of email marketing campaigns for the business.
Final Words
We’ve discussed the ways in which invalid email addresses can impact the marketing ROI of your business negatively in this guide. However, it is important to understand that the longer a business waits to validate the email addresses in its mailing list, the further its marketing ROI will fall.
Email validation can help avoid that, but it should be undertaken regularly at least once every two months. This will ensure that your mailing list remains clean and free of fake addresses, even as new ones are added to it.
Doing so will also help eliminate any waste of effort and time during the process, which is another significant advantage for your business.