If the 2014 data quality research shows one thing, it’s that email is here to stay. The number of organisations who name it as their top channel for marketing and customer communications actually rose from 34% last year to 36%. Even where businesses use social media as their principal channel, email will be used as a secondary channel in that truly multi-channel communication environment in almost all campaigns. Businesses continue to recognise that the practical benefits of email, including low costs and high response rates, are hard to beat. At the same time, social media, the next most popular channel on 22%, has yet to realise its commercial potential.

You’ve got mail problems – where organisations are going wrong

Despite the continued importance of email, more than two thirds (67%) of those surveyed say they have had problems getting all their emails delivered to their customers and prospects during the past year. That’s a huge proportion and a massive concern when you consider the consequences of bounce back.

A total of 28% say customer satisfaction has suffered, while 26% that they have been unable to communicate with customers. Looking to the bottom line, 25% say they have incurred extra costs as a result of emails not hitting target and 22% lost revenue.

But the upfront costs of email going astray may actually be at the lower end of the scale compared to the potential blowback that can result from errors in an increasingly heavily patrolled and regulated online world.

When you consider the average sender reputation score in the UK of 51, this would result in an average of only around 23% of emails reaching the inbox of your customer. Compare this to the UK and Canada, with sender reputations scores averaging 67 and 70, due to much stricter anti-spam laws, where inbox placement runs at an average of 67%, UK return on investment sits at $41 per $1spent also compares favourably to the UK at £24 per £1, giving clarity as to why inbox placement and sender reputation are so important.

Reputation damage

More than 20% of respondents say they have suffered reputation damage from misfiring email. And that risk is intensifying as increasingly vigilant ISPs use more sophisticated filtering methods and setting spam traps and honey pots for emails to fall into. Each email that an ISP has to process costs them money. While the cost of individual email might be tiny, when you multiply that by the millions of emails they process every day, coupled with the fact that email services are a pure overhead on which they derive little or no revenue, then you begin to understand the pressures that Internet Service Provider's face and their increasingly sophisticated methods of blocking and filtering messages away from the inbox of the customer.

Too many bad email addresses and legitimate marketers can find themselves blocked like a spammer. Indeed, if your bounce back rate is high, you could easily find an entire campaign is blocked in an instant, as happened in the high-profile case of one US retailer. If you’re in a regulated business, such as financial services, telecoms or utilities, there is also the risk of being penalised, as the regulators necessarily set ever-higher standards for how companies should communicate with their customers.

So where does bad email data come from and how can it be filtered out? Part of the answer lies at source. The most popular channels for collecting email addresses are websites, used by 58% of organisations, followed by call centres, used by 43%. These also happen to be the two sources named by respondents as responsible for generating the dirtiest data.

This suggests that a lot more attention needs to be applied to making sure information is correct at the point of capture. Whilst web-capture is in the hands of the consumer, call centre and in-store data capture can be more effectively managed. This takes both technology and education of the personnel working in those environments.

Fix: Real time email validation processes implemented at every touch point with your customer can ensure that email data entering your organisation is correct and valid first time and really improve your opportunity to generate additional revenue from that consume following successful customer on boarding.

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Valuing quality over quantity

Another source of bad email addresses are purchased lists, which should be treated with caution. They may help you expand your customer base quickly but they can prove bad value if they import outdated or incorrect data into your database, which could in turn land you in a spam trap or in trouble with the regulatory bodies. Always make sure that lists are thoroughly checked and cleaned before use. Additionally, you must take care to ensure that the data on a purchased list has the relevant permissions. Bearing in mind the current strict, and future stricter, data protection laws, you must ensure that the data you use has been consentedand consented or the purpose that you are using it. This is extremely difficult to do when you are buying a list from a third party.

Fix: List buying although frowned upon is still a valid way to widen your customer pool for a marketer. You must however ensure that the data you have brought it trusted before you risk send bulk mailings to it and find yourself black listed. This can be done by a bulk validation exercise. Returning active and correct email address that can be used with confidence and a greater chance of campaign success.

Keeping up to date

Email data is fast decaying. You only have to consider that the average person changes email addresses up to twice a year to start to understand why. So you really can’t be sure that any information more than six months old is still accurate. Checking and cleaning your data will help you be confident that you are communicating with the right customers and prospects and sending them appropriate, timely messages, which in turn will help increase response rates.

Fix Implementing a process of regular bulk legacy email validation will ensure that your contact data will be up to date and trust worthy continuously.

Email is not going away. Despite the buzz around social media and the promises made for big data, email remains the most popular channel in 2014. However the costs and risks associated with bad email data are increasing. This leaves marketers with two main challenges: how to stay out of the traps, and how to deliver to the right inboxes. Thankfully, the same solutions apply to both. The best way to stop your ISP blocking emails is to make sure that email addresses are correct when you first capture them and to keep checking data to clear dead and dormant addresses from your list.

By doing this, you can be confident that your emails are going to the right people at the correct address. This will not only keep you out of the junk folder but help customers both old and new to trust you as a reliable source of information. Being a trusted sender can be just as important to your brand as the number of likes your campaign video gets on Facebook – and much more likely to drive high response rates.

Doing the groundwork

However, this won’t happen overnight. You need to do the work to get there. Ensure you’re your strategy focuses on the right places. Make sure that you implement effective processes to make sure everywhere that you collect data, it’s done well. That means at your website, at call centres, on the phone and when you buy it in. And don’t just expect data to look after itself. Adopt robust systems, such as real-time validation, to ensure your data does not go out of date. Above all, you need the right management approach, one that takes data quality seriously and embeds it in the culture as an everyday part of your business.