Major Retailers Fail at E-Mail Address Validation
Thursday, 26 January 2006
FreshAddress, Inc., an e-mail database services provider, released the results of its study "E-mail Address Validation Study of Fifty Top Retail Web Sites." The sobering results show none of the tested Web sites successfully blocked the most common e-mail address registration errors, thus allowing typos and undeliverable e-mail addresses into their databases. The average cost to each of these retailers is $6.7 million dollars annually in lost sales.
The 50 retail Web sites were selected from Internet Retailer's list of Top 300 Retail Web Sites, and included Amazon.com, Dell.com, and Staples.com.
The nine invalid e-mail addresses used in the test included common typographical, formatting, "dead" domain errors, and bogus e-mail addresses, such as:
Bob_8@attbi.com - Attbi.com is a "dead" domain & out of business
Bob_8@hotmial.com - Common misspelling of "hotmail.com"
Bob_82hotmail.com - Common typo where the shift key was not pressed for the "@" symbol
The results show that 98 percent of the sites tested failed to block at least two types of invalid e-mail addresses, 96 percent failed to block three or more types, and fully 86 percent failed to block four or more types of invalid e-mail addresses.
After a holiday season where online sales were at a record high and major companies are announcing up to 30 percent increases in their 2006 online advertising budgets, inaccurate databases can create significant problems. By averaging the conversion and customer-value rates provided by Internet Retailer, it is estimated that over $500,000 per month, per retailer, is lost due to faulty e-mail address validation.
According to FreshAddress, Inc. President, Austin Bliss, "The solution is to provide a simple, user-friendly process that immediately identifies invalid e-mail addresses and offers intelligent corrections. After years of perfecting and utilizing validation technology in-house, we now offer this Real-Time E-mail Address Validation service to our clients. The interest has been incredible."
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) utilize bounce and spam-trap thresholds to thwart spammers from clogging their systems and annoying their customers. When these thresholds are exceeded for a given campaign, ISPs often blacklist the offending source. This results in falling deliverability, open, and/or response rates, which directly impacts customer sales revenues or member donations.
"The nine invalid e-mail addresses tested represents a small subset of the millions of invalid e-mail registrations that occur daily," said Bill Kaplan, CEO of FreshAddress, Inc. "List hygiene is the underlying cause for many e-mail deliverability problems facing companies today. If organizations don't address this problem at the source, they will continue to throw millions of dollars away in lost revenues."