5 Common challenges organizations face in maintaining email data

Every digital communicator knows that your ability to reach customers starts with valid contact details. If ‘position, position, position’ was the holy grail of the traditional marketing era, then ‘data, data, data’ is its replacement in the digital era.

Getting customers' contact details (and their permission to communicate electronically) is the first step in the digital game. But maintaining the validity of that data has to be an ongoing program, and one that often presents significant challenges to an organization.

The good news is: if data hygiene and reactivation keeps you up at night . . . you are not alone. The bad news is: there’s no easy way out.

Five common challenges organizations face in keeping email data up-to-date:

1. Failure reports are non-negotiable
I am always shocked when I hear the following statement: “We sent the campaign, but have no idea which messages were successfully delivered and which failed.” There is no reason whatsoever to settle for a lack of basic reporting. Any decent email service provider (ESP) or self-service email application will provide standard delivery reporting, so insist on a report indicating the success or failure of each message sent, at the very least.


2. How many is too many when it comes to failures?
Sometimes delivery reports are available, but no intelligence is applied to drive down the percentage of undeliverable email addresses. This impacts on both the reach of a campaign as well as sender reputation, so it’s important to have a strategy around successive failures. Ask yourself the following questions: How many times does an email address fail before it is entered into a hygiene process? Is this based on frequency of contact or the period in which the contacts were attempted?


3. Alternative contact details are vital
If the email address fails enough times to be deemed invalid, it’s crucial that the organization has alternative contact details on record. Keep costs in check by opting for another electronic channel such as mobile text messaging or SMS to request an updated email address, keeping high cost channels such as outbound calls to a minimum.


4. Uploading new addresses
Running email hygiene processes will produce valuable data sets that need to be uploaded onto the master customer information system. It’s surprising how many organizations battle to execute bulk uploads. If this step in the process is not resolved, successfully implementing the first three steps above becomes meaningless.


5. Automating processes
The motto here is: avoid manual processes at all costs. In my opinion, data hygiene programs should be fully automated and regulated, with little to no reliance on human input. The most successful programs I have seen consist of multiple triggers that cater for every failure type with a combination of processes that just run.

To summarize -  if you can:

1. Identify which addresses on your base are undeliverable
2. Define an approach to frequency of failure
3. Use a different channel to get updated email addresses
4. Bulk upload the corrected details, and
5. Automate this whole process . . . .

...then you deserve to sleep well at night, knowing you have achieved what many organizations have not. If not, get in touch with us and one of our email messaging specialists will assist you.

Alison Treadaway
striata.com