According to a study by Marketing Sherpas , B2B data is degrading at a rate of 2.1% per month. Which equates to an annual staleness rate of 22.5% of verify an email address. This statistic comes from the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report, and is also confirmed in Hubspot’s 2014 State of Inbound report.
Hubspot
To put this into context, this means that approximately 22.5% of the email addresses in your database become obsolete each year due to job or company changes (you can multiply this by the number of years you have owned your database… it’s scary indeed).
Why this obsolescence? Because people change companies. Contacts’ email addresses change with each major professional change (dismissal, departure, promotion sometimes, etc.).
2 – Because you won’t get your message across
Sending emails to unverified addresses can harm the deliverability of your campaigns. Deliverability is the fact of arriving in the inbox of your target. When you are new to prospecting, you think that an email sent = an email received.
But this is not always true, hence the importance of talking about and measuring this deliverability.
By the way, did you know that your domain (your company email) has a reputation with email services like Gmail, Outlook? A high bounce rate, spam complaints, or sending emails to invalid addresses are all negative signals that can harm your reputation and cause your emails to be sent to spam folders or not .
At Monsieur Lead, we’ve seen cases where clients have had trouble contacting their own customers and partners because their emails consistently end up in spam (this often happens to schools because their students ignore the emails and develop a bad reputation).
Making an appointment for prospecting with Mr. Lead
3 – Because you will have a high bounce rate and few responses
If many of your prospects don’t receive your email, they can’t be about your offers, respond, or schedule a demo or presentation of your services. This is what happens when you have a high bounce rate .
A “bounced” verify an email address refers to an email that could not be to its recipient and is to the sender with an error message.
Little response
A high bounce rate has a direct impact on your ability to achieve positive results in your prospecting. Not only does it reduce the qualified b2b leads for sale of potential conversions, it also exposes your domain to risks of spam and sometimes even having your email block.
There are two main types of bounces:
Hard bounce : This is a permanent error that indicates that the email will never be delivere. Reasons for this could be an incorrect or non-existent email address , an invalid domain , or a email account . If an email bounces hard, remove that address from your contact list as it is invalid .
Soft bounce : This is a temporary error indicating that the email could not be delivere for a temporary reason. For example, the recipient’s inbox may be full, the mail server may be temporarily down, or the email may be too large. In the case of a soft bounce , the email may be delivere if you try to resend it later, but if the problem persists, it could also indicate that the address is gradually becoming invalid .
II. Free methods to verify an email address (light prospecting)
Now that you know why it is important to verify emails before contacting prospects , we will present you with free methods to do so. These methods are suitable for a number of contacts (less than fifty emails ).
Why this limit? Because these manual methods are tedious and time-consuming as the number of addresses to verify increases. Also, be aware that time spent manually verifying lead emails does not generate sales meetings or business, unlike real and effective contacts.
What you save on paid tools can become a loss of productivity. Finally, a small nuance: these manual techniques are not always 100% accurate (but nothing is in this area). They provide an approximation with a high probability, but there may be some errors. So why talk about it? Because sometimes we don’t have a budget (or our manager is stingy). Sometimes we only have a few contacts to check from time to time, which does not justify paying for a tool.
