Email is a great way to cultivate and keep relationships with your customers - more specifically email newsletters. Research shows that 95 percent of people who sign up for a newsletter find it useful and relevant, and are more likely to engage and make purchase decisions based on the emails they receive. Email validation, also known as email verification could be your solution to email bounces, abandoned or inaccurate email addresses. Email list hygiene cleans your email lists to verify that you’re sending to an email address that not only exists, but is active and accepting mail. Email address validation is usually provided as a SAAS tool, like ZeroBounce. Wouldn’t you rather have a list of 25,000 subscribers with a 35% open rate, versus 75,000 subscribers with a 4% open rate? Email verification tools validate email lists, improve deliverability, and improve sender reputation. So how does email list validation help your newsletters? 1.Increase deliverability Increase deliverability by managing bounce rates and complaints. More of your messages will inbox and result in higher open, response and click rates. 2.Bounce rate reduction A bounce rate above 2% is a red flag. Lower your bounce rate with email scrubbing to remove undeliverable email addresses. This will lead to a larger percentage of emails being sent to a deliverable address. 3.Sender score protection Protecting your sending score through an email checker will help to improve overall deliverability and campaign success. If you are using an email address validation service like ZeroBounce to check if email is valid, it will remove invalid emails, spam traps and know email complainers from your list to help protect your sender reputation and score. About ZeroBounce Based in Santa Barbara, CA, ZeroBounce is a major email verification company created to help businesses just like yours reach their marketing success. In practical terms, that means reaching humans, not bots. ZeroBounce is an essential service for marketers everywhere that wish to improve their deliverability and open rates and, of course, increase their revenue.

Brand protection is on the minds of a lot of advertisers and marketers lately. From advertisements showing up alongside objectionable content to fears about influencers dragging their name through the mud (or whatever messy challenge is making the rounds among YouTubers that week), brands want safety. But email is a pretty safe communication channel for brands, right? It can be, as long as you take the right steps to secure your brand reputation. While affiliate email marketing can bring big returns, it can also introduce safety and security concerns. Fortunately, there are ways to navigate these challenges without hurting your brand. Let’s take a look at a few ways email marketers can reap the benefits of email while protecting their hard-earned brand reputation.

Keep an eye on your CAN-SPAM compliance.

When there are a million other things to consider in an email marketing program, staying CAN-SPAM compliant isn’t always at the top of marketers’ minds. But complacency can be costly. At best, sending email to opt-outs will give prospects a negative perception of your brand; at worst, each email can cost you thousands of dollars. When you’re sending millions of emails, those fines can add up. It’s important to have a system in place to manage opt-outs. That way, you keep your customers happy, and you honor your unsubscribes well within the 10 days mandated by the CAN-SPAM Act.

Monitor your email partners for optimal brand protection.

If you’re emailing with partners, odds are, you spend time carefully choosing your affiliates or co-marketing partners. But even the most meticulously vetted partners can go rogue. Email partners who abuse your email list can upset customers, leading to email unsubscribes and lost business. To make sure partners don’t scare off your subscribers, it’s important to have brand protection tools, such as partner monitoring, in place. Solutions like UnsubCentral give email marketers the tools they need to keep an eye on their email partners. By tracking how often partners download suppression lists and watching how many unsubscribes these partners generate, you can keep your brand from falling prey to a bad influence.

Secure your suppression list data.

Speaking of suppression lists, sharing suppression list data with your partners can bring security concerns into your email program if not done correctly. You must make sure all email partners can scrub their lists against suppression files, but sharing raw email data gives emailers access to a slew of nonmailable data. No brand wants to be synonymous with security issues—especially when data breaches have dominated the news lately—which means you need a way to share this data securely. With a global suppression list management solution, you can house email data in a centralized location without having to give partners access to nonmailable email addresses. When your email data is secure, your email list is happy.

Use suppression lists to send smarter email campaigns.

Finally, suppression lists don’t have to be all about compliance. They can help you be a better email marketer to your list. By using suppression lists to exclude certain segments of your list, you can help make sure that your email communication isn’t turning off your current customers or other parts of your email audience. For example, if a customer receives an email notifying them of a special offer for new customers, that customer might get a little annoyed at paying a higher rate than incoming customers. Instead of sending an email that will annoy current customers, you can use suppression lists to exclude customers from certain affiliate email campaigns.

About UnsubCentral

UnsubCentral offers the industry’s leading solution for email compliance and opt-out list management. UnsubCentral provides advertisers, agencies, and networks with the necessary tools to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act by allowing them to securely manage opt-out and customer lists across third party partners.

On May 31, 2018 the CA Assembly voted in favor of AB 2546.  This bill expands the provisions of California Business and Professions Code 17529.5 (commonly known as CA’s anti-spam law) by, among other things, expanding the law to allow private suits not just on the header information in commercial emails but also the body of the emails, expanding the definitions so that the law would apply to charitable, religious and political email advertisements, and unless you can prove you have some other legit business purpose – it also will prohibit the use of multiple domain names to send commercial emails, prohibit the use of registered dbas as from lines and prohibit hidden and nonsensical text for the purpose of breaking spam filters. Under the revised law mailers and networks will be liable (not just advertisers) and arguably ESPs, ISPs, colocation facilities and software platforms are directly liable too if they know their services are being used to send unsolicited commercial email. If this becomes law the amount of claims and lawsuits against large reputable companies that are involved in commercial emailing will increase and the provisions of this law will make it more difficult to send commercial emails to or from CA.

Now that this bill has passed the Assembly it will move on to the Senate for consideration during June and July with a deadline of August 31^st for the Senate to pass this bill. Madrivo, along with a number of other great businesses in the industry, have just joined the Internet Business Coalition which will be opposing this bill as it makes its way through the Senate.

 

Oppose this bill? If you are in CA contact your local senator’s office today and tell them to oppose AB 2546 – contacting is simple through your local representative’s website. If you are interested in doing more to oppose this bill please contact your Madrivo representative.

JFK once said “There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.”