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.

You may have read our post on May 4th marking the 40th birthday of email marketing. Our friends at ZeroBounce wrote a great blog post detailing the history of that day and how email has evolved year to year. Enjoy the post: If you look on the Guinness World Records website, you will find Thuerk listed as the author of “the world’s oldest spam.” His email, which was composed on the 1st of May 1978, got sent on the 3rd of May to almost 400 ARPAnet users. “The world’s oldest spam was sent at 12:33 EDT on 3 May 1978 by Gary Thuerk (USA), then working for Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC, USA). It was sent to 397 email accounts on the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) of the US Defense Dept., inviting them to a product demonstration of the DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060 and 2060T computers. ARPAnet is regarded as the predecessor to the internet. The original email still exists,” states the Guinness Book of World Records. “I thought of it as e-marketing,” says Thuerk, who admitted he knew he “was pushing the envelope.” But he wanted to reach as many people as possible and invite them to test DEC’s new products. As a marketing manager for DEC, Thuerk was hoping to get attention and increase the company’s revenue.

What happened next?

He received many complaints for his unsolicited email, including from an ARPAnet representative, who called him and “chewed him out,” as Thuerk remembers. On the other hand, the email blast did work: DEC sold almost $14 million worth of its new computers as a result of the mass email.

How email marketing evolved

Since Thuerk’s first email blast in 1978, email marketing has gone through many transformations, with marketers and email service providers fine-tuning their strategies. Let’s take a look at how things have changed: 1991: Internet access gives marketers a new way to reach potential customers, with Hotmail offering the first free email service. The most common email marketing tactic is “spray and pray.” 1998: The Data Protection Act forces email marketers to offer their recipients the possibility to opt out. 2001: The first behavioral email is sent, as marketers realize they need to craft their campaigns according to online user behavior. 2003: The first spam regulations appear. The Can Spam Law sets new rules for commercial emails. 2004: The Sender Policy Framework is introduced as an email validation system for the prevention of email spam. The system verified the sender’s IP address. Email marketing is on the rise, with intensive spam being its main weakness. Legitimate marketers start to see a serious effect of the ISP’s filtering rules on their campaigns. 2008: Windows Live Sender Reputation Data allows recipients to mark emails as spam. Marketers start to understand they have to refine their strategies if they want to preserve their reputation. 2009: Email deliverability becomes a topic of discussion, as Return Path reports that 30% of emails never reach the inbox. Recipients now have the option to block certain senders. Due to poor email reputation, many marketers are blacklisted. 2010: The continuous development of email marketing and the rise of social media bring focus on data collection and management. 2012: More than 40% of marketing emails are opened on a mobile device. Creating mobile-friendly campaigns becomes a priority. In the same year, the European Parliament starts preparations on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 2016: The European Parliament approves the GDPR. Enforcement date: 25 May 2018. 2018: Email is the most efficient marketing channel, with a revenue of $44 for every $1 spent. Techniques are more sophisticated than ever. Emails are personalized and marketers strive to send valuable content. Email verification becomes an essential part of their strategy as it increases deliverability and helps maintain a good sender reputation. About ZeroBounce Created by a team of top-notch professionals, ZeroBounce is the premier email validation service dedicated to e-mail bounce detection, email abuse and spam trap detection, email data append and advanced security. Marketers who are using email lists validated by ZeroBounce report a 98% accuracy rate and preserve their online reputation intact. Featured on Entrepreneur.com, BuzzFeed and Inc. magazine, ZeroBounce is widely considered “the best email validation system available.”

Every year, for the past six years, Madrivo has attended Affiliate Summit West and this year was no exception. Being able to build face-to-face relationships in one place with over 6,000 companies in the affiliate marketing industry is something we always look forward to as the show approaches. Last week’s show was a fantastic 3 days of meetings, networking, and learning.  As two-time winner of the Affy Award (2014 for Outstanding Internet Achievement, 2017 for Affiliate Satisfaction) we want to congratulate our friends at ZeroBounce for winning this year’s award for Outstanding Internet Achievement. This award comes well-deserved considering their accomplishments over the past year and setting the benchmark in email validation and verification. They have generated a significant and novel contribution to the digital advertising community, and more specifically, affiliate marketing by creating an industry-leading and paradigm-shifting tool. ZeroBounce is a major email validation service dedicated to email bounce detection, email abuse and spam trap detection, email data append and advanced security. We are so excited for them and their achievements in the industry; they’re definitely a company to work with in 2018 if you’re looking to improve deliverability and increase ROI from email campaigns. What were the highlights of Affiliate Summit West 2018 for you? We want to know!