Product news

Keeping email data accurate

Experian QAS recently conducted a survey to examine how important accurate email contact information is to organisations. The survey, sent out with April's edition of Insight, revealed some interesting trends. When asked:

• How important accurate email contact data was to their organisation:
  • 42% believed it was crucial
  • 25% thought is was quite important
  • 4% considered it wasn't important
• How many leads or enquiries came through their website per month:
  • 45% received 1-1,000
  • 6% received 1,001 - 5,000
  • 8% over 5,000
• Whether they used any software to validate email addresses collected online:
  • 15% use a software solution
  • 46% don't use anything
  • 8% are currently considering options

These results paint a fascinating picture. Whilst most businesses consider accurate email contact information as being crucial to their business, only the minority have any form of system or software in place to help ensure that their data is accurate.

QAS Email Validate is a new solution from Experian QAS that helps improve the accuracy of a business's email data. QAS Email Validate screens email addresses at the point of capture, preventing errors from creeping into the email database. When an individual submits their contact details, QAS Email Validate corrects common errors and checks the address against dead domain names and malicious email addresses. If an address is flagged as invalid, it provides a number of suggested alternatives. This ensures that good quality data is stored for future communications, and problems such as email bounces are minimised.

By confirming the accuracy of an email address at point of capture, organisations can gain the following benefits:

• More effective email marketing and increased campaign conversion
• Increased reliability of contact information in an organisation's customer and prospect database
• Reduced time and wasted resource when manually correcting invalid email addresses
• Improved customer service through the prevention of inaccurate or incomplete contact information from impacting communication processes
• Improved accurate completion rates of website forms which helps reduce lost revenue
• Protected brand image
• Improved contact data integrity

To help celebrate the launch of QAS Email Validate, and as part of the survey in April's Insight, we offered an 8GB iPod nano as a prize to one of the people who completed the survey. We are pleased to announce that Karl Peterson from Norfolk Constabulary was the lucky winner. Karl, your prize is on its way to you right now. Congratulations!