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In a recent analysis of validation transactions across clients, TowerData found that an average of 4% and as much as 8% of contact data entered by visitors to our clients’ websites were incorrect or invalid. As illustrated in Table 1, the lost opportunity this invalid data presents can be quickly calculated by applying your average conversion rate and lifetime value for a customer to the number of new monthly leads you receive. However, lost revenues are only part of the equation. Bad data also leads to additional mail, telemarketing, and data hygiene costs. Investing in up front data validation will increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts and save you money on marketing communications.
Validating Data
Contact information such as email addresses and phone numbers are difficult to verify accurately. Simplistic checks can be used to confirm that an email has an at sign, ‘@’, or that a phone number has ten digits. However, to know whether an address can receive email or a phone number can be called requires a more sophisticated application.
Email Validation
Invalid emails are costly. If you pay a service provider to deliver your mail, mailing bad email addresses has a direct hit on the bottom line. Mailing to dead addresses also hampers your ability to send to your good ones. Top ISPs such as AOL will reduce your delivery rate, or may even block you, if you mail to too many invalid addresses. Even harder to quantify are the sales and goodwill you have lost by not capturing the correct email addresses for your prospects and customers. You can avoid these costs and improve your marketing results by validating email addresses as you receive them.
Email validation comprises
- Detecting format and syntax errors,
- Validating email address domains are functioning, and
- Verifying that customers’ mailboxes work.
The proper format for email addresses is defined by the Internet standards document RFC 2822 (See Figure 1 for a sample). It is a convoluted and recursive definition, and yet it is not fully accurate because there are some email address formats that are used in practice that do not meet the standard. For example, the address john.@domain.com, with a period before the ‘@’, violates the standard but would be accepted by many email servers. The problem with most email validation solutions is that they have a simplistic idea of what an email address is and they reject some email addresses that are in fact valid. You could be frustrating and turning away potential customers because they can not enter their perfectly valid email addresses on your site. Conversely, you most likely are accepting emails that good validation would identify as invalid. For example, which of these is invalid: john@dom-ain.com or john@dom_ain.com? The latter one is. Would your existing validation catch it? Be sure to use a solution built with knowledge of the standards and the expertise to know the exceptions.
By using email verification that incorporates accurate ISP format rules, you will capture even more valid emails. Most ISPs have their own format rules, in addition to those governing overall email address syntax. For example, AOL email addresses never start with a number. Yet determining ISP specific rules requires study of published guidelines and analysis of large lists of known valid emails. A case in point, Yahoo’s email format has evolved over time as it has acquired some smaller ISPs, and the formats it accepts are broader than the format used for newly created Yahoo emails. Select a provider with the necessary know-how.
Identifying proper email syntax is only the start, but that is where most email validation programs stop. If your site only uses JavaScript email validation, it is only stopping a fraction of bad emails because it does a limited set of syntax checks and does not verify the domain. Properly validating email domain names, the portion of the address to the right of the ‘@’, will greatly increase your data quality.
A valid domain both exists and will accept email sent to it. There are many domains that have been registered but have never had an email server setup for it and thus can not accept any mail.
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