Bad email address can undermine marketing campaigns, meaning lost opportunities for customer communication, and wasted resources. By standardizing addresses as they are entered, at point of sale or in online guest book entries, organizations can eliminate the need for a "confirming email" field, reduce fraud, improve the effectiveness of customer interactions.
To address the need for high quality customer data, Melissa Data, a provider of contact data quality and address management solutions, has introduced real-time Email Mailbox Verification for its Global Email Cloud Service solution. According to Melissa, Email Mailbox Verification can help reduce 95% of bad emails in a customer database to improve email deliverability, helping them avoid bounce-backs and avoid spam traps, and protecting their reputation from blacklisting.
“Ensuring email data quality has necessarily become a best practice for marketers,” said Bud Walker, director of data quality solutions, Melissa Data. “The Global Email Service protects business operations with flexible, cascading data quality features that start with basic spelling and syntax, move up to domain-level verification, and then apply the gold standard in terms of verifying specific emailbox deliverability in real-time.
Using Global Email Cloud Service, email addresses are parsed and standardized and can be validated in real-time or batch processing. By standardizing addresses as they are entered, for instance at point of sale or online guest book entry, online merchants or marketers eliminate the need for a "confirming email" field which can decrease Web form completion and conversion rates. Online fraud is reduced, while the reliability of overall contact information is improved.
Melissa Data’s Global Email Cloud Service offers a flexible range of data quality operations, including the ability to add domain names, specify misspelling fixes, standardize casing of email addresses, and identify invalid domain names for suppression. Processes can be customized to individual business needs, allowing users to intelligently manage various email datasets with different levels of validation. General email formatting and syntax errors can be quickly remedied, for instance, changing an “!” to “@” or correcting “.c0m” to “.com”. Top level domain (TLD) names can be validated and corrected; domains are verified against an extensive database of known good and bad domain addresses and the domain’s existence is validated through MaileXchange (MX) lookup. Once a domain is determined to be valid, Email Mailbox Verification allows users to further validate that the specific emailbox exists and is deliverable.
Global Email Cloud Service also supports marketers in maintaining compliance with CAN-SPAM guidelines; the service is enhanced with current data defining mobile domains, so marketers can avoid sending unwanted commercial messages without prior permission from the recipient. The Global Email Service uses a simple web-based API to enable all features, and supports multiple protocols such as JSON, SOAP, XML and REST.
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