Revenue from an email campaign increases by 1% for every percentage point you get closer to a 100% delivery rate. Based on a sensitivity analysis that we performed on the retail industry, a marketing campaign with a 90% delivery rate stands to see up to a 10% increase in sales just by improving its list hygiene. For reference, the email click-through rate is over 52 times that of average social media conversions. This means getting the same kind of improvement from other campaigns would be far more expensive and difficult since email campaigns see an average of a 44:1 ROI simply based on using a high quality list. Even organic lists see quick attrition because of the job moves or account deletions there are around the world every day. When your delivery rate drops below 90%, you get into a risky situation with your email provider. Some providers will limit your sends per day or even suspend your sending access altogether when your sending quality gets low. Could you imagine being unable to send email for a day or a week? The best way to not only protect your business from being cut off but to also keep your bounce rate under 2% is to maintain the hygiene of your email list. Hygiene can be determined by classifying the emails in your list into different types.
According to the Radacti Group, 281 billion emails are sent from 3.8 billion emails every day. In all of this chaos, inboxes have to rapidly sort the mail and get it into the right inbox while prioritizing it at the same time. The sheer volume of the messages sent via email requires each inbox to act as the bouncers for our primary inbox club by checking IDs at the door. Different email types make up the overall hygiene of your list and decides how many of your messages get in. Types like hard and soft bounces to spam traps and complainers all affect the way inboxes view your sending quality. In order to have the best delivery rate to inboxes, more than anything you need to make sure you are talking to the “right crowd”. Your crowd is determined by the mix of the different email types that you keep in your database. The process of analyzing your list’s hygiene is called validation or verification. Algorithms can determine the quality of each email in a list incredibly fast by checking different data points and separating emails into different validated lists.
Lead validation
If you’re starting email campaigns before validating your leads, you’re running half of the race. To run your best campaign, you need lead validation. Lead validation increases the quality of your lead data. Lead validation helps you identify the portion of your generated leads—usually only about half—that are legitimate sales leads. In the race to grow your business, without lead validation you’re stopping after the first leg of the race.
Lead validation gives you better data. Data that helps you to answer crucial questions about your campaigns and improve them.
This article explains how lead validation helps you answer these questions:
Lead validation improves your conversions
In other words, know when to pass the baton. Timing plays a major role in lead conversion. According to Straight North’s research, a lead’s first visit to your website is the most crucial. 85% of conversions happen on the first visit. Second-time visits convert only 10% of the time. Research also suggests that optimal conversion rates start early in the week. The majority of lead conversions happen early in the week, Monday through Wednesday, with Tuesday having a slight advantage over all other days. You can improve your conversion rate by knowing more about lead validation and building persuasive content that captures leads on the first visit to your website and timing your campaigns with peak activity.
Lead validation reveals the real ROI for your campaigns
In other words, don’t let lead generation be the pacesetter. You can access more powerful data than lead generation to determine your ROI. According to Aaron Wittersheim at Straight North, you could be overestimating the ROI of your campaigns by as much as 50 percent when you’re tracking leads, but not validating them. Use lead validation to accurately assess your campaign quality. With an accurate view of your campaign results you can keep your ROI in the right lane: focusing on the cost per quality lead rather than the cost per conversion.
Lead validation shows you how to improve your campaign
Set a new pace. Everyone wants to know how to improve campaigns, to generate better leads, and win more conversions. With lead tracking you might know the leads are coming in from a campaign, but not the quality of generated sales leads. Lead validation helps you identify exactly which campaigns generate quality sales leads and which result in low-quality inquiries. Once you know which lead capture forms are effective and which are not, you can make rapid and effective changes to campaigns to improve sales leads and conversions.
Without lead validation, you can end up putting all of your energy into off-track leads that won’t grow your business. If you want to follow-up efficiently and effectively with those who have real potential to become loyal customers and clients, you need analytics to pinpoint which of your leads deserve one hundred percent of your effort.
Generate, validate, campaign, win.
