What is an invalid email and why do email marketers, especially e-commerce marketers, avoid it so much?

Let’s start by understanding which types of emails cause the most damage to email marketing campaigns:

• Non-existent or deactivated addresses in a domain.
• Emails with syntax errors, invalid domain holders and spamtraps.
• Discarded or temporary, junk, scraped, among others.

According to the survey The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil, carried out by SafetyMails, invalid emails could be jeopardizing millions of reais.

Email marketing, which is responsible for around 23% of e-commerce sales, represents no less than R$39 billion in turnover for this market in Brazil.

Now imagine 2 million verified emails and 36.5% of them being invalid. This was the conclusion of the survey, which checked the quality of email lists from 25 of Brazil’s most popular business categories.

Want to gain valuable insights into your business? Download the Survey for free!

But how and why can stale emails affect business? That’s what we’re going to understand from now on.

What is an invalid email in email marketing?

Everyone who works with email marketing needs one or more contact lists, right?

The aim is for each contact to become a business opportunity. However, if the email is invalid, this objective is not met.

ISPs’ anti-spam filters are highly thorough in their hunt for suspicious emails. This is because an invalid email takes up bandwidth that could be used for a message that is really relevant to the recipient.

For this reason, ISPs have created the infamous spam boxes, which collect suspicious messages while classifying the sending IP as a spammer.

Therefore, email marketers who want to stay away from the spammer classification check their emails frequently.

This is the only way to keep lists free of invalid emails, which damage not only the sender’s reputation, but also the entire communication investment.

List management

All this is reflected in the management of mailing lists. But do you know when your base is really ready to send?

In the world of email marketing, everything begins and ends with an invalid email, which harms all audiences:

• The recipient, who has no interest in receiving spam, since they didn’t authorize it.
• ISPs, who incur costs to send suspicious emails to spam boxes and maintain their bandwidth.
• Email marketing senders, whose ROI on their campaigns has deteriorated.

As if the size of the damage caused by invalid emails wasn’t enough, it’s also subdivided into several genres. See what they are below!

Types of email that cause damage

Delivery failures

Bounces are emails that are rejected or fail to reach the recipient’s inbox for temporary or permanent reasons. This means that a message can be blocked temporarily or permanently.

To classify delivery failures, there are two categories:

• Soft bounces: these are errors that make the email unsuitable for use, but which, when corrected, make it usable again. Typing errors in the domain (Gamil instead of Gmail, for example); a full box; problems with the recipient’s server, among other “light” reasons, are soft bounces.
• Hard bounces: these are serious permanent errors, which lead to the suspicion of spam. Here are the most common hard bounces:

Spamtraps

These are fake emails created by email providers in order to identify purchased email lists. The commercialization of bases is an action that is severely penalized, with campaigns being blocked and worse: the IP being sent to spam blacklists.

These lists are publicly available for consultation, and all email providers have automatic access to them through their anti-spam filters.

This means that just one spamtrap can cause enormous damage, such as a sharp drop in deliverability, blocking the sender’s access to new leads, loss of revenue and so on.

Disposables

These are temporary emails, created to last only a few hours or days. Their presence on a mailing list is quickly identified by ISPs, which block the message in the spam folder and record the IP address of the sender.

Disposable email is often used in registration forms. The user creates a temporary email to access materials without developing a relationship with the source. For example, to download an ebook and not receive emails from the site where they entered their details.

To avoid this problem on lists, the recommendation is for professionals to install a real-time verification API, which prevents invalid emails from entering the database and automatically corrects emails with errors.

Corporate emails can also be considered temporary, since turnover in companies quickly makes emails out of date.

What is a junk email?

They are random users, created with numerical sequences, meaningless phrases and even swear words, taking on the role of secondary email repositories. As a result, engagement is low or nonexistent. And emails without engagement are penalized by ISPs.

What is a scraped email

Scraped email is an address collected by a spammer technique that goes by that name, to build lists made up of the most common corporate names.

For example: financial@; sales@; customer service@ and so on. With such a base in hand, the spammer collects all the likely domains and creates a huge list.

However, as any list containing at least 3% invalid emails is already considered spam by ISPs, this technique is quickly identified.

Other types of emails that detonate campaigns

You’ve just seen the most common invalid emails, but there are several other types that cause email marketing senders a lot of headaches.

We’ve listed all the details of the emails that ruin any professional’s reputation in this article.

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