Intro
When email marketing is vital towards increasing your sales revenue, having your email marketing campaign suffer from a significant bounce rate can be detrimental to your profit margin. A significant bounce rate can negatively impact your email domain reputation.
Using an email validation service like MailboxValidator can go a long way to addressing that. However, there are certain types of email addresses which could be considered risky to send emails to even though they might be perfectly valid addresses. We’ll explain why below.
Role-based email addresses
Big organizations often have group emails which mirror their business departments like sales & marketing, customer service, tech support, etc. These group emails are basically localized mailing lists with multiple recipients. These emails will look similar to these: sales@example.com, customer_service@example.com or tech_support@example.com.
Sending emails to these addresses are generally acceptable for business matters related to those specific departments. The risk happens when you try to send promotional email materials that someone within that group may deem as spammy. That’s when you could get flagged as a spammer.
Free email addresses
Almost everyone would have an email address from a free email provider like Gmail or Hotmail. They can be perfectly valid email addresses. Some folks even use them as business email addresses.
Having said that, if your business is focused more on sales to other businesses then it would be wise to be wary of free email address users. Remember that anyone can sign up for a free email address so you could be dealing with someone who’s out to defraud your business.
Catch-all email addresses
Catch-all email domains are used by businesses to provide a safety net in case anyone tries to send them emails and made a typo with the recipient email address. When the recipient mail server receives this email and is unable to find a match for the recipient email address in their list of users, it will forward the email to a catch-all email address.
As useful as it is for businesses to employ catch-all, your job as an email marketer just got harder when you have these in your mailing list. For all you know, that email address you’ve emailed some promotional material may not exist and you’ve just wasted time & money. This is because catch-all will not generate a bounce email so you will never know.
Conclusion
As with all risks, you can mitigate them by following certain steps. Always practice double opt-in which is also good for compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Always monitor your bounce rate and complaint rate. If you see any bounce or complaint for a particular email address, unsubscribe it immediately. As for the free email addresses, insists that your users sign up with their business email address if they are a company.
Get started with MailboxValidator
Improve your email deliverability and sender reputation in email marketing.
Register today and clean your email lists for FREE!