Four ways to block damaging disposable email addresses
Email is critical to business growth. It is a standout communications channel because of its ability to quickly and cost effectively deliver personalised communications. This in turn supports the selling of products and services, along with building profitable ongoing relationships with customers.
Proliferation of disposable emails
However, the growing popularity of disposable email addresses, driven by evolving technology, is rapidly damaging the usefulness of email as part of the sales and marking mix, as an increasing number of people set up inboxes that are live for ten minutes to up to a few days.
Consumers are embracing throwaway email addresses to safeguard their privacy, avoid having their email data shared and to dodge marketing communications. A number are even attracted by the opportunity for trial offer abuse!
In some cases it’s been estimated that 30 – 40 per cent of website signups are using disposable email addresses. This is backed up by a report from HTF Market Intelligence that predicts the global disposable email tool market will grow by 14.6 per cent a year, reaching a market size of $1.02 billion by 2033.
What throwaway emails cost business
Disposable emails are costly to any organisation, mainly because they cause poor customer email data quality, resulting in a wasted marketing budget due to the amount invested in lead conversion, storing data and marketing activity targeted at customers.
Also, business intelligence can be distorted with fake signups skewing signup and purchase funnel metrics, as well as A/B test results, leading to flawed decision-making.
Trial abuse is another big and costly issue with an estimated 20 per cent of ‘new’ signups to promotional campaigns returning customers using disposable emails to take advantage of first time user discounts.
Furthermore, with no knowledge of the real identity behind those with a throwaway email it can be used as a cover for fraud, with email addresses created just days before a transaction thought to be 25 times more likely to be fraudulent.
One of the most significant issues caused by disposable email addresses are bounce rates which can destroy the sender’s reputation. High email bounce rates are penalised via internet and email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo. If bounce rates hit five per cent then emails from the sender are likely to go straight to spam folders, or even blocked.
A four layer defence system is recommended
To protect against disposable email addresses and better understand the data being submitted implement a four-layer defence system.
Stop bad data at the door. To this end implement a real time
process with a global reach that validates email syntax, domain activity and disposable risk in milliseconds at the onboarding stage. It must be able to reject known email address throwaways instantly, and flag privacy relay and alias emails for monitoring before a purchase or signup information is accepted. It’s a cost effective way to prevent disposable emails from entering your systems, and is far more effective than relying on manual checks or static blocklists for email verification. Not only is a manual approach more costly, time consuming and liable to human error, but it can’t keep up with evolving threats.
Clean existing customer email address data, because most organisations will already have disposable or expired emails in their databases. Therefore, undertake bulk email verification across CRM and marketing lists to source invalid, risky and disposable addresses in real time. There’s often a dramatic reduction in email bounce rates once these have been identified, isolated and removed.
Apply friction to the signup process without damaging the user experience. For example, the delivery of double opt-in confirmation emails sent after the initial sign-up process. This way genuine users with be distinguished from those using disposable email addresses that will expire before verification can be completed.
With
on customer databases deteriorating at around 25 per cent a year maintaining ongoing email data hygiene is essential. Therefore, schedule regular reverification of emails, proactively monitor engagement and suppress those email addresses that consistently fail to open or click across multiple campaigns.
In summary
To combat fast evolving email abuse tactics organisations should take the four steps outlined above. This way they can they ensure that email remains a trusted, high performing growth channel, while minimising the costly operational and financial damage disposable email addresses can cause.
This guest blog was written by Barley Laing, the UK Managing Director at Melissa. To learn more about Melissa please visit their LinkedIn page.
