Founder & CEO of Bouncer, an email verification & list cleaning tool gives Magnet Monster the best practices for maintaining a healthy email list & high open-rates.
Does improving your sender reputation, decreasing bounce rate & improving email deliverability sound important to you?
Bouncer, the SaaS creation of Radek Kaczynski allows you to achieve all of this with its simple list-cleansing interface rapidly.
In this interview for the #EcommerceInsider, Radek explains the importance of maintaining a strong reputation as well as best practices for cleaning your email list frequently.
Magnet Monster: Radek, thanks for joining us. Give us an overview of how the idea of Bouncer came about and the initial development behind the software?
Radek: Thanks, Adam for having me here!
The idea of Bouncer had its genesis in two parallel worlds on two different continents.
While I was working in the U.S. for one of the best truck manufacturers, we had a challenge with continuity of communication between truck dealerships and customers when the email address was passed over the counter. The consequence of a simple typo was a huge waste of time and energy down the data and processes chain.
At the same time, my friends from high school, while running their email automation SaaS, run into a challenge of bounced emails affecting senders reputation and whole deliverability.
By coincidence, when I was on vacation sailing in Poland, I met with my mate for a breakfast and we started talking about our challenges, and how we thought we could solve them... and at that very moment decided we wanted to start Bouncer. On the spot I decided I will quit my corporate job, we'll move back to Poland and with help of my friends will start Bouncer, build a team and great product.
Back then we had an ambition to build the most intelligent email verification solution, with the best precision, great performance, top data security, and GDPR compliant by design.
That's why silverback gorilla is our mascot - the most powerful, intelligent and largest of the primates.
With an awesome team of geniuses, we started the work, and have constantly been learning as an organisation and individuals, and, fast forward, two years later, we do have one of the best solutions on the market.
MM: Why is deliverability so important for businesses with a mailing list & how does Bouncer help them with this?
Radek: Email deliverability is a complex thing, with many factors coming into play and affecting our reputation as a sender.
As you can imagine, when your reputation is higher, your emails will get to the recipient's mailbox and will not hit the spam folder either.And your sender reputation depends on your sending practices - among a couple of aspects one of the most important ones is bounce ratio - relative amount of the emails that were not delivered (bounced).
Undeliverable email is not only broken communication with a particular recipient. When the ratio is too high we may be identified as spammers, put on the blacklists and eventually our overall deliverability will be affected.
Studies show that when your bounce ratio gets higher than 20%, whole deliverability may drop by 50% - even those emails that normally would be delivered will be blocked cause you are categorised as a spammer.
What makes it even trickier is that there are estimates that across industries up to 20% of email addresses get obsolete in just one year, and around 15% of email addresses are incorrect during the moment of entry.
So here comes the Bouncer with some help: we provide our customers with the information if the email address is correct and deliverable in real-time. By that we let them clean their lists from invalid email addresses before the send-outs, keep bounce ratio low and their reputation high. Plus, we give them the possibility to check deliverability of the email address when it is being captured, so that it can be still corrected and the opportunity for the communication is not lost.
MM: Which industries are leveraging Bouncer to help them increase their deliverability? Is there a predominant industry (i.e. e-commerce) or are there a large variety of customers using the software?
Radek: It's actually a very large variety of customers, from fitness studios, through online businesses to global brands - generally speaking, any party that communicates with their customers or partners via email, at some point needs email verification.
We kind of are like an algae-eater - we are not the most desirable fish in the aquarium, but because we're doing the cleaning job right, other fishes can shine.
OK, done with the metaphors for today... back to your question: indeed, e-commerce is one of the industries that heavily needs email verification. There is a huge potential of providing value to already acquired customers, so marketing in e-commerce has big power when done wisely. Thus, no-one should be afraid of sending emails with new and cool offers to their customers.
Another thing is capturing the correct email addresses, when allowing "guest purchase" without the full registration. Usually, email addresses are not being confirmed in that flow, but the whole communication usually is dependent on that... thus, this part is error-prone and usually requires a lot of support.
MM: Can you provide our readers with some basic email list-cleaning best practices to keep deliverability high?
Radek: Even though it has a great impact, email list-hygiene does not have to be difficult.
I like the holistic approach the best:
1. Make sure that you capture only valid email addresses and let your customers correct the typos on the spot
2. At least every quarter clean your whole list from undeliverable email addresses
3. Clean the lists also before big mass marketing activities too
4. Remove bounced email addresses from the list
5. Honour requests to be unsubscribed
6. Remove contacts that haven't been engaged with your communication for a longer time
I believe this time may be longer when you use an email verification service than if you didn't. I personally have a couple of brands that I like to receive emails from, even though I'm not really engaged with them much (am not reading them, just glancing the subject line to see if there is something new and exciting from them)
I hope it helps ;)
Want to find out more about bouncer? You can visit their website here.
Want to connect with Radek? He's on LinkedIn here.
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