Email List Decay Kills Your Marketing Strategy: Here’s What to Do About It

Your email database is the lifeblood of your business. A customer’s email address is the reward for your marketing efforts and hard-spent ad revenue. But, here’s the critical question: is there someone on the receiving end of the email address in your Salesforce CRM?

If your database doesn’t have valid, accurate contact information, you can’t conduct business. Your email bounce rate climbs, your campaign performance suffers, and you fail to make meaningful connections. And yet, in our encounters with marketers and outreach specialists in digital marketing, SaaS, tech, healthcare, etc., many fail to consider the possibility that their email lists can and will decay. Before we get into the how, the why, and more importantly what you can do to combat it, let’s first start with this…

What Is Email List Decay?

Email list decay is the gradual degradation of your email contact list’s quality. 

A business’s ideal email list contains real or valid email addresses. This accurate data allows sales and marketing specialists to reach out to interested prospects successfully. An accurate email list can also be described as clean.

Conversely, symptoms of a decaying email list include the following:

• Fake or expired email addresses.
• Disposable email addresses that have expired.
• Spam traps.
• Any address that’s not configured to receive incoming email messages.

Validating an email address can determine if it’s valid or fake/expired. As a company that specializes in email validation, we examined the validation results for all industry types and provided the statistical reality of how quickly your Salesforce email list decays.

How Fast Does an Average Email List Decay?

Our Email List Decay Report for 2024 finds that 25.74% of your email list decays annually. We broke down everything that our validation engine detected below:

Outright fake or expired email addresses can make up just under a quarter of your Salesforce CRM. However, your team may acquire other email addresses that can also threaten your email marketing and outreach efforts. Here are brief descriptions of those:

Catch-All

Companies often use catch-all email addresses to intercept messages sent to their domain via an inaccurate email address. A catch-all is impossible to validate as either valid or invalid, making it a higher risk for bounce rates and other deliverability issues.

Abuse

An abuse email is valid. However, the user shows a track record of abusing the spam report function, which can paint your business unfairly as a spammer.

Spam Trap

An email address designed for the sole purpose of catching spammers. As a mass email sender, your business can’t afford to accidentally email a spam trap, as your business will lose the confidence of email and internet service providers.

The ‘Do-not-mail’ category captures various additional email address types. However, the important takeaway is that these addresses are either not configured to receive mail or are highly toxic and should be avoided at all costs.

How Does Email List Decay Impact My Email Marketing and Sales Strategies?

Anyone in your company using an email list is affected by email list decay, whether aware or not. Examples can include your marketing team, sales reps, BDRs, and PR professionals. A decaying or dirty email list leads to:

High Email Bounce Rates

You can’t deliver emails to fake or expired addresses. Expect your messages to bounce back consistently. ISPs encourage mass senders to maintain a bounce rate of 2% or lower. Salesforce monitors email bounce rates higher than 10% and spam complaint rates higher than 0.1%.

Poor Email Deliverability

Email deliverability describes your ability to reach the customer inbox. With poor deliverability, your emails have a greater likelihood of reaching the Spam folder. ISPs may also block emails from senders with a consistent record of high bounce rates, spam complaints, and triggering spam filters.

Suspension of Service

When you fail to clean your database, your reputation with your email and internet service provider also degrades. Failing to address high bounce rates, spam complaints, or emailing a spam trap can prompt some providers to suspend your service until your poor database and sending habits improve. Check out these Account Engagement email deliverability best practices for further details.

Email Blacklist/Blocklisting

Antispam services such as Spamhaus and Barracuda are on the lookout for naughty email senders. If your business has a negative reputation rooted in email list decay or otherwise, your business domain and IP can be blocked entirely.

What Can I Do to Combat Email List Decay?

Method 1: Use a Syntax Checker

A syntax or regex (regular expression) checker determines if a visitor enters a valid email address format in a provided field. When a visitor enters a valid email address (e.g. [email protected]), they pass the check and the email address is submitted to your database. If the check fails, they receive an error message. 

Most popular websites or landing page builders feature basic syntax checkers within the platform settings. However, you can also include your own regex checkers using your preferred programming language. Never feature a signup form without one.

Method 2: Upload Your List to an Email Validation Engine

While helpful, a basic syntax checker needs to provide an understanding of the provided lead email address. The email may include valid characters and follow a valid structure, but it doesn’t mean that it exists or is configured to receive messages. 

To properly validate the lead, you need help performing a series of additional validation tests to verify whether the mailbox exists and has the proper configuration. 

You can do this by exporting your list of contacts from Salesforce as a file and uploading it to your email validation platform of choice. When selecting an email validation tool, here are some essential things to bear in mind:

• Accuracy of the validation results.
• Privacy and security features to protect your data.
• Unknown results rate i.e. what percentage of uploaded emails is the provider unable to validate on average?

Method 3: Implement a Real-Time Validation API on Your Forms

While an upload to an email validator can rid your database of decay, a real-time email validation API detects and blocks bad data automatically. 

Despite the jargon, making use of an API is relatively simple for any experience level. Email validation providers mentioned above typically also include API access with their service. To use it, you’ll need to add their API script along with your unique assigned API key to leverage their validation engine. 

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

Method 4: Validate Emails in Salesforce With the ZeroBounce Integration

As a Salesforce CRM user, the easiest way to combat email list decay is by using the built-in integration with ZeroBounce’s email validation engine. You’ll need a Salesforce subscription or trial (Enterprise or Unlimited), a free ZeroBounce account, and to download the ZeroBounce app through the Salesforce AppExchange.

After successfully linking your Salesforce and ZeroBounce accounts, here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. From the menu, click on Marketing or use the search bar to find the ZeroBounce app directly.
2. You can now see your Leads and Contacts in the top menu. With the ZeroBounce app configured, you’ll see new buttons that read ‘Validate All’ and ‘Validate Selected’.
3. Clicking the former will validate all email addresses on that list. Alternatively, you can select specific email addresses via the related checkbox and choose the latter option. Click OK to continue after the pop-up.

As the email validation process completes, you’ll see new fields populate in the table for ‘ZeroBounce Status’ and ‘ZeroBounce sub-status’. You can also opt to automatically validate newly added email addresses by checking the box under ZeroBounce Settings.

Final Thoughts

We all rely on email for communication and business. But, for unavoidable reasons such as privacy, job updates, or domain updates, email list decay will continue to pose a problem for all marketers and business owners. Over this year, nearly 26% of your Salesforce list may either expire or populate with fake and other high-risk email addresses. This was found to occur regardless of email list size or industry type.

Invalid and risky email contacts lead to the following: high bounce rates, spam complaints, poor email deliverability (inbox visibility), and a negative sender reputation. You can combat email list decay by using a combination of basic syntax checks for entered form data and bulk email validation for existing leads and contacts. We can also validate new signups in real time to prevent visitors from submitting invalid information to our databases.