By Melissa

Email is a vital communications channel that helps to drive retail growth. It provides a standout role in delivering personalised communications that supports the selling of products and services, along with building profitable ongoing relationships with customers.

Disposible emails are impacting on performance

Today, in many cases, emails aren’t delivering for retailers the way they have been in the past. One big reason for this is that people are increasingly setting up disposable email addresses – with inboxes live for ten minutes to up to a few days.

Worries about safeguarding their privacy, their email data being shared and wanting to avoid receiving ongoing marketing communications are the common reasons for the growth in throwaway email addresses. Others are attracted by the opportunity for trial offer abuse!

In some cases it’s been estimated that 30 – 40 per cent of website signups in retail are using throwaway email addresses. While these are numbers that the majority of retailers will not have encountered, there’s no doubt that without undertaking any intervention many will experience a steady increase in throwaway emails on their databases.

This is backed up by a report from HTF Market Intelligence which predicts that 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.

Counting the cost of throwaway emails

One of the main issues with disposable emails is that they lead to retailers experiencing poor customer email data quality. This results in a wasted marketing budget, due to the amount invested in customer acquisition, storing data and marketing activity targeted at customers. Retailers will also encounter a constant decline in click throughs from email outreach campaigns.

Furthermore, fake signups can seriously distort business intelligence by skewing signup and purchase funnel metrics, as well as A/B testing results — leading to flawed decision-making.

Trial abuse – essentially fraud – is a significant issue that’s fuelled by disposable emails. An estimated 20 per cent of ‘new’ signups to promotional campaigns are returning customers using disposable emails to take advantage of first-time user discounts. It’s a huge, costly issue.

Additionally, with throwaway emails you have no idea of the real identity behind the fake email account. This creates significant security concerns, and is something that could encourage wider fraudulent activity. In fact, email addresses created just days before a transaction are thought to be 25 times more likely to be fraudulent.

Then there’s the issue of bounce rates which can destroy the sender’s reputation. Disposable email addresses drive up bounce rates from email campaigns. 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, which is very costly for retailers.

Protect relationships with genuine customers

It is important to realise that blocking all emails that could be classified as disposable could negatively impact on legitimate users, so put in place an intelligent email classification and defence process. This entails monitoring for alias addressing and privacy relay forwarding – the latter is an email service offered by Apple that people use to protect their identity – as these may be set up by genuine customers. Remember that the goal isn’t to just block email addresses, but strengthen trust in your data, sender reputation and customer communications.

A four layer defence system is recommended

To effectively protect against disposable email addresses and better understand the data being submitted, the most effective approach recommended by Melissa is a four-layer defence system.

Firstly, start by stopping bad data at the door. To achieve this, retailers can implement a real-time email verification process with a global reach that validates email syntax, domain activity and disposable risk in milliseconds at the onboarding stage.

Such a service 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 the most cost-effective way to prevent disposable emails from entering your systems.

This approach 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.

The second stage is to clean existing customer email address data, because most retailers will already have disposable or expired emails in their databases. Retailers can implement bulk email verification across CRM and marketing lists to find invalid, risky and disposable addresses in real time. Once these have been identified, isolated and removed, there’s often a dramatic reduction in email bounce rates.

Thirdly, it is smart to enforce friction in the signup process without damaging the user experience. This can be achieved by using double opt-in confirmation emails sent after the initial sign-up process.

It distinguishes genuine users from those using disposable email addresses that will expire before verification can be completed. Also recommended is monitoring user behaviour by pairing email verification with fraud indicators to identify rapid form submissions from single IPs, for example.

Finally, with contact data quality on customer databases deteriorating at around 25 per cent a year, maintaining ongoing email data hygiene is vital. Therefore, retailers should schedule regular reverification of emails and proactively monitor engagement and suppress those email addresses that consistently fail to open or click across multiple campaigns.