Poor email data impacts user onboarding, transaction security, and campaign engagement. Discover how accurate email verification prevents fraud, protects revenue, and boosts customer trust.
November 13, 2024
4 minutes
Junyi Li, Yuqi Chen
~This is especially valuable in industries like e-commerce, airlines, and social platforms, where profiling can help mitigate risks across key stages like onboarding, transactions, and user account management.
Here’s the story: Lisa runs a furniture boutique in a quaint town, known for its unique design style that attracts a steady flow of customers. To expand the boutique’s online presence, she decided to launch a promotional campaign, sending customers notifications of new arrivals and special discounts.
Lisa invested substantial time and resources into crafting this email marketing campaign, encouraging customers to provide their email addresses at checkout to enjoy a discount. Lisa was excited as she launched the first emails. But within days, a troubling pattern emerged: her bounce rate was through the roof. Upon investigation, she discovered that many customers had input incorrect email addresses—common issues included typos, missing the “@” or using invalid domains.
Worse still, system records showed that during certain times, the same user had repeatedly purchased specific items at abnormally low prices, far outside the range of regular buying behavior—clear signs of potential fraudulent purchases. These suspicious transactions not only cost Lisa financially but also made her realize that her marketing campaign might be exploited as a cover for fraud.
On top of this, Lisa’s store reputation took a hit. Some customers missed out on coupons and discount information entirely because they never received any emails, while others complained that the messages went straight to their spam folders, preventing them from accessing key promotions. These issues led customers to question Lisa’s marketing approach, doubting its professionalism and security.
Facing these challenges, Lisa had to re-evaluate her email marketing strategy. She realized that relying solely on customer-provided email addresses wasn't enough; implementing a stricter email verification process was essential to prevent fraud. Additionally, she needed to strengthen cybersecurity measures to ensure the safety and privacy of customer information.
The failure of Lisa's first email marketing campaign is just a glimpse of how poor email verification can harm your business. In fact, fraud caused by low-quality email contact lists is a common issue across email-reliant industries like e-commerce, airlines, social platforms, etc., especially during key stages such as marketing, onboarding, and transactions.
For example, in e-commerce, fraudsters often use fake or temporary email addresses to create multiple accounts and repeatedly claim new user discounts or promotional offers, known as promotion abuse. This practice not only inflates customer data but also leads to revenue loss, as genuine customers may miss out on promotions. Similarly, in the airline industry, chargeback fraud can occur when fraudsters use throwaway email addresses to make purchases and then dispute the charges, exploiting loopholes in the transaction process. Social platforms also face issues during onboarding, as bad actors create fake profiles with invalid emails, which can lead to spam and security vulnerabilities. These types of fraud are not just costly but damaging to customer trust, making a strong case for the importance of email profiling tools to verify email quality and protect businesses.
In the marketing scenario, when a fraudster intentionally inputs incorrect email, it could disrupt mailing lists, inflate bounce rates, and reduce campaign effectiveness - for merchants, emails sent to invalid addresses damage sender's reputation, hinder marketing impact, and erode consumer trust. To make matters worse, major providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail monitor bounce rates closely; repeated issues can lead to blacklisting, limiting successful email delivery. Together, these issues make a strong case for robust email profiling tools to validate email addresses and protect both business reputation and revenue.
Validating and removing invalid email addresses is essential for any business that relies on email communication, as high-quality data is foundational to effective engagement and secure operations. Accurate email lists help improve deliverability, ensuring messages reach valid users without excessive bounces, which can harm sender's reputation and hinder successful communication.
And the critical question is raised: how can businesses improve email data quality when they can’t avoid input mistakes from users?
To maintain high-quality email data, businesses can rely on tools like email profiling to verify the validity of emails when encountering suspicious transaction traffic or a high email bouncing rate. Beyond basic validation, email profiling provides an additional layer of protection by detecting risky or suspicious email addresses—such as throwaway, and fake accounts with randomized characters, which is proven to be a strong indicator of fraud. Advanced email profiling tools provide real-time risk scoring, allowing businesses to gauge user credibility and give them better guidance to block the transaction before fraud happens. This is especially valuable in industries like e-commerce, airlines, and social platforms, where profiling can help mitigate risks across key stages like onboarding, transactions, and user account management. By identifying questionable emails early, businesses can reduce fraud exposure, enhance data integrity, and improve the reliability of customer interactions.
With cleaner, better-profiled data, organizations can foster trust, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately deliver a more secure, streamlined experience for their customers. This proactive approach not only supports compliance and security but also strengthens brand reputation across diverse industries and scenarios. Learn more about TrustDecision Global Risk Persona.
By ensuring a clean, verified email list, businesses can strengthen customer trust, enhance engagement, and boost overall campaign performance. Investing in tools like TrustDecision’s Global Risk Persona can streamline this process, allowing businesses to focus on delivering value to their customers while staying one step ahead of fraud. As Lisa’s story illustrates, prioritizing email data quality is essential not only for a successful campaign but also for maintaining a professional and trusted brand image.
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TrustDecision empowers businesses with AI-driven decision engine designed for fraud prevention, credit risk decisioning and ensure regulatory compliance. It leverages on machine learning models and big data capabilities to deliver real-time risk insights with accuracy and automate decision-making process to deliver maximum operation efficiency.
