Do you know how many of the email addresses on your list are invalid? What happens when your subscribers mark your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing? How can you improve your sender reputation and your email deliverability? And did you know that you're losing approximately 22% of your subscribers every single year? We discuss this (and more!) with Brian Minick from ZeroBounce. And we guarantee you - you want to know what Brian has to say here. So listen or read on, and you can thank us later! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:12) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks. (3:10) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. (4:58) Did Brian really jump from the side of a cruise ship?(6:20) What is email validation and why do you want to do it?(9:44) Why deliverability rates aren't accurate.(11:43) The truth about disposable email addresses.(16:08) How to deal with typos.(19:50) Other reasons why email addresses aren't valid.(24:33) How to build an email list based on quality and not quantity.(26:47) Make informed business decisions with ZeroBounce.(31:40) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]What is email validation and why do you want to do it? Having validated over 18 billion email addresses over the years to check if emails to those addresses are deliverable, ZeroBounce did some research back in 2022. And they found that, on average, about 22% of email lists are decaying year on year. This means that next year you won't be able to deliver 22% of the emails you delivered this year.And part of the reason why is because of job shifts and email addresses getting shut down or abandoned. But there's more, and we're going to go into details with Brian a little later. But for now, let's let that number sink in - it's a terrifying statistic! Sure, if you have more personal accounts on your email list (rather than business ones), you're looking at a slightly slower decay. But that number could be higher if you're B2B. Brian confirmed that ZeroBounce (who are B2B) are seeing their own database reduce by 32% every year!If you've been following our work for a while, you'll know that our approach to email marketing is based on building a list over time and nurturing those people. We make offers from the start, but not everyone will buy straight away - some people can take a couple of years before they become customers. And if these people aren't even going to be on your list next year, you definitely want to sell to them quickly! You want to turn them into paying customers to keep them in your world. Because when they become customers, they're more likely to get in touch and let you know if they changed their email address, for example.But let's get into more detail... Why deliverability rates aren't accurateWhen your emails aren't getting delivered, you might see your bounce rate increase. However, Email Service Providers (ESPs) don't do a great job of explaining why that is. ZeroBounce, in their analysis, focuses on deliverability. When your emails are delivered, it means they've landed in someone's inbox. ESPs, on the other hand, will consider an email as delivered when it's left their system and has gone somewhere. In reality, it could be in someone's spam folder (blocked by a spam filter) or the Promotions folder. All it means is that the email has been sent.The reason why ESPs report on 'sent' rather than 'delivered' is that they can't tell the...