Three tips for increasing recovery rates with email (sponsored)

Incorporating email into your outreach strategy can help you reach consumers more quickly and frequently through a preferred channel. It’s also a timely option. Call blocking, mislabeling and a flood of scams have left consumers wary of answering calls or texts, leading to an industry-wide drop in right-party contact (RPC) rates for these channels. Rising postal rates are decreasing the return on investment (ROI) for direct mail campaigns.

Email offers many benefits: it’s relatively inexpensive, consumers can check their emails at any time and email brings consumers directly to your digital experience. Even if it doesn’t have the best response rates, it can be a relatively high-ROI option and an important addition to your overall collection strategy.

However, if you’re going to succeed, you need to be able to reliably collect, validate and deliver emails. Here are three tips for getting started.

1. Append emails to build your contact list

Collection agencies and debt buyers might not receive email addresses. You can attempt to gather email addresses directly from consumers. Or you can use an email appending service to find the best emails for consumers based on what you already know, such as their name or address.

For example, Experian’s contact management solution TrueTrace™ includes email appending as a built-in feature.

It’s available on the cloud with secure file transfers for batch processing, and you can use a single configurable input to search for various types of contact methods. These include best email address, best address, phone number and combinations of different results.

2. Validate emails to improve deliverability

Email validation can help you confirm that an email address is active and can receive emails. It’s an important step to ensure your emails don’t bounce back. Sending emails into the abyss isn’t just a waste of money. It could lead email providers to blocklist you and route your emails to spam folders. 

Validating your email list should be an ongoing process as people regularly open or use new email accounts. Experian’s research found that:¹

• Email addresses go stale at a rate of three percent per month.
• About half of email data issues are the result of human errors, such as typos.
• There are 820 million changes across all contact databases every 90 days.

An email validation tool or service can ping email servers to verify that the email address can receive emails. Some tools can also correct typos or errors that could lead to bouncebacks, such as an extra space or a misspelled domain name.

Emails are validated before they’re added to the TrueTrace™ database and revalidated before Experian appends them to customers’ contact lists. Experian also offers stand-alone email validation tools for collectors who manage their own email lists.

3. Integrate email into your digital strategy

Collectors are experimenting with different digital strategies, including automation, self-service portals, personalized treatments and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.

If you’re segmenting accounts and optimizing your outreach, you may already have systems for prioritizing channels based on consumer preferences or cost. Email can be a valuable channel because it’s low-cost and inherently digital.

Additionally, consumers can check — and recheck — their email at any time and on different devices. Some collectors find that even when email has a lower RPC rate than calls, it offers a better ROI and is an important part of their overall strategy.  

Read the Optimizing your collection strategy ebook to learn more about improving your operations and increasing recoveries.

Get started with TrueTrace™

Experian recently upgraded TrueTrace™ to run on identity graph, a type of database built specifically for situations when you want to find links between data sets — such as tying accurate contact information to consumers.

Previously, organizations that tested TrueTrace™ saw a 10 percent increase in RPC rates compared to the competition. The upgrade to an identity graph improves matching and ranking and could lead to even better results. An identity graph is also more efficient than competing approaches when you’re working with large and varied data sets.

TrueTrace™ includes proprietary contact information on millions of consumers from Experian’s database. It also has information from select third-party and marketing data sets, as well as change-of-address request data from the USPS’s NCOALink^®.

New data comes online every year, and one of the latest additions is an email database. The database is regularly updated to include new emails and reflect consumer opt-outs. And with email append, you can quickly search for the best email addresses for consumers using your existing contact list.

Learn more about TrueTrace™ or read our white paper, to learn more about identity graphs, email appending and incorporating email into your contact strategy.

¹ Experian (2023). Revolutionizing your email strategy