In the past people invented language to express themselves, therefore language became a communication medium. To reduce the communication barrier, we have been trying to invent various ways, and email is one of them.
In 2021, the number of email users has gone beyond 4.1 billion, and worldwide there are 7 billion email accounts. During the pandemic in March and July of 2020, email users number increased rapidly and the growth rate was 7%.
While email users are growing each day, the number of disposable email users is also increasing. Although users benefit from using disposable email addresses as a company or brand, they have to suffer a lot.
What is a disposable email address?
Visiting any website for any INFO or buying anything first, you have to sign up. You know those companies, blogs, and organizations will mail you for their marketing purpose and you don’t want to get that type of email. To escape this issue, you or visitors have to generate a disposable email address.
When someone creates an email address with the intention of accessing any website temporarily and that email address expires after a certain short period, that’s a disposable email address. Disposable email addresses also called temp, burner, and temporary email addresses and their short form is DEA. To know more and understand, you have to know how many types of disposable email addresses exist.
Mainly there are 3 types of temporary email addresses that subsist –
Alias Email Address
When an email address looks like an original email address but it’s not and uses that email address as a temporary email address, that’s an Alias email address. If your motive is to check or take advantage of something temporarily then you can create an alias email address. Through Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and alias email addresses generation becomes easier. For instance, if you want to sign up for XYZ company’s newsletter or promotion campaign, try to avoid your original email account. Rather you can create an account like john+shopping@gmail.com or john+xyz@gmail.com and then you can use it.
Forwarding Email Address
In general, a forwarding email address is generated on a separate domain or the same domain but with a different email address. When a user interconnects an email address with his or her original email address for the purpose of email forwarding, that becomes a forwarding email address. Then once an email, the email will be forwarded to the user’s primary email account. Here, if you are a marketer or company then you will be caught up in a dilemma of which email address is primary and if you’ll send an email that user would read that email or not. Because when an email address becomes a forwarding email address that means the user isn’t eager to open that email account regularly. That’s why your email might be overlooked through the user’s eyes.
Non-Forwarding Throwaway Email Address
After serving the user’s purpose this email address becomes unusable. Because users create a Non-forwarding throwaway email address for a short time to communicate. When a certain period of time finishes, nobody can’t send or forward any mail to the user. For that email is hardbound and marketers or organizations suffer to do proper marketing. There are lots of companies that give throwaway email address services, they are EmailOnDeck, 10minemail, Mailnator, TempMail, and Guerrilla Mail.
Why does one use a temporary email address?
Protect personal info
Nowadays the majority of internet users are concerned about their personal data security. Because, we have seen that lots of companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple didn’t protect customers’ data. Millions of email addresses got hacked and couldn’t be recovered. Through the hacked email addresses, hackers committed several crimes and took lots of advantages like taking control of their credit cards, social media accounts, etc.
Lack of Trust in the Company
When a technological company knows your info ( name, age, like/dislike, address ), they can easily manipulate you to do anything by you. The world’s top internet companies are doing these same things. They welcome you to use their services or products for free and in return, they take your personal data and take advantage of those data such as selling your data. That’s why there is distrust between a customer and a company. Of that company could suffer a lot.
Decrease unwanted emails
For promotional purposes, companies send enormous emails to a customer. For that when an email user doesn’t find out his important email, that makes him or her irritated. If somebody uses a temp email address for sign-up which is unimportant to him or her then that is a relief from that issue. The email that contains a promotional message, newsletters, and other unnecessary information will go away with that temporary or disposable email and one’s personal email inbox will be clean.
Temporary usage
To collect data or download something from any website, the maximum website requires signup. And if we sign up with our primary email address then we have to suffer a lot for their promotional marketing. They get unnecessary offers, day-after-day notifications, etc. For that reason, people just go with a disposable email address for temporary usage.
Get extra facility
Companies run discounts, vouchers, and free campaigns to sell more products. Who doesn’t love these offers? When you go to participate in that campaign, the company wants your email address. For getting these temporary offers customers use a temp email address and once the discount of an offer is finished, they just make another disposable email and regain those offers.
Test products and services
In the technological era, every day new products and services are being launched into the market. Compared to the past, people like to test new things. Especially the tech-savvy person has to test different types of software, apps, and websites for staying updated. On the other hand, ordinary people also test various things on the internet. For that, they have to have lots of email addresses to test and only disposable email addresses can make it happen.
How do Temp Email Addresses harm the business?
Temp email addresses can cause a lot of harm to a business. One of the biggest problems is that they can cause brand reputation damage. we discuss some points of how temp email harms your business.
Distrust between the company and customers
Getting innumerable disposable email addresses to indicate to a company that customers lost faith in that company or brand. If a company wants to get back their demolished trust from the customer then they have to fix something. Otherwise, customers will be using temp email addresses and the company won’t be able to use these email addresses for any promotional or continuous communication.
Could be blacklisted
We have been demonstrating an IP address like a name. If the company gets an enormous disposable email address on their email box and they use it for promotion or continuing communication with customers, then customers somehow ignore or unopened emails or mark those emails as spam then those emails will be stored as spam emails in the spam folder. For that, your company’s spam rate will be high and your domain could be blacklisted because of being identified as spam-leading. This phenomenon is common among companies that work with email addresses and newsletters. This is the worst thing your brand or company faces and there is no way to get rid of it unless you check all the email addresses your company working with.
Poor Results than expectation in Email Marketing
Marketing strategy only works when you have the right way to promote and email is the most popular way to promote your products or services. No matter how many email subscribers you have on your email box list, you can only reach valid email addresses and users who escape the use of disposable email addresses. A temporary email address prevents achieving the best result of email marketing.
To take advantage of a free trial
Companies give free trials to acquire new customers so that in the future companies can turn a temporary customer into a permanent customer. But most customers take this free trial as an advantage and misuse it. Customers use free trials using throwaway email addresses. Once the trial period is over, the customer makes another temp email address and retakes the free trial. This is something that happens every day and companies fail to reach the crowd they want. In this case, companies are being compelled to stop those free trials and some real customers miss the opportunity to try a new product that might be helpful for them in the future.
Fail to get targeted customer
You should remember that everyone isn’t your customer. That’s why you have to find out your targeted customers. Disposable email addresses prevent communication with targeted customers. If somehow you get your targeted customers but they use non-forwarding email addresses then there is no benefit. Because if you can’t communicate with your targeted audience then you can’t understand their actual problems and won’t be able to fulfill their need. Let’s suppose, you have a service and one of your customers is taking that service with a non-forwarding email address when you bring another service that might be useful for that customer but you fail to communicate with your customer because of a temporary email and that’s how companies are losing many potential customers every day.
Wastes time, money, and resources
For disposable email addresses, your promotional emails don’t go to customers’ primary email boxes. That’s why customers couldn’t read your email. In making a promotional email, your company has to pay lots of money to a marketer. The marketer has to give time and use a lot of resources to make a promotional email. These all are things wasted only for disposable email. This is not only harmful to the companies but also detrimental to marketers who earn from that. This problem should be resolved otherwise it will be a risk to start and develop a promotional campaign through email media.
They Affect Your Churn Rate
When many customers create and use a number of emails to take all the benefits of your discount or free tier, this type of action affects your churn rate at the end of the day.
While clients are using various emails to take gain of your cut-price or loose trial, this could have an effect on your churn rate. A churn rate is the percentage of new subscribers who will put off themselves from your e-mail list within a short duration. Even though some form of churn fee you can not avoid, the churn rate is evaluated in a way that is based on dividing the entire variety of customers who’re been lost by the whole purchasers within that time range. The result has a tendency to be skewed since the equation that calculates churn rate no longer takes temp email users under consideration and that is unfair for a business,
Your analytics are skewed
If you have a large number of disposable email addresses in your email list, your emails will not be viewed or read by anybody. Furthermore, your efforts to acquire potential clients are futile, failing in your business or company.
Skews email marketing metrics
Disposable or temporary emails might not harm your purpose or interact with you. However, when you have a list of emails where these types of emails are available, it will skew your metrics badly as it has zero open rates which makes it hard for you to measure the proper performance of your campaign or marketing.
You can be blacklisted
Poor mailing habits will have an impact on the sender’s reputation score as well as IP reputation, which will influence whether your emails are going to be sent to a person’s inbox or end up in the spam bin. Sending emails to unknown individuals, sometimes known as throwaway email addresses, is terrible. When you send an email to a disposable or temp email address that email will not be delivered and be returned as a bounce email. As a result, too many bounced emails will be adequate making you a spammer and putting you on a blacklist.
How to identify a disposable email address?
As a company, you are supposed to welcome customers to sign up for an account on your website. During that time if users sign up with Disposable or Temporary Email Addresses on the website, it’s almost impossible to refuse those email addresses. There are two ways to identify disposable email addresses and they are listed below –
Check daily basis
There is a manual way to identify disposable email addresses and block them. That is you have to monitor your email box every day. It sounds easy but it isn’t. If you have an enormous customer database, every day thousands of email addresses arrive in your email box or email database. From those thousand emails, it’s tough to find a disposable email address, and finding DEA that way is also a waste of time. To do this, you might have to hire more people who will only check the email whether it is disposable or not and that would cost you a huge amount of money.
Using a third-party API
With crowds of thousands of email addresses when it’s so tough to find out disposable email, Third-party API could be your problem solver. Through third-party API, a company can detect disposable email addresses easily and keep its email list clean. For that, their marketing process becomes easier and faster than in the past.
Using a tool or software
There are many options on the internet for differentiating disposable emails from real email addresses. The best way is to find a tool or software that takes your email data sets and separates all fake and temporary email addresses. This you can get rid of all of the temp email addresses in one click. This might cost you some money but it is worth it when you’re running a business.
How to avoid disposable email addresses?
People can’t trust a website or app so often so they don’t want to provide the email addresses they use day to day basis. The only way to solve this situation is to tell people the truth, and how their data will be used. Provide them rewards and explain to them how their data will be kept safe by your company by showing them your privacy policy.
Show the benefits: Most people don’t recognize the value of a brand, therefore they can not be sure whether that brings any benefit or not. Once they get what they want, they’ll ignore any further campaigns you bring their way. This is why it is essential to let them know about all of the benefits they will receive if they sign up for your list.
Get rid of disposable email addresses
A disposable/throwaway email address is nothing but a temporary account created to reduce the volume of undesired or spam emails in an inbox. When a person no longer wants to use their temporary email, such accounts normally expire or can be manually removed. Although a temporary email account may appear to be a good idea to customers, it can be detrimental for businesses and companies. They are fighting against businesses that wish to have a healthy and engaged email list. A clean and authentic email list can bring you more and more potential consumers and make a successful campaign or marketing. Disposable emails are not going away soon. However, if you are aware of the issue and are strong enough to prevent it before it occurs or has an impact on your business, it is better to know the solution of disposable or temporary email addresses. You can give this work to an online email verification tool that will clean your email list from all types of disposable and throwaway email addresses. So, get rid of disposable email addresses and grow your business with successful campaigns.
