SafetyMails Research - 2023 Edition
The quality of
email lists in Brazil
SafetyMails’ study presents insights,
tips and trends of mailing in Brazil
We researched data relating to 25 business segments across the country, with the aim of showing email marketing professionals how mailing management is workingin the most popular business segments in Brazil. The data was collected from a sample of 200 million emails.
Insights include the following information:
- How the mailing list impacts companies’ lead generation.
- Reasons that lead to an increase in invalid emails.
- Reasons why email deliverability is being compromised.
- Which segments are managing to communicate better and worse with their audiences.
- Types and incidence of non-recommended practices when creating mailings (purchase, exchange or rental, harvesting, dictionary attack).
The evolution of SPAM
After the popularization of email as a communication tool, a practice of sending messages as a commercial nature was adopted, which we now call email marketing.
Since then, a lot has changed in the way email marketing is done, however, this practice has maintained its status as the most effective digital marketing tool, even surpassing SEO and social media* in terms of ROI.
Email marketing is widely used in digital marketing because of its low investment cost:
The biggest ROI of digital marketing. US$42 for every US$1 invested
With this excellent Return on Investment, email allows a communication campaign to be carried out on a large scale, by sending thousands of messages simultaneously, using the mailing list.
However, precisely because it is capable of generating extremely agile communication at a low cost, the existence of spammer practices is recurrent, deteriorating email marketing efforts.
The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil Study reveals that 1 in every 2 emails present on companies' mailing lists belong to the invalid or risk class.
*Source: State of Marketing 2022 Report
Mass communication and financial return
The financial return on email marketing is notably positive for those who work with clean email lists, that is, without invalid emails, spamtraps, temporary emails and other types of email addresses that are harmful to online reputation.
Activating very large email lists without the help of an email verification service can result in a large number of invalid addresses.
This happens for several reasons, such as the abandonment of email accounts, deactivation of domains, turnover in the job market, inadequate practices for generating and capturing new leads.
And also because there are those who consider it very easy to build a mailing just by buying emails or harvesting (a technique that collects addresses from various web repositories such as blogs, forums, etc.).
A sender who reaches 3% of invalid emails in his list, regardless of the size of the list, is classified as a spammer and has his reputation damaged.
Among the sanctions applied is the registration of the IP address with providers and blacklists, which in turn causes future messages to be forwarded to the spam folder or summarily blocked.
In other words, those who work with unverified and sanitized mailings cannot see their emails delivered to recipients' inboxes.
Therefore, the maximum financial return from email marketing is only enjoyed when there is an email verification service that carries out an in-depth analysis, capable of preventing the entry and/or removal of invalid addresses from databases.
Revenue Data
More than 4 billion people use email accounts around the world, mainly to do business¹.
Worldwide, more than US$3 trillion in revenue is generated through e-commerce², of which 23% comes from email marketing³. Therefore, email marketing is the most effective customer acquisition and retention channel today, with an ROI of $42: $1.
Taking only Brazil and the United States into consideration, around US$207 billion comes from email marketing actions⁴, demonstrating how strategic this channel is.
*1: The Radicati Group, INC. | Email Statistics Report, 2020-2024
*2 and 4: Statista
*3: Econsultancy
Deliverability rate
The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil detected that the e-commerce market in general suffers from significant drops in the deliverability rate of its emails.
In 2023, many business categories were harmed, caused by a significant increase in invalid emails on their mailings.
A large volume of non-existent emails and spamtraps (emails created with the sole purpose of identifying spammers who practice harvesting or purchasing email lists) were identified.
Non-existent email accounts
These are email accounts that, although they have perfect syntax, that is, they respect the format provided by technical reference documents (RFCs) “local-part@domain”, do not have an active user.
Explaining clearly, they don't exist. This is because the email address was simply not created or, eventually, it was deleted by the user or deactivated by the provider itself for various reasons, including account abandonment.
In cases of account abandonment, the email provider itself terminates email activities.
There are also cases of corporate emails that, when deleted when the employee leaves the company, become non-existent.
Non-existent emails belong to the category of hard bounces in verification reports and are one of the main reasons for errors in mailings.
The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil points to a growth in non-existent emails in certain key categories of the national market, which means that email marketing professionals must submit their email lists for verification and invest in relationships and good practices to update their qualified leads.
Good practices require deleting invalid emails to build a clean email list, made up of real and actionable contacts, who have actually shown interest in the communication of your product or service.
Email verification data
SafetyMails scan reports reveal error types based on the following indexes:
- SafetyScore: evaluation of mailings imported into the checker. If the number of invalid addresses is less than 3% and without risky emails, the score is high, and vice versa.
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Report status: the categories of emails found in the lists are segmented by color. Green (valid emails) | Red (emails not suitable for sending) | Yellow (represent reputation and blocking risks) | Gray (have not been validated for various reasons).
- Distribution by error: point out which errors are present in invalid emails. Non-existent addresses, syntax errors, invalid domains, among others, are some examples.
- Distribution by risk: all addresses that poses a threat to the sender's reputation. Disposable emails, spamtraps, scraped (generic corporate emails such as sales@; finance@, etc.), and so on.
The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil reveals that approximately 47% of emails sent in the country belong to one or more error categories listed above.
Delivery X Deliverability
When a mailing is approved by the provider (that is, when the sender has a good reputation and the list contains less than 3% errors), it means that the messages are ready to be delivered to the recipients.
However, even if they are suitable for reaching your inbox, messages may be retained by anti-spam filters for various other reasons and, therefore, remain blocked. This way, the message is delivered, but doesn’t reach the inbox.
That's the difference: Delivery tells you whether or not you were able to deliver an email to a provider. Deliverability determines whether the emails you deliver will be made available in the inbox or junk email (spam box).
For analysis purposes, delivery and deliverability are two crucial moments in the email relationship.
This is because a good delivery leads to a good deliverability, since for good delivery it is important to follow the best practices in email marketing.
The result is a good reputation, which ends up in more emails being made available in the inbox, in other words, a better deliverability.
We know that email campaigns with invalid emails have less than 44% of their emails going to the inbox.* A disaster in terms of results.
The first edition of SafetyMails' Study showed, in 2019, a total of 19.5% of emails not delivered to inboxes. This represented 1/5 of blocked emails, with a consequent worsening in deliverability and losses in ROI.
In the second publication of the Study, carried out in 2021, the total number of invalid emails reached 1/4 of all emails sent.
In this year, the current version of the Quality of Email Lists in Brazil records a total of 36.5% of invalid emails, identifying an increase of 14% harmful emails between 2019 and 2023.
*Source: Hubspot
Email marketing and B2B
Lead Generation is the main goal in building mailings. Soon after, come closing sales and other strategic purposes. Check out this and other information in the graph below:
Source: Content Marketing Institute
The email marketing market is forecast to grow by more than 15% by 2030, reaching a market value of approximately US$60 BI.*
The growth of the email marketing market will continue to directly benefit the B2B segment. See the reasons:
- Constant upgrade of market digitalization, through the development of digital businesses (commercial transactions, etc.).
- Ease and low cost in mass communication through marketing automation (use of email triggering tools).
- Ability to personalize emails, which corroborates the strength of Inbound in the strategies of companies that are looking for continuous updating.
*Source: Future Market Insights
Increase of invalid emails on mailings
Invalid emails pollute lists, causing reputation problems, in addition to negatively affecting all email marketing work.
Also known as bounces, they are subdivided into two types: soft bounces (temporary errors) and hard bounces (permanent errors).
The first group represents emails that are not delivered for various reasons, which include connection failure, full inbox, spam complaints, high rates of invalid emails in previous campaigns, incidence of spamtraps, low engagement and other reasons that do not invalidate the email address. High rates of soft bounces lead to reputation problems and, consequently, worse results.
Hard bounces are serious and permanent errors, signaling emails that are not delivered simply because they don't exist.
The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil detected a 36.5% increase in invalid emails in 2023 compared to 2021, which recorded 22.8%.
This means a 13.7% drop in the quality of lists over a 2-year period. What caused the increase in invalid emails in Brazil?
E-commerce market
*Source: Neotrust
*Source: Statista | Global Payments Report 2023
Are Brazilian companies prepared to follow the development of the e-commerce market?
The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil showed that 92% of companies undergoing digital transformation consider that they are still adapting to the process.
Email marketing and B2C
Email marketing has, among countless advantages, the skill of communication without intermediaries.
Depending on the quality of the message, combined with a good visual structure and conversion strategies, a campaign achieves the expected success. In other words, the final purchasing decision is just one click away between your strategy and the buyer persona.
Nowadays, knowing the reader of your messages is no longer enough. It is necessary to know where the public accesses emails from, when people open messages and all possible information about their behavior.
Below are some important data that reveal common habits of email marketing consumers:
Where email marketing is most accessed
Newsletters | frequency (2023)
Sending one newsletter per week generates:
-
Open rate:
-
CTR:
-
Click to open:
-
Cancellation fee:
Sending 5 newsletters per week generates:
-
Open rate:
-
CTR:
-
Click to open:
-
Cancellation fee:
Note that the frequency preferred by professionals (once a week) reveals the highest cancellation rate. Therefore, it is very important that your messages deliver the ideal solution to your buyer persona’s pain.
Realize that sometimes, what you think is right may not give the expected results, due to the asymmetry between what your buyer persona wants to receive and what you are delivering.
*Source: GetResponse
Trends
Personalization is the keyword that guides planning email marketing campaigns.
Automation appears as a complementary method that enables results optimization techniques in building healthy mailings.
80% of consumers are in favor of purchasing decisions based on a personalized experience, and that's why 55% of marketing professionals seek to expand their knowledge towards this objective.*
Email marketing priorities as a communication strategy for the coming months
| Improve how you use personalization | 55% |
| Automate more areas of your email marketing | 48% |
| Refine campaign performance tests | 44% |
| Improve campaign ROI by | 38% |
| Improve deliverability | 37% |
| Simplify workflows | 36% |
| Improve data management | 36% |
| Implement design systems | 22% |
| Invest in new email tools | 19% |
*Source: Litmus
Market fragility
Regularly reviewing in email marketing workflows is essential when using automation as a tool for sending mass emails.
The mailings continually change, and the strategist must reorganize the segments according to new marketing objectives that emerges.
Checking emails frequently means taking precautions against the fragility that an inadequate mailing represents.
It is important to observe the persona's behavior (which changes from time to time) and also the competitors' behavior, to outline a useful predictability when creating strategies.
The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil reveals the market's levels of fragility in relation to the distribution of valid emails and bounces in the most popular business segments in the country.
Online data collection methods
Among the records made on registration forms in Brazil, 20% of them were invalid emails.
For companies that don't protect the entry points from new leads, this means a significant increase in CPL (cost per leads), harming conversion results and, consequently, ROI.
Using a real-time email verification API protects qualified lead generation by alerting to correction.
The Quality of Email Lists in Brazil pointed out 81.1% of non-existent emails as the biggest reason for alerts for corrections in forms.
Registration forms are an essential tool for boosting the growth of email lists, and 77% of marketers use a landing page applied to their website for this purpose.*
*Source: MarketingSherpa