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CASE STUDY

How ZeroBounce reduced Image Source bounces from 19% to 0.85%

Image Source was looking for an email verification service to restore the quality of their database. ZeroBounce provided just what they needed, and more. The team came to us with an average bounce rate of 19%. By cleaning their email lists with ZeroBounce, Image Source reduced their bounces to 0.85%. Now the company manages to drive constant results from email marketing.

About Image Source

Image Source is a leader in the office and managed IT technology space. It offers a wide variety of solutions for companies and organizations looking to maximize their investment in office and cloud technology. As a platinum Xerox dealer, Image Source provides everything a customer needs, from a simple laser printer to the latest in production inkjet printer.

  • Year of foundation
    Founded:1988
  • Our Offices
    Locations:14 offices throughout California
  • Number of employees in the company
    Number of employees: 200
  • Mainly serving services
    Mainly serving: Small to medium-sized businesses, K-12 education and hospitals
  • Types of emails send
    Types of emails Image Source sends: Marketing emails, newsletters and updates.

We talked to Bruce Herwig, Marketing Director at Image Source, who told us what their email marketing challenges were and how ZeroBounce helped.

Challenge

As a sales-oriented B2B company, Image Source uses email to reach out to prospects and keep in touch with customers. But data decay can sabotage a brand’s email marketing efforts, and Image Source was no exception.

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"We were expanding our email marketing and knew that our list was questionable. After a 19% bounce rate on our last email campaign, we knew we needed to do something. I just wasn’t sure where to start."

Bruce Herwig
Marketing Director, Image Source

Approach

Before sending out another email campaign, Image Source looked to industry experts for advice. As it turns out, using an email verification service was the safest and fastest way to reduce bounce rates and improve deliverability.

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"We had just implemented HubSpot," Herwig told us. "After reaching out to them for ideas, they suggested we run our list through an email verification service and recommended several companies including ZeroBounce."

Why ZeroBounce?

Image Source chose ZeroBounce over other email validation services because of some key features:

  • Accuracy:
    The service guarantees 99% accurate results.
  • Spam trap detection:
    There are only a handful of services that remove spam traps, and ZeroBounce is one of them.
  • Security:
    The platform uses multiple data protection mechanisms.
  • A.I. email scoring:
    The system further validates catch-all emails and returns quality scores for any other types of email addresses.

Results

By using ZeroBounce, the team at Image Source was able to get a clear breakdown of their data and find out why it wasn’t performing.

Below you can see the results of the email verification test Bruce Herwig ran (10% of the list).

Results of the email verification test

Herwig went on to clean the entire Image Source database. The image below gives you an even better perspective of the email list quality – it’s easy to understand why Image Source’s emails were getting a 19% bounce rate.

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ZeroBounce found more than 21,000 invalid email addresses, 28,524 catch-all emails, and 139 abuse emails (users who were likely to mark emails as Spam). On top of that, more than 4,000 emails were “do not mail” – meaning they were probably toxic, disposable, or role-based.

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"ZeroBounce has superb customer support. When I reached out with questions, I received a quick answer and a phone follow-up"

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“There is great peace of mind knowing that the emails that you are sending to have been verified and that old and outdated emails have been filtered out. As our email reputation improves, we’re seeing a slight increase in deliverable and open rates. We expect this to continue,” says Bruce Herwig.

A.I. Email Scoring

Once he validated the entire email list for Image Source, Bruce Herwig went on to try the ZeroBounce A.I. email scoring system.

The service uses artificial intelligence to further validate catch-all emails and rate the overall quality of an email address. Thus, it helps marketers gain perspective on how subscribers will interact with their emails.

Overall Experience

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"By adding the ZeroBounce scoring to our contacts, we’re able to control the blend of verified and low scoring emails in a campaign. This lets us email strategically and systematically without blowing our reputation scores."

Lastly, we asked Bruce Herwig what his overall experience with ZeroBounce was.

Here’s what he said:

“I appreciated the education I received from the ZeroBounce website and blog, and the clear step-by-step process suggested. Uploading our database was easy and the categories you get in the results are easy to follow. Also, ZeroBounce has superb customer support. When I reached out with questions, I received a quick answer and a phone follow-up. Our current plan is to run new data through the email verifier quarterly, and the entire database annually. I look forward to continuing to use ZeroBounce!