Handling “Wrong Email” Responses and Findem's Approach to Email Outreach Accuracy

Table of Contents

Understanding the Nature of Email Data

How Findem Mitigates Risk and Improves Email Accuracy Over Time

Gated Outreach Logic: Prioritizing Precision

Emails as Identifiers: Linking Profiles Across Sources

Data Sources & Quality

User Control & Contact Management

Our Commitment to You

 

Email accuracy is a critical component of responsible outreach, and we want to clarify how we approach it and the systems we have in place to mitigate risk.

Understanding the Nature of Email Data

It's important to note that there’s no foolproof way to ensure perfect attribution of an email address to an individual, for two key reasons: 

1. Email data is inherently imperfect: For example, someone might register for a program using a family member’s or shared inbox email.
2. Verification limits: Without sending a message, it’s generally not possible to confirm if an email truly belongs to the intended recipient.
3. Dual objectives: Given the unique nature of emails (i.e., each email is one-of-a-kind), they can be used for both communication and identity resolution. If you see an outdated email associated with a profile, Findem is persisting those to resolve duplicates and connect information from one instance of a profile to another (rather than using all of them for outreach).

How Findem Mitigates Risk and Improves Email Accuracy Over Time

Despite these inherent limitations, Findem's approach is built to minimize impact and improve continuously: 

• Low error rate: “Wrong email” responses typically account for 0.1-0.2% of all outreach attempts (1 or 2 in 1,000).
• Self-correcting system: Once an email is identified as incorrect, it is permanently disassociated from the matched person, so precision improves with each outreach.
• Deliverability validation: All emails are validated before use, ensuring technical deliverability and reducing bounce risks.

Gated Outreach Logic: Prioritizing Precision

We also use a gated email strategy to prioritize the most accurate contact information:

• Primary emails with the highest confidence scores are used first.
• Only if these primary emails return as undeliverable or are explicitly flagged as wrong do we consider fallback emails with slightly lower confidence.
• This means what you see associated with a contact isn’t always a direct reflection of what Findem uses during outreach—our system makes precision-based choices dynamically.

 

Emails as Identifiers: Linking Profiles Across Sources

In addition to direct communication, we also use email addresses as a means of identifying and linking professional information:

• Outdated or inactive emails—such as those found on old résumés or social profiles—help connect disparate data points about a professional’s career history.
• These emails are not necessarily used for outreach but are vital for constructing a complete and unified profile across multiple sources.
• In that sense, they serve more as graph nodes than communication channels.

Data Sources & Quality

We aggregate contact data from multiple trusted providers to ensure comprehensive coverage. While we aim for high accuracy, discrepancies between sources can occasionally occur. Our system continuously adjusts and learns from these variances.

User Control & Contact Management

We provide several features to give you flexibility and control over communication: 

• Unsubscribe links in every email for recipients who prefer not to be contacted.
• Profile browsing allows your team to preview existing contact data before outreach.
• Auto Refresh ensures contact details are automatically updated when you shortlist candidates, giving you the most current info at the point of contact.

Our Commitment to You

We’re committed to improving data quality through continuous refinement and offering you tools that ensure respectful, targeted communication. We welcome feedback and are always happy to review processes with you directly.