We are often asked what we mean by "CP Preferred Email," our trademarked, proprietary email curation system. The "CP" part is obvious. The "Preferred" part, in a nutshell, is the way CarePrecise acquires, verifies, and maintains high quality email addresses for physicians, nurses, dentists, chiropractors, and other U.S. healthcare practitioners. Since we offer a 95% deliverability money-back guarantee, it is critically important to our business that the medical email addresses we sell are solid.
"Preferred" Physician Email Addresses?
When doctors and allied health professionals sign up for conferences and CME opportunities, subscribe to medical journals, and join medical organizations of various kinds, they're asked for their email addresses, and whether they want the organization to share with other organizations within the healthcare industry. You might be surprised to learn that a majority do "opt-in" to sharing. This doesn't mean that they have opted in for your particular use, but that they are OK with having their email used for a variety of medically related purposes. This is one way they can get timely information on new conferences, continuing education opportunities, new medical products and services, etc. It's where we source the vast majority of medical professionals' email information.
Other sources include places where they give an email address for goods and services and have permitted sharing, and the small number of places where they are required to publicly share an email contact. We do NOT "screen scrape" to get email addresses surreptitiously from websites. That's just not cool, and could lead to unhappy addressees (and unhappy email customers, of course).
Email addresses sometimes "go dark." How do we keep up?
How does CP Preferred Email follow a physician when they move from one practice to another, or add an entrepreneurial venture email address, or one for a teaching position? And how do we know which address is the best one to use to get the email into the environment most likely to result in it being opened, read, and responded to positively?
The answer is partly a "secret recipe," of course. We wouldn't want every other medical email vendor to compete with us. But it's also partly just common sense, and we'll gladly explain.
First of all, we only use good sources. When we get new email addresses we immediately verify every one for deliverability. We also use a proprietary system to determine whether the email is addressing the correct practitioner (we track them by NPI number so we can be certain). There are many components in this step that take into account IP address locations, and domain and local-part components of the address making sense (our own proprietary AI), among other factors. All this happened before a single email is sent.
And then there's the vitally important technique of Spending Gobs Of Money On Fresh Email Addresses So Often It Makes Our Finance Director Cringe. Keeping up with moving clinician emails requires it.
Anatomy of an email address
There are two primary components to an email address. The "domain" is the part following the "@" sign, and this may contain both the primary domain and a subdomain:
maryjones@[bighospital.com] or maryjones@[cardio.bighospital.com]
The domain and sub may be used anywhere in the world that has Internet access. The local-part generally identifies the specific mailbox associated with, for instance, a physician assistant's email address, and is usually the person's name:
[maryjones]@bighospital.com or [Dr.Bob]@GeriatricAssociates.co
Note that email addresses are not case-sensitive. People can use as many uppercase letters as they like, but the servers treat them all as lowercase.
Many of the special characters may be used in the local-part of an email address, notably !#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~ (and the ever-popular "." as long as it's not the first or last character). So, depending on the specifics of a given email server's configuration, you'll may some nutty or genuinely creative email addresses similar to ///pediatric.care///@hugehealthsystem.org, or even Hi,Kids!_:-}@jonespediatric.com or You-Like-Ice-Cream?_It'll-Put-On-###_And-Costs-$$$!@weightclinic.com. No kidding.
But knowing whether an email address is a "well-formed email string" means little in determining quality.
Crowdsourcing for the highest quality medical email addresses
Through our gathering process we collect more than one email address for many individuals. Working with some of our higher-volume email customers, we ingest email bounce reports containing data on up to hundreds of thousands of email addresses per report. From this we get information on which email was opened, which addressees opted out of future mailings from that organization or program, and many more technical clues. Real world data not only lets us know which email is getting through to the mailbox, but also which ones were deleted without being opened, and which ones were opened, responded to, and which ones produced a real ROI based on information shared with us by users. This process lets us tag one of the several email addresses for Dr. Jones is being responded to in a positive way. It may become one of our "Preferred" email addresses, if, that is, it meets other quality criteria and maintains its quality over a period of time.
Rigorous medical email verification
Nowhere else is it more important to respect an email recipient's time and attention than among medical clinicians. We check out every prospective email purchaser and grade them for worthwhile usage. That is, we simply do not sell to spammers. But beyond that, we re-verify all of our email addresses every few weeks to eliminate the ones that have gone dark, and those that we suspect as being problematical for a number of reasons. We don't throw out addresses only because they don't get a top deliverability score from a bulk verification service. If we did that, we would be throwing out many of our best emails – ones that are performing strongly in our Preferred email system. Ultimately, our customers don't just want email addresses that can get an automated score of some arbitrary level, they want email that actually performs.
Why are email addresses so much more expensive than other contact information?
Good email addresses are hard to come by. Our sources guard them jealously as a valuable business asset. You can't just go to Wikipedia and search for "all U.S. physician email addresses." Wouldn't that be nice? Or head on over to the American Dental Association and ask them for a free download of their membership email list. But nope. Won't work. There is no open government resource for email addresses (with a vanishingly few exceptions) as there is for phone numbers and practice addresses. If you're willing to buy a large number of emails, chances are you can score a few hundred thousand nurse emails from a company that deals in low quality and high volume (in other words, the email addresses used by spammers), and then you can run them by a verification checker and throw away the stinkers (most of them). But will they produce returns? Our customers don't seem to think so. Yes, our pricing isn't as low as the screen-scraped (and sometimes stolen) addresses you might find, but ours are up-to-date, verified, and guaranteed.
Our customers make it happen
If not for the customers who send millions of messages using our email addresses, we wouldn't have "Preferred" email. Many use our email addresses to communicate with existing and prospective provider network members. For these uses and for medical marketing, the healthcare industry is a special case among email usage. To acquire email addresses from CarePrecise, our users must agree to abide diligently by the terms of the U.S. CAN SPAM Act of 2003. Beyond that, CarePrecise offers medical email best practices that not only protect our users' reputations and their domains from blacklisting, but also help keep email communication pertinent to the recipient, and respectful of their attention and time. Together, CP Preferred Email and our users form an important piece of U.S. healthcare industry communication.
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