Why You Need Email Validation

by | Apr 30, 2019 | Uncategorized

Email marketing isn’t dead — it’s only growing. In fact, the inboxes of the world are super busy: an estimated 280 billion emails are sent every day.

But as a marketer, when your emails don’t make it to their destination, it can be a headache. Even more annoying? Failing to reach your customers could be due to a variety of reasons.

That’s where Email Validation comes in.

Email Validation uses a combination of steps to determine if an email is deliverable, without sending an email to it.

A thorough Email Validation service:

  • Corrects poor syntax
  • Suppresses toxic data
  • Pings an email’s domain and mailbox

Marketers who use Email Validation improve the quality of their data, leading to better inbox placement and higher response rates. That’s why Email Validation is the standard in email data hygiene.

Here’s why you need Email Validation in 2019.

Improve Deliverability

 

Even if you use best practices for collecting emails — such as only mailing to organic leads who have opted into your database — you will hit bounces. That’s because email marketing databases lose about 22.5% of their contacts every year, on average, according to HubSpot.   

Hitting invalid or toxic email addresses over and over again will, as a result, impact your reputation as a sender. Your sender reputation could make a difference in how an Internet Service Provider or Email Service Provider filters your emails. A poor reputation could land your emails in the spam or promotions folder, or could result in blacklisting.

Every email that isn’t delivered is a missed opportunity to reach a customer. If you are consistently hitting bounces or being marked as spam, you may have issues with inbox deliverability.

mail Validation solves this problem by identifying which emails are deliverable, undeliverable or risky. A good Email Validation provider will give you this information and allow you to customize your sending strategy based on these results.

Collect Good Leads

Email Validation does not only work on bulk lists of data. Instead, thanks to an API, Email Verification providers can validate emails in real time as a user enters their email on a webform. If the user enters a bad email, the webform can then prompt the user to enter a valid email address.

Why is this vital?

Why You Need Email Validation in 2019

Email marketing isn’t dead — it’s only growing. In fact, the inboxes of the world are super busy: an estimated 280 billion emails are sent every day.

But as a marketer, when your emails don’t make it to their destination, it can be a headache. Even more annoying? Failing to reach your customers could be due to a variety of reasons.

That’s where Email Validation comes in.

Email Validation uses a combination of steps to determine if an email is deliverable, without sending an email to it.

A thorough Email Validation service:

  • Corrects poor syntax
  • Suppresses toxic data
  • Pings an email’s domain and mailbox

Marketers who use Email Validation improve the quality of their data, leading to better inbox placement and higher response rates. That’s why Email Validation is the standard in email data hygiene.

Here’s why you need Email Validation in 2019.

Improve Deliverability

Even if you use best practices for collecting emails — such as only mailing to organic leads who have opted into your database — you will hit bounces. That’s because email marketing databases lose about 22.5% of their contacts every year, on average, according to HubSpot.   

Hitting invalid or toxic email addresses over and over again will, as a result, impact your reputation as a sender. Your sender reputation could make a difference in how an Internet Service Provider or Email Service Provider filters your emails. A poor reputation could land your emails in the spam or promotions folder, or could result in blacklisting.

Every email that isn’t delivered is a missed opportunity to reach a customer. If you are consistently hitting bounces or being marked as spam, you may have issues with inbox deliverability.

Email Validation solves this problem by identifying which emails are deliverable, undeliverable or risky. A good Email Validation provider will give you this information and allow you to customize your sending strategy based on these results.

Collect Good Leads

Email Validation does not only work on bulk lists of data. Instead, thanks to an API, Email Verification providers can validate emails in real time as a user enters their email on a webform. If the user enters a bad email, the webform can then prompt the user to enter a valid email address.

Why is this vital?

We found that 8.4% of emails entered onto webforms are invalid. Imagine losing 8.4% of your customers. That’s huge!

Recapturing those leads allows you to boost your marketing ROI and sell to a lead you would have otherwise lost.

Protect Cross-Channel Marketing Spend

 

You put a lot of money into display and social advertising. These ads often push users to a landing page with a webform, encouraging them to sign up.

But remember: 8.4% of those users will enter an invalid email. Without Email Validation, you aren’t making the most of your advertising and marketing spend.

The solution: Use an Email Validation API to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your marketing buck.

Collecting email addresses is a routine part of a digital marketer’s job, but how do you know if the what you are receiving is quality? Just because you get a new subscriber does not mean the account is real, or that a typo did not happen. That’s where the importance of email verification comes in.

Perhaps you are not familiar with email verification, but you can think of it as a layer of security for your email marketing goals. Keeping your email list free of typos, fictitious and temporary email accounts that could impact your deliverability. The last thing you want to do is risk your emails getting sent to spam or rejected due to inadequate quality data.

Deliverability: Sender Score Factors

Your Sender Score is a big part of your email deliverability. It helps the ISPs determine if you are worthy of the inbox or if you get filtered to the spam folder. The higher your score, the better placement you get and the lower your score, then likely you will get stuck in the junk folder.
Here is how email verification improves your Sender Score.

1. Eliminates Hard Bounces

A hard bounce is one of the primary reasons your sender score drops. Hard bounces mostly occur because the email address no longer exists. Maybe it never existed at all, and you acquired a fictitious email address, or perhaps the account once existed and was later closed by the user. It is a good practice to ‘clean your list’ on a quarterly basis to identify old email addresses and remove them before your next campaign. It is also recommended that you validate each newly acquired email address to prevent typos and fake accounts from creating additional unwanted hard bounces.

2. Reduces Spam Complaints

In an ideal world you want to have your spam complaint rate less than 0.1% this means that per every 5,000 email messages sent out you should have less than five spam complaints. Therefore, you must be sending quality content to interested users, but even so, we know spam complaints can happen.

In an effort minimize users clicking spam on your email the email verification tool XVerify automatically flags email accounts of users who have a high frequency of marking emails as spam.

3. Blacklists

If you become blacklisted, this is another reason why your Sender Score will suffer. Getting placed on a blacklist will prevent your message from getting accepted by the server. Some blacklists are more potent than others and some blacklists will automatically de-list you after a pre-determined amount of time.

Practicing good list hygiene and acquiring data from the right sources is key to minimizing the risk of becoming blacklisted. Keep in mind it is also recommended that you monitor your mailing IPs daily to identify if you have become blacklisted and attempt to get it resolved before you send off your next campaign.

Keeping Your Data Clean – Know your data sources:

Not all data sources are going to be good sources. Therefore, when you select partners to work with, you need to keep an eye on the quality they are sending to you. Additionally, don’t work with data brokers, often the data they are selling has been sold over many times. This means you won’t get results with the subscribers, and you will also find stale data leading to more hazards.

Remove unengaged users:

Review your list regularly, and remove unengaged subscribers. I know it is hard letting go of data you worked hard to acquire, but uninterested users can create problems. If a user has not opened any of your emails in the past three months remove them from your list. This way you are reducing risks of spam complaints and hard bounces.

Routine list hygiene with email verification:

Real-time email verification is the best way to filter out bad quality leads at the point of collection. Don’t allow typos and fictitious contact data sneak into your web form and do damage. Check your leads at the front door to prevent spam bots and fraudsters from infiltrating your email list. Also, clean your entire list on a quarterly basis to prevent emails that were once good from growing old and doing damage.