Why Email Verification Is Important to Your Email Campaigns
If your new to email marketing you’re going to want to read this to see why email verification is so important before you get your email campaigns shut down.
It’s free to start a Gmail account and there’s no charge to email your mom. So it can be easy to overlook the costs or consequences of careless email list practices. However, when you’re an email marketer, email hygiene is vital to your campaigns’ success. Let’s see how email verification helps you achieve better list quality, boost your open rates and overall performance.
What is email verification?
If you don’t know what email verification is, all you need to know is that it’s simple and implementation need not take long.
Imagine you needed to send out a big stack of “Save the Date” wedding announcements or graduation invitations. However, the list of mailing addresses was last used when you sent out Christmas cards four years ago. Besides that, your handwriting of the address for your Uncle Billy makes you wonder if you had been drinking when you added it to the address book. Does that say “Ct” as in “court” or “St” as in “Street”?
You would probably find some way of checking to see if your information was correct and whether there were any mistakes on hand. The point is to get the mail delivered and not to mention the postage is not free. Every “Return to Sender” is money down the drain.
Well guess what? Email verification is important for mostly the same reasons.
Email verification, sometimes called email validation, separates the bad email addresses from your good ones. If you don’t know about the quality of your list, you could be headed to a place you don’t want to go – think the spam folder.
What kind of bad email addresses could be lurking in your list?
To better understand how email verification helps, let’s take a look at some of the riskiest email addresses you could have in your list right now.
People change jobs or switch to another provider
Some email addresses go out of fashion – meaning they become invalid and bounce.
Like mailing addresses, people change their email address quite a bit. There may be privacy concerns or someone abandoning an email provider to go to another one.
Also, many individuals may use their workplace address, but then go on to work someplace else. It’s not likely that any of these people will think to unsubscribe from your list just because they have a new email. Continuing to email them will only increase your bounce rate.
Misspelled emails are not leads but dead ends
Furthermore, accuracy is crucial with email addresses as postal addresses. In fact, it can be even more important. The postman may be able to deliver the envelope to your Uncle Billy if the street number is a bit off, but one wrong or missing period in an email address and it’s going to bounce.
Abuse emails belong to people who mark you as spam
There is also the issue of abuse emails. Some individuals habitually mark emails –yes, even from email newsletters they subscribe to – as spam. Maybe they subscribe to email lists, forget about it and then click the “spam” button. Using an email verifier will cut those abuse emails from your list.
Temporary emails are useless – and risky
If you offer any freebies on your website, such as e-books, you should be especially careful about temporary emails. Some of your visitors don’t really want to be on your mailing list, they just want the e-book. So they use a temporary – also known as disposable – email address to download your content offer. The problem with these accounts is that they self-destruct and end up bouncing.
A poor sender reputation means you land in spam
These are just a few of the types of bad contacts that you don’t want on your list. If you have a high bounce rate and spam complaints, your sender reputation will be in jeopardy.
Guess what happens then? There are a number of negative effects to not practicing email verification and hygiene.
- Your email marketing campaign could end up in your subscribers’ spam folder instead of the inbox. This applies to legitimate people who really want to receive your emails.
- Another negative effect is that your costs increase. The prices for most email services are based on how many contacts you have on your list. You don’t want a high bounce rate because you are essentially paying to send emails that will never be received.
How to use an email verification service
There are two ways in which you can use an email verifier:
- to clean your list in bulk. The process involves uploading your database on the platform and allowing the system to validate it. For a list of up to 100,000 emails it should take you less than an hour. A good service is straightforward and easy to use.
- to use a real-time email verification API. As soon as you create an account on the platform, you should receive your API key – a piece of code you simply copy and paste into your website. Once installed on your forms, the API checks email addresses in real time, ensuring you collect only the valid and active ones.
To make things simple, a reputable email verification service should also allow you to integrate with your email service provider (ESP). This means that instead of manually uploading your list into the system, you can simply import it from your ESP and export it back when it’s clean.
Email verification is something that you have to use regularly. Even with the good addresses, 1 in 4 or sometimes up to 1 in 3 become dead or invalid within a year. Email list hygiene is not unlike your personal hygiene. You must do it regularly.
Let’s wrap things up
Envision writing the most sentimental and heartfelt letter with a message that is eloquent and beautiful. You’ve even picked the loveliest stationery, crossed every “t” and dotted every “i.” The only problem is that the reader never got to see it. That’s precisely the mistake so many make by not using email verification.
Email marketing is one of the most valuable tools a business has. People may forget to check their mailbox every day, but most check their email seven days a week. You have the ability to meet your clients and potential customers wherever they are.
The design, tone, quality of writing, graphic design all deserve your attention to detail. Your emails have the ability to increase your brand awareness, but also build the loyalty and trust of your audience. Using an email verification system ensures that your mental efforts and hard work are not put to waste.
