It might be safe to say that a person’s identity in the virtual world of the internet starts with an email address. As an email marketer, finding out that most of the addresses you have reached out to are false implies that your business is going to suffer from this.
Digital marketing is here to stay and your email list can be of great help in being a successful marketer. However, sending emails to spam traps and bots hurts your sender reputation, adversely affects the email marketing metrics, and thereby decreases the efficiency of your efforts. The only way to beat this is through email validation.
What is email validation?
Also known as email verification, the process of email validation rapidly cuts down on bounce rates and helps your sender reputation. More often than not, when someone asks for your email address at a store or after browsing through a page, you are likely to give them a fake address or a disposable one. Some people genuinely misspell the address while others give out some address so as to avoid a crowded inbox for their actual email address.
As a sum of all this, the email marketer receives a list of invalid addresses, and dispatching messages to these are practically useless. Moreover, if the address is malicious or a spam trap, the marketing strategies that are used become futile. However, with email validation, the email addresses in your email list are verified in real-time. Since the email addresses are verified before the email is sent, your sender reputation is maintained and email deliverability is reduced. Through email verification, you can get rid of misspelled, invalid, disposable, catch-all emails, and so much more.
With email validation, you will be sending much fewer emails, and the chances of your email address being blacklisted or marked as a spammer will fall. The process also gives you a chance to prevent wasting your emails and thereby reducing bounce rates and complaints as well.
Validating an email address
There are major tools designed to help people with verifying their email lists. Choosing the right one can help you protect your valuable list and produce better results for the digital marketing strategies that you devise. You can validate the email list manually or by using an API. Picking the automated method is a smarter choice because if you have an extensive list of email addresses, the process can be time-consuming.
No matter how you choose to validate your email list, the underlying process of verification is the same. Verifying an email address can be divided into three steps, it remains the same in both manual and automated processes.
1. Syntax and formatting check
This is the primary step in email validation. Here, the email list is checked for addresses with any faulty formatting. The typos and errors in both the local and domain part of the address are assessed, for instance, missing @, invalid characters, or missing spaces.
2. Domain and server verification
Here, the validity of the DNS and the MX records are checked to see if the inbox of the email address can accept emails. If the domain is set up and working well, the email addresses are kept in the list whereas the invalid ones are removed.
3. Confirming the mailbox
This is the last process in the email validation where faulty emails are pulled out. First, it checks whether the mailbox is full or can receive messages. Following this, using a verifier tool that adheres to SMTP protocol, the email address is sent a message and the response is recorded. If the email address is shown to be active and valid, the address is kept in the list.
Ways to improve your email validation and marketing
As a crucial part of email marketing, email validation needs your attention. With a poor sender score due to the lack of smart validation practices, you might hurt your business. Here are a few ways to get better at verifying your email list:
- Sending email activation: Email validation is done to make sure that the addresses in your list are correct. Apart from the basic steps of email verification, you can send a mail with an activation link to potential subscribers. Apart from confirming the activity of the address, this also helps you gauge if the marketing approach will work as you planned.
- Ensuring a reliable database: Collecting the right set of information from your customer base is important to deliver relevant emails. Sending relevant emails with content that is appreciated by the readers can help you maintain a healthy list.
- Start with data enrichment: Obtaining details about your subscribers can be difficult because people usually worry about phishing and privacy breaches. When you get to incorporate at least some basic information about your subscriber in the mail, the sender reputation slowly picks up. Email personalizationis a great way to improve your open and click-through rates.
Summing It Up
Email addresses that are wrong, broken, or malicious can hurt your marketing goals and reduce your sender score. Picking out these emails can be difficult but not impossible. With the right email validation tools, you can remove the and email addresses from your list and help your email marketing strategies be more effective.
