You just had a rush of inspiration and crafted your best campaign yet. You’re certain this new messaging will convert those stubborn leads you’ve been trying so hard to convince for months, and you can’t wait to see the outcomes of your launch.
But what if you’re speaking into the void?
So many killer campaigns never produce the grand results marketers hope for, simply because those emails never get to customers or prospects. Sending emails to invalid, fake, or nefarious accounts not only wastes precious marketing dollars and limits reach, it can also diminish sender reputations or increase hard bounce rates.
The good news is that you can ensure emails reach inboxes through email verification. Email verification methods ensure your campaigns arrive as intended, enhancing conversions, building trust, and creating a healthy sender reputation.
Below, we’ll explain the benefits of Email Verification in detail and share three methods to add Email Verification to your marketing workflow.
Why should you verify an email address?
Your outbound email marketing is only as good as your ability to reach your audience. Email verification helps you:
Maintain an updated email list
Emails go out of service due to a number of external factors. For example, customers may lose their student email post-graduation, open a new personal Gmail account, or switch to a new job. In fact, 22.5% of email addresses become invalid every year.
Without any cleanup, your lists will eventually contain a significant chunk of invalid emails. Continuing to send emails to those addresses will lead to a high bounce rate, which lowers your sender reputation. Be sure to verify email lists on a regular cadence to keep your bounce rates low, maintain your sender reputation, and build trust with your subscribers.
Cut down on hard bounces
A hard bounce returns emails to the sender. Either recipients don’t exist, or their email addresses are invalid.
The more messages in a campaign that hard bounce, the more likely other emails in your campaign will be marked as “spam” by inbox filters. When this happens:
- Messages sent to bounced email addresses are not delivered.
- Messages to valid email addresses also are not delivered-they get filtered out of a recipient’s inbox.
- Sender reputation decreases.
Since spammers often have high bounce rates, email service providers may start to mark your account as threatening. Once your bounce rate hits a certain threshold, your account could be blacklisted. Email verification helps you avoid this altogether, confirming emails are legitimate before beginning a campaign.
Improve email deliverability
The more frequently you use an email verifying process, the higher the chances your message hits prospects’ inboxes. An added bonus of boosting deliverability is that it helps you maintain a high sender reputation, which improves your email marketing ROI in the long term.
Keep your email reputation high
We’ve mentioned a few variables that affect sender reputation, but it’s important to remember that sender reputation is calculated based on a combination of your:
- Bounce rate – how frequently your emails hard bounce
- Engagement – how recipients respond to the email; measured in opens and clicks
- Spam report rate – how regularly your emails are reported as spam
- Sending habits – when your emails are sent and how warm your leads are
Avoiding low bounce rates, spam reports, and poor deliverability is only possible with a solid Email Verification process in place.
How do you verify an email address?
There are several ways to verify email addresses that vary in terms of effort and efficacy. They include:
1. Use an Email Verification tool
An Email Verification tool is the fastest, easiest, and most effective way to verify emails at scale. These platforms have built-in methods of confirming an email address, checking for:
- Invalid mailboxes, either expired or incorrect.
- Invalid domains, which are fake or expired and will likely bounce.
- Spam traps, which are email addresses created by mailbox providers and anti-spam organizations to identify marketers with poor practices. Emails sent to these addresses will negatively impact your reputation and could result in blacklisting.
- Syntax errors caused by typos.
While there are free Email Verification tools, most have limits on the number of emails they will verify at no cost. Plus, only some of these features are available for non-subscribers. If you’re sending emails in bulk, you’ll need the help of an Email Verification service built specifically to handle enterprise-level communications, as well as all of the additional variables that come with it.
While an Email Verification tool is the ideal way to validate email addresses; other, more manual ways exist.
2. Ping the Server
While “pinging,” is a familiar concept to most people, it means something a little different in terms of email validation. Rather than a text alert or chat notification, a “ping” is a diagnostic tool for testing network connections. In this instance, a ping acts as a query tool to check an email’s validity.
When you ping an email, the ping reaches out to the SMTP server to check the Mail Exchange (MX) records for the email’s domain. After that, you’ll have to select a server, and “chat” with it through a series of commands. While these commands are different for either PC or Mac products, the server should be able to confirm over “chat” whether an email is valid.
While pinging the server can be used to check one or two emails, you’ll need to be careful when you use this method: otherwise, your own IP address could get blacklisted. Furthermore, pinging doesn’t work for every domain. You’ll need an Email Verification expert to handle those, or to use other techniques beyond pings.
3. Google search the address
Google search is one of the simplest ways to certify email validity. People leave traces of themselves-including their email addresses-all over the internet. So a quick Google search will likely bring up someone’s digital footprint. This method often exposes whether or not an email actually exists.
But Google search won’t always connect the right digital identity to the right email address. And even if an email address seems valid, that doesn’t mean it’s real. While Google search can be a quick way to spot-check one or two emails, searching every single email address in an enterprise list is unrealistic. Confirming the validity of those emails through search is impossible as well.
Enterprise companies need the help of a robust Email Verification service to ensure their emails are getting to the right people at the right time.
Maximize your marketing by optimizing delivery
Enterprises need to communicate with their audience; having the wrong or invalid email addresses shouldn’t be a blocker. Email verification methods like Google search, IP location, and password recovery reduce hard bounces and keep your email lists clean.
But you can only go so far with manual methods. Integrating an Email Verification tool into your marketing workflow protects you from hard bounces by double-checking syntax, domains, and spam traps.
AtData Email Verification goes beyond traditional Email Verification platforms: it identifies invalid mailboxes, highlights potential corrections, flags risky emails, and provides enhanced B2B verification to maximize your deliverability. Plus, AtData’s Email Verification comes with human quality control and a 100% guarantee, giving you the most bang for your buck.
Learn more about our Email Verification and other solutions to optimize your outbound campaigns.
