Both businesses and consumers of products and services use emails either for communicating messages or for receiving informative content. For a business, an email is a top delivery vehicle for engaging consumers. You get to address consumers directly and market products without stretching the budget.
But high flying email marketing strategies will crash-land if messages don’t reach their destination or get bounced back undelivered. Companies get saddled with mailing lists clogged up with dead-end mail accounts that drain time and energy and yield no returns. This is why we use email validation solutions.
What is Email Validation, and Why Should It Concern Businesses?
Email validation is the process that minutely examines the consumer’s email address to find out if it is valid. It’s a way of ensuring that the email message that you send doesn’t bounce back undelivered. If you’ve been ignoring your bounced emails, you’re self-inflicting serious damage because a fairly high bounce rate ruins your reputation.
Most large businesses with huge mailing lists integrate email validation directly into their contact forms and inward mail channels to keep out spammers and people using fake accounts. But the tables can be turned on the very same companies by consumer mail service providers.
The consumer’s mailbox provider has its own technique for assessing mail senders. If it is detected that you are notching up a high bounce rate by sending stuff to invalid mail addresses, the mail provider may list you as a spammer.
Being relegated to spam territory is like being thrown into a swamp; even if you escape, the goo sticks to you. Being labeled as spam prevents your emails from reaching good consumers. So your first task as a legitimate company is to clean up your mail listings by removing invalid email addresses. In short, you need to validate your email leads, and for that, you use an email validating service.
The Essentials of a Good Email Validating Service
The expert email validator doesn’t stop at analyzing the structure and syntax of the mail address; really experienced email validators (for example Byteplant) dig deeper providing real-time email validation alongside verification. They’ll verify everything – the algorithms, programme database, and archival database – to check how the email fares. A good validating and verifying protocol should present the following status report on any email address and take suitable action:
Valid: The mail account exists, it is actively used, and there’s a high chance it’ll accept inward bound email.
Invalid: The mail account doesn’t exist, or is abandoned or is inactive, and can’t accept email.
Duplicate: Will check if this is a duplicate of the validated or invalidated address loaded in the same mailing list.
Catch-all email address: These addresses used by small businesses to capture even wrongly typed or misspelled mail addresses. This ensures the company receives mail despite common typos. This could pose a problem. Businesses sometimes tune their catch-all emails to receive all emails only to reject them later. So the likelihood of a hard bounce is high. These addresses are best deleted from your mailing list.
Unknown: The email address appears OK but for some reason, the domain doesn’t respond to verification requests. Usually, this happens when the domain name has been retired.
Email Validation: Fast Facts That You Ignore at Your Peril
According to the Radicati Group, there are over 4.9 billion email accounts in the public domain, and it’s expected to grow by 6 percent annually all the way to 2021. Consumer emails corner 76 percent of all emails in circulation. This is a captive market which still considers the email to be its primary form of communication. Another survey indicated that 67 percent of consumers are spending a minimum of 10 minutes to an hour reading promotional emails.
Email Validation Ensures Your Message Hits the Sweet Spot Every Time
- With an email validation tool, you’ll be 98 percent successful in eliminating bounce rates. The lower your bounce rate, the better your reputation.
- Your emails will enjoy an encouraging open rate which should translate to higher conversions.
- You operate below the radar of email service providers that suspend mail accounts for spamming consumers.
- By eliminating invalid emails, you save your time and energy and position yourself to receive higher revenues.
- Because your sender score will be higher, every email will enjoy a higher success rate and inbox placement will be spot on. Your emails go only to the demographic that you target.
The email sender score is a measure of the sender’s reputation assessed by the internet service provider. If your sender score hovers between 80 and 100, your emails will be routinely accepted in inboxes. You also stand a better chance at cracking permission-based email marketing.
Ask your email validator to show you your sender score, and also analyze how your email listings compare with what the competition is using.
7 Fabulous Ways Email Validation Solutions Benefit You
1. You get to flag and eliminate invalid mail addresses
Email addresses of consumers that are inactive are flagged for removal. This effectively prunes a mailing list leaving you with only the productive emails that are more likely to spur conversions. The skilled email validators go deeper and analyze the reasons for inactivity. Is it because consumers are neglecting their mailboxes? or are consumers deliberately avoiding your emails? Email validators probe the answers and tweak your mailing list to exclude the unresponsive consumers.
2. Email validation rectifies email errors, helping you zero in on the real consumer
It’s possible that consumers may feed you a wrong email address by mistake; company employees are also known to err more than usual in conveying correct email addresses. Minor errors like this could make a potentially valuable customer inaccessible. Validation rectifies errors and restores addresses so you get to contact genuine people.
3. Email validation is the stepping stone to effective email marketing campaigns
The best email marketing campaigns fail to take off because invalid addresses clog the mailing list. Instead of conversions, you’ll be receiving email rebounds which do your campaign no good. By eliminating the invalid emails, you get to open the floodgates of open rates and you increase your chances of a higher click-through and conversions.
You’d be surprised how sincerely most consumers read their emails. Validation is the visiting card admitting you through the gate. Whether you lose consumers or convert them depends a lot on the quality of your message.
4. Without email validation your emails would reach spam land, also called cyber-cemetery
Unused and inactive emails may appear inviting but you have to prune them from your mailing list. The reason is that email service providers view email carpet bombing as behavior typical of spammers. Once you’re tagged as a spammer, it’s difficult to undo the damage to your reputation. Even your mail delivery gets trashed.
5. Email validation is your bulwark against hard bouncing emails
A hard bounce happens when your email bounces back on crashing an invalid address or an email that doesn’t exist. This may occur if consumers delete older email accounts or simply give you a fake address to avoid receiving spam. Email validation saves you botheration by flagging addresses that are most likely to hard bounce your emails.
6. Email validation gives you valuable consumer insights
An error-prone mailing list is not the best starting point to flag off a successful email campaign. Email validation points out the consumers that are your best bets for click-through translating into conversions.
Validation tells you which consumers are active and who are the people who have engaged with you in the past. These are valuable insights that help you target your product correctly to the right demographic that is genuinely interested in your product.
7. Email validation effectively improves the ROI
Imagine the losses you bear chasing fictitious or invalid email addresses. On the other hand, every email that you send to a valid address (a genuine consumer) stands a better chance of creating the marketing impact that you are setting up. The ROI on a validated mailing list is far higher compared to any error-prone listing.
Conclusion
In the super competitive world of digital marketing, an email validation tool is a super effective way of sprucing up your mailing list as a forerunner to a successful email marketing campaign. If you haven’t done this already, it’s worth sparing the time and energy for getting your mailing list validated. At one stroke, you’ll to cut the risks, preserve your business reputation, and make the most of your leads.
