Getting a new subscriber doesn’t always mean that they have spelled their email address correctly or even that the account is real.
What is Email Verification?
Email verification is a layer of security to protect your email marketing goals. It works to keep your email list free of fake accounts, typos, and temporary accounts that could ultimately affect your deliverability. It helps you avoid the risk of having your emails rejected or sent to spam due to having data of inadequate quality.
Is Email Verification Necessary?
Email verification is a necessary step when it comes to protecting your sender score. Your sender score is a huge part of your email deliverability rates, as it helps Internet Service Providers decide if your emails are worth being sent through to inboxes, or whether they should be filtered to the spam folder. The higher your sender score, the better chance you will have of your subscribers reading your emails. On the other hand, senders with a lower score have a much higher risk of being sent to the junk folder, where most of the time, emails will never be seen or opened.
The Importance of Email Verification
Some of the main reasons why email verification is so important for your sender score include:
- Eliminate Hard Bounces: Hard bounces are one of the main reasons for a sender score to drop. Most of the time, they will happen because an email address does not exist, either due to a spelling mistake, a fake email address, or a closed account. Cleaning your mailing list regularly is good practice to identify any non-existent email addresses and ensure that they are removed before your next campaign, preventing these accounts from creating unwanted hard bounces.
- Reduce Spam Complaints: Ideally, you should aim for a spam complaint rate that is less than 0.1%. This means that there should be no more than five spam complaints for every five thousand email messages that you send. To achieve this, it’s important to send quality content to subscribers who are interested in what you’re sending. You can use tools to identify the email accounts of users who are more likely to mark emails as spam.
- Avoid Blacklists: Becoming blacklisted will also cause your sender score to suffer by preventing your messages from being accepted by the server. Acquiring data from the right sources and verifying your email list regularly is important to minimize the risk of ending up on a blacklist.
Why is Email Verification Important?
Email verification is an important part of keeping your mailing list clean, which in turn, improves your sender score by reducing hard bounces and spam complaints, ensuring that you are sending marketing emails only to subscribers that are interested and have an active email account.
How Does Email Validation Work?
Email verification works by allowing you to keep your mailing list data as clean as possible for the best results. To do this, use the following strategies:
- Get to Know Your Data Sources: It’s important to bear in mind that not all sources of data are good. When choosing partners to work with, it’s important to assess the quality that they send to you. Avoid working with data brokers as they will often provide data that has been sold many times, which won’t get you results with subscribers.
- Routine List Hygiene: The best way to filter out any poor quality leads as the point of collection is to use email verification in real-time. This helps you avoid any fake contact data or spelling mistakes from getting into your list where they can cause damage. Checking leads right at the start allows you to prevent fraudsters or spam bots from infiltrating your email list. You should also clean your email list at least quarterly to remove any emails that are no longer active.
- Remove Disengaged Users: Regularly review your mailing list to remove any subscribers who are not engaged with your content. While removing data that you worked hard to get is never pleasant, uninterested users can create more issues than they are worth. Remove any users that have not opened any of your emails in the past three months to reduce the risk of hard bounces and spam complaints.
How Email Verification Works
An email address’ authenticity can be estimated using a range of validation methods and algorithms. Once the email verification process comes to an end, any invalid or inactive email addresses are pointed out and can be removed from the mailing list, which creates a clean email list of deliverable addresses ready to use for business and marketing purposes.
How to Use an Email Verification System
Email validation systems are often easy to use, allowing you to simply upload your email list and begin the check. Once the check is complete, you will receive more information on the email addresses contained in your list including any that are faulty, non-existent, or inactive. Some systems allow you to check your entire list, while others will check a sample.
Email Verification Best Practice
Having a valid list of recipients is the foundation of any effective email marketing campaign. If your targeted recipients are not getting your messages, you are wasting resources. Email verification is key to making sure that your marketing emails are being received. Some best practices to follow when it comes to email verification include:
- Send a verification email: Double opt-in is becoming a common practice with email marketing. This method involves sending new subscribers a verification email to finalize their subscription before they are added to the mailing list. It allows you to avoid misspelled or fake email addresses from the start, along with enabling you to ensure that all subscribers actually want to hear from you.
- Clean addresses at the point of collection, such as contact capture forms and lead magnets.
- Clean your email database: Bear in mind that email addresses that were active a few years ago may no longer be in use today. This is why it’s important to regularly go through and clean your email list, as some subscribers may no longer be using the email addresses that they first signed up with.
- Detect spam traps: Some consumers have ‘spam trap’ email addresses that are designed to serve as catch-all’s for communications that they do not really want to receive. It’s important to know how to identify these spam traps and adjust your messaging or content strategy accordingly if they are linked to a specific entry point in the typical buyer journey.
- Monitor your database continuously: The larger your email database is, the more important it is to make sure that it is constantly monitored for any potential issues.
Email Verification Process Steps
- Email Address Syntax Check: A step to eliminate any inappropriately designed email addresses.
- Domain/MX Records Check: Confirms an email address’ DNS sections
- Role-Based Account Detection: Distinguishes emails from role-based accounts such as sales@ or admin@ that can adversely impact your deliverability.
- Dispensable Email Address Detection: Identifies any disposable or ‘junk collector’ emails. These are emails that tend to be used only for signup forms or login details
- Spam Trap and Honeypot Detection: Looks for bots, honeypots, spam seeds, sham, or blacklisted email addresses that are used to trap spammers.
What is Email Verification Service?
Email verification services are used in all industries to work on the security of email addresses. These services offer methods for checking that email addresses are being used by the individuals that possess them. There are three kinds of email verification services, which are:
- IP Geolocation: This is a check to make sure that the IP matches what is on the account.
- Domain: A check to assume that the domain matches what is on the account.
- Phone Number: Checks that the phone number matches what is on the account.
Email Validation Process – Choosing the Best Email Verification Service
Choosing the right email verification service for you is important to keep your email list clean, boost your sender score and get the best results from your email marketing efforts. Mainly, the best email verification service should be one that fits all, or at least most, of your requirements. It’s also crucial to look for an email verification service that has a high precision rate when it comes to recognizing email addresses that are undeliverable, invalid, non-existent or spam. Look for a service that at the very least has processes for checking correct syntax, verification of the domain, gets all servers, and validates SMTP. Some other key elements to consider when choosing the right email verification service include:
- Speed of checking your mailing list and providing results
- How you can transfer your mailing list to the service
- GDPR compliance and data security.
- Value that accommodates your spending plan and budget
When sending email marketing messages, who you send to can have an impact on your sender score, deliverability rates, and overall results. Because of this, it’s important for all marketers to have a good email verification system in place.
