Email Validation: A Critical Success Factor in Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most efficient and common ways to get in touch with customers or app users. If a campaign follows the best content and deliverability practices, a business owner can get impressive returns on investment.

That’s why marketing teams need a reliable way to connect with audiences. 

One of the ways to ensure you are making the most of each campaign you send out is email validation.

In this post, we will take a look at the benefits and tips to keep your mailing list up-to-date.

Focus on the Audience That Wants Your Emails

Billions of email accounts are in the world. On the one hand, it’s great news for business owners since you have a huge audience to target. 

On the other hand, the odds of accidentally reaching out to a person who never wanted to get your emails in the first place is higher than ever. If a user makes a single typo when entering the address, you will be sending messages to a different person or a non-existing address. 

How do marketing teams ensure they get in touch with their audiences? Most use email validation. it is a legit way for business owners to check that emails left in the subscription form are valid and attached to a secure domain: gmail.com, outlook.com, or other. Also, it is a way to guarantee that business messages, say order confirmation emails or other types, reach the right people. 

How does an email get validated? Here’s a non-technical overview of the process:

• A website visitor enters his email in the subscription form
• A validation tool automatically runs a syntax check to make sure that the address corresponds to the standard structure.
• A domain name system validation and DMARC setup check ensure that an address is attached to a secure domain.
• A validation tool sends a request to the recipient’s email to make sure it’s accepting new messages.
• The email passes through the form.

Here are the three most common segments of emails you get after the validation:

• Valid. An email exists, the provider accepts emails,
• Risky. Although the address exists, the recipient’s server doesn’t accept new messages. Typically, marketers or software engineers re-validate risky emails once again to ensure that the bounce is temporary.
• Invalid. The address doesn’t exist, in which case it should be deleted.

Realizing The Benefits of Email Validation

Validating the addresses on your mailing list is one of the key sender’s reputation and deliverability practices. It protects your campaign from bounces, hitting a spam trap, or getting a ton of spam complaints. 

Now that you understand what email validation is and how it works, let’s take a look at its main benefits. 

1. Improves open rates and engagement

If you are consistently emailing non-existing addresses, there’s no one on the other side to interact with your messages. So, if your latest campaigns didn’t get many opens and link clicks, it might be too early to blame the content or the design. 

Instead, validate the addresses on your list and remove invalid, dead-weight emails. Most teams see impressive engagement improvements after running a validation check. 

2. Provides sales reps and marketers with accurate email data

Having a neat mailing list gives your team a better understanding of how a campaign actually performs. Marketers and sales reps will thus be able to trust in the metrics, narrow down or broaden target audiences, tweaking sending time or proposals content based on those. 

At the end of the day, email validation helps business owners be confident in the insights they get and improve customer communication or user onboarding. 

3. Protects sender reputation

None of the interactions between your and the recipient’s emails are lost. Instead, they are recorded by ISPs and influence your sender reputation. 

If too many people flagged your messages as spam, didn’t care to open them, or didn’t get emails, to begin with, sender reputation will take a serious toll. 

Since email validation protects your campaign from bouncing, improves its engagement rates, and reduces the number of complaints, it is a tried-and-true way to keep a stellar sender reputation. 

Saving Money and Improving ROI

According to statistics, about 8.4% of addresses on an average email list are invalid. Although this might not seem a big deal, let’s view how this creates losses for business owners. 

For a list with 15,000 emails, 8.4% of addresses equals 1200 prospective users. For instance, an average value a marketer gets per subscriber is $40. Now, let’s do the math:

Business owner’s losses due to invalid addresses = 120040 = $4800

Encouraging app users and customers to enter valid email addresses helps get the most value out of the list and mitigates financial losses. That’s why business owners should consider email validation as a must-have for every email campaign they start.

Actionable Data Insights and Segmentation

Other than lowering bounce rates, email validation helps entrepreneurs build a personalized connection with prospective customers. It gives marketing managers a large set of personal data on subscribes – names, addresses, job titles, and companies they are associated with.

Managers can use validation insights to create efficient personalization strategies. These make a huge difference: your users are more likely to open an email that resonates with their interests and occupations. 

Thus, email validation directly improves the conversion of each campaign you send out. 

Enhanced Reputation

The consistency of your email marketing activities determines whether or not prospective customers trust the company enough to purchase a product or pay a subscription fee. Without managing the email list, the risks of losing trust points are skyrocketing. 

 

Statistics say that over 50% of online shoppers don’t trust brands who don’t reach out via sign-up confirmation letters, transactional emails, or a follow up email. 

 

How does email validation improve brand reputation? By ensuring a smooth connection with every subscriber on the list, companies come across as reliable, trustworthy, and proactive. That’s why clients will have no objections when it comes to doing business together. 

3 Top Approaches to Email Validation

The benefits of email validation are clear. It drives engagement, improves the company’s reputation, and brings more insights to the company’s future marketing activities. 

 

Now that you understand all the advantages of going through with validation, you might be wondering what the first step to take is. In fact, there are several ways to approach email validation: 

Sending subscribers an activation email

Sending already mentioned confirmation emails is a common validation practice that marketers use. If a website visitor confirms the subscription, it means that the email exists. If not, a user will be asked to resubmit the subscription form. 

 

Although it’s a convenient practice, it comes with downsides. For example, if your ecommerce letter ended up in “Promotions,” user might not open it, but that wouldn’t mean that a website visitor entered a wrong address. Or if the email header of your message has trigger words, it may go straight to “Spam.”

Asking subscribers for extra data

Basically, this method tests a website visitor’s commitment to join the list, weeding out people who leave non-existent emails in subscription forms. 

 

On the one side, having a detailed subscription form offers marketers more data, allowing them to engage with subscribers on a deeper level. From the other side, most website visitors don’t like sharing personal data right and left, so you will be getting fewer sign-ups.

Bulk Email Validator as a Tool of Email Validation

Out of all the approaches we described, using an email validator like Proofy is the fastest and most efficient way to keep your mailing list clean. Here are the benefits that might help you add bulk validator into the list of your communication tools: 

• It’s fast ( you can check up to 500 emails at once).
• It requires no extra activity from a subscriber, keeping the user experience as smooth as fluid as possible.
• It encourages a website visitor to enter a valid email into the form by letting him know if the entered address is invalid.
• It supports SMTP check.
• It cleans your list from duplicate addresses keeping it manageable.

Bulk email validator tools are easy to integrate into your website – top-tier platforms typically come with a secure proprietary APIs a tech team can use. 

Conclusion

Through email validation, marketers and business owners can ensure they are doing their best at converting website visitors into subscribers. Validating addresses and keeping your mailing list clean improve your sender reputation, eliminate the risk of spam traps, and drive engagement.  

Although there are several ways to approach email validation, using a tool to automate checking emails. Choose the platform that meets your needs and budget and validate hundreds of addresses instantly – this way, you’ll improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts by huge numbers.

Author Bio

Dmytro Zaichenko is an Outreach Specialist at Mailtrap, a product helping to test emails at the developmental stages. He has more than 5 years of experience in content making.

Apart from writing and communicating with talented people, he’s a huge NBA fan. Connect Dmytro on LinkedIn.