Five Facts About Email Validation

Whether you’ve been an email marketer for several years or you’re new to the scene, chances are you’ve heard the terms email validation or email verification. Email validation is frequently touted as one of the most powerful approaches to improve email deliverability. If email is a part of your marketing strategy, you have to pay attention to the quality of your list. However, there are a few things you want to learn about email validation before you put money into a service. Namely, just what is email validation? Why should marketers care about it? What are the advantages of using such a service? We’ll get into that below and do our best to explain them.

1. Email validation makes it possible to remove inactive addresses

A reliable email validation tool can spot inactive addresses right away, so you can decide whether you want to keep them in your database or not. Some of the more  complex services out there will also ascertain whether an email address is truly inactive or simply unresponsive to your communication. This is valuable feedback on your data quality, as it allows you to separate dormant contacts from the ones you could still re-engage.

2. It fixes data entry errors

Human errors can totally derail your list building efforts. For example, a cashier bombarded with shoppers may accidentally key an email address wrongly. Or a customer can inadvertently mistype when entering their email address in a form. These mistakes can prevent you from reaching somebody, limiting potential earnings opportunities. But email validation can fix human mistakes, such as typos and misspellings, and eliminate those addresses from your list. Also, most email verifiers offer a real-time API which will prevent erroneous addresses from being added to your mailing list.

3. Get more accurate campaign reports

Dormant or abandoned email addresses are not only useless to your marketing purposes, but can skew your reports. Good marketers always keep an eye on their reports – specifically on their bounce rate, open and click-through rates. If you have lots of inactive contacts, you’re not getting a clear picture of your overall performance. Eliminating these contacts from the list will give you a more realistic perspective of your open rates, clicks and conversions.

4. It keeps spam traps away

Spam traps are some of the most difficult email addresses to validate. They are abandoned addresses repurposed to attract spammers and block them. No marketer wants their emails to land in a spam trap, so making sure you don’t have any in your list is crucial. An advanced email validation service can detect spam traps and remove them, thus supporting a good sender reputation and email deliverability.

5. Email validation is the best way to avoid hard bounces

A couple of hard bounces every once in a while is to be anticipated, but frequently emailing known bad addresses will harm your sender reputation. What happens next? Your email deliverability is going to decrease, which means your genuine subscribers won’t receive your campaigns. Email validation helps eliminate this issue by letting you know which addresses on your record are very likely to hard bounce. If some of your results indicate potential soft bounces, you can try emailing those addresses a few more times before deciding to ditch them. Email validation can be a true lifesaver for digital marketers. It is a super-effective way to clean up your list and boost the success of your campaigns. If you haven’t already, it’s worth getting your list validated to maintain your sender reputation.