Email Validation for Beginners: What You Need to Know
You’re getting frequent bounces and spam complaints, and your overall email engagement isn’t that great. But you know you can fix these issues – and one of the first steps in the process is to clean your list. Don’t know where to start? These email validation tips for beginners will clarify many unknowns and help you refresh your email marketing.
What is email validation?
First, let’s define the term: email validation is the process of determining which email addresses are valid within a list of subscribers. In email marketing jargon, you’ll also find it under the name of email verification, email list cleaning, or email scrubbing.
While they all work toward the same goal, there are some small differences between these processes. Check out our email validation glossary to learn more.
Email validation for beginners: how does cleaning your list help?
From Fortune 500 businesses to startups and independent bloggers, everyone seems to have jumped on the email marketing wagon in the past few years. If you’ve done so yourself, smart move!
Email is currently the number one platform marketers use to stay in touch with their audience. It helps you form stronger relationships with your customers and increase your sales.
However, the key to successful email marketing campaigns is great email deliverability. That means getting your emails in your subscribers’ inboxes, where they have a chance to be seen. Otherwise, they’ll simply go to waste instead of improving people’s lives – and your business.
Now, you may ask yourself: how does cleaning my list help me achieve better email deliverability? The answer is simple: by removing outdated and risky email addresses, you preserve your sender reputation and have a higher chance of landing in the inbox.
How your sender reputation works
There are several factors that determine how many of your emails reach the inbox. The first and most important one: your sender reputation.
You may think a few bouncing emails won’t affect you. But the truth is, when you repeatedly send emails to invalid and other bad addresses, your sender reputation is at stake. Internet service providers (IPSs) consider it when deciding where your emails should go – inbox, spam, or nowhere at all. That’s right, using a messy list can also result in your emails getting blocked altogether.
So, what do you do?
Manually checking your list to see whether the addresses it contains are valid would be a tedious and time-consuming process. Besides, some risky email addresses are impossible to detect manually.
But don’t worry: even for email validation beginners it’s easy to remove undesirable addresses.
How to find a good email validation service
First, look for a trustworthy company. Email marketing has grown in the past few years, and so has the number of email verifiers on the market. As a beginner, you may be tempted to go with the first platform you find online, but a bit of research pays off.
Before you choose a service, make sure you check out this article we wrote on the topic: How to find an email validation service.
Getting started: validate your list
Now that you found an email validator, it’s time to clean your list. You have two options, and each covers certain needs and comes with different benefits.
Let’s take a look at them so you can begin validating today!
Already have a list of subscribers?
Then you want to make sure your contacts are accurate and up-to-date. No matter the size of your list, if you’re getting weak results with it, it probably needs a good scrub.
What you’re looking for is a bulk email validation system. Say you chose ZeroBounce to clean your list: gather all your contacts in a CSV or .txt file and upload it on our platform.
Once you click “Validate,” ZeroBounce will begin verifying every one of your contacts. The process takes about 45 minutes for a database of up to 100,000 email addresses.
When your list is clean, we’ll notify you so you can download your results.
Our platform is easy to use even by email validation beginners, so don’t worry. What’s more, you have an experienced customer support team available 24/7 to help you out or answer any questions.
Want to keep your list clean longer?
Then you should make the most of our email validation API – a piece of software you can integrate on your platform to check emails in real-time. It’s an effective filter that won’t allow invalid addresses to sign up on your mailing list.
Of course, it wouldn’t make much sense to use the API unless you clean your list in bulk first. Once you make sure all your subscribers are real, you can easily install the API on your forms and collect only valid email addresses.
While the API does a great job protecting your list hygiene, we recommend you still clean your database in bulk every quarter. Some of the email address you collect may be perfectly safe to use when you first get them, but may go bad in time. Running your list through an email validator is the best way to weed them out.
Wrapping up
Having a large email list is a great goal to follow. But keeping an eye on the quality of your leads will play an even bigger role in your email marketing. So, before you send your next campaign, check your list for accuracy. The benefits of email validation are undeniable: your engagement will increase and you’ll see even more reasons to connect with your audience consistently.
This article was updated in May 2020.