The Value Of Email Validation
A validated email list is the key to better email marketing.
You work hard to craft highly-personalized, engaging copy. You build eye-catching newsletter designs. You monitor all outgoing content from your domain so that you always adhere to the best email-sending practices.
Despite all of this, your emails aren’t reaching your audience.
The cause? Invalid and undeliverable email addresses. Avoiding these would allow every message to reach its intended target. Your bounces disappear, and your campaign conversions climb.
Therein lies the value of email validation.
Why email validation is necessary
Your marketing team spends countless dollars and labor hours to get results.
After numerous paid ad campaigns and time spent convincing leads to sign up, you now have a lengthy email list. You can start creating highly-targeted email marketing campaigns to help generate more engagement and sales.
But what if those emails are fake or untrustworthy?
Most brands use email marketing as a primary channel, particularly in the B2B space. Without an email bounce checker and validator, communications don’t reach the inbox. At best, an email might read as “delivered” but land in spam. At worst, it hard bounces when the receiving server rejects it entirely.
Companies see the potential power of email marketing and chase revenue. However, they often fail to appreciate the value of email validation and its ability to singlehandedly energize a campaign.
Even if you believe your lead collection process to be reliable, everyone will encounter some fundamental problems.
Problem #1 - Emails constantly change
The first problem is that an email list is ever-changing. Even if you validate your list today, it will degrade by 22.71% in a calendar year.
A once valid contact may undergo a position change or leave for a different company. Well-meaning leads may even misenter their email address when filling out your subscriber or lead sign-up forms.
A once-valid email address can become a dud and jam up your email communications. You continue sending your email marketing messages to this invalid address, only to see your bounce rate increase. You spend a fortune in ad dollars to obtain these addresses, while your content and offers never reach the actual person.
Problem #2 - It’s easy to fake a valid email address
There are ways around providing your actual email address when using a sign-up form.
Many internet users are privacy skeptics and don’t want to see their data bought and sold. This frequently happens, so we can never recommend purchasing an email list. Countless buyers purchase those lists, leaving you with nothing more than contacts that are likely to report you as spam.
To combat data privacy concerns, many people use temporary addresses. They can receive and sometimes send mail like a standard address. Because it appears valid, it seems to be a worthy lead.
This fakery adds to the problem of email list decay.
The value of email validation as a marketing solution
Every contact in your email list has a dollar value. Every email you send to an address represents the time and money spent attempting to convert that lead. This includes investment in copy, graphic design, inbox placement testing, and campaign reporting.
Implementing email validation ensures that you identify which email leads are worthy of the investment. Let’s examine how cleaning your list will improve your email marketing ROI.
It’s an email bounce checker
Let’s face it - bounce rates are what cause most email marketers to panic.
Not only are you trying to understand why an email bounces, but a continuously increasing bounce rate can also lead to account suspensions. Quick access to an email bounce checker immediately demonstrates the value of email validation.
An email validation API will identify every type of problematic email in real time. Once it determines the invalid contacts, it prevents them from entering your email list. This leaves you only valid addresses, meaning your messages will deliver successfully.
You should also take your existing list to an online email validation tool once every few months. This will combat list decay and help prevent additional unnecessary bounces.
It protects your reputation
Every person or business that connects to the internet has an IP address. It operates like a physical address, allowing ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to locate and identify a device or local network.
ISPs and ESPs can monitor your unique IP address and observe your inbound and outbound traffic and related behaviors. An IP address also helps other online services determine whether to transmit data. This includes communications from web browsers or emails.
There are rules for what ISPs consider appropriate behavior regarding email marketing. This includes not only sending emails to valid addresses but sending relevant messages that are free of spam or malicious content. Adherence to these rules helps keep your IP reputation in good standing.
Conversely, sending outbound messages to invalid addresses or spamming users with poor content harms your IP reputation. Sending to invalid locations leads to a bounce, which alerts your ISP to negative behaviors. The occasional bounce is inevitable, but without an email bounce checker, you’re liable to resemble a spammer.
ISPs take notice of your commitment to best email-sending practices. Thus, email validation has the power to preserve your IP reputation. By cleaning your email lists and removing fake addresses, spam traps, catch-alls and abuse emails, you ensure a higher rate of deliverability. This builds your IP reputation as a trusted and responsible sender.
An email validation service helps ensure you reach the inbox and avoid spam folders or blacklists.
In addition to this, remember that even qualified contacts change their emails frequently. Even if someone opts into your email marketing in good faith, it’s unlikely they’ll report an address change. It’s up to you to resolve those changes.
You save on email marketing services
Modern-day businesses rely on email marketing platforms. These services assist companies in managing bulk emails and SMS messages so that you can reach more customers and test your content reliably.
However, these platforms generally charge you by email contact list size - different from how many messages you send or receive. While you can’t avoid the cost of creative investment, you can quickly reduce monthly costs by scrubbing invalid emails from your lists. You don’t sink further costs into what’s already bad data.
You can better target your leads
List segmentation is the process of dissecting a more extensive email list and creating smaller groups based on shared attributes. One complete email list can lead to countless segmented lists depending on how deep you wish to dive into your campaign targeting.
While you can technically segment your email list without email validation, the results will be poor. As long as your email list contains fake, inaccurate, or junk data, it will skew your results. This prompts you to invest money into new campaigns assuming that these invalid addresses will lead to additional revenue.
Take the time to validate your list and remove harmful addresses. Then, begin segmenting your contacts by age, income, occupation, or purchasing history. The better you can target actual leads, the more likely you will see your conversion rate rise.
You gain improved audience insights
Email validation is essential. However, most platforms only offer a “valid” or “invalid” result. While it’s arguably safer to scrub all of the invalid results from your list, it’s possible that you could be losing money unnecessarily.The ZeroBounce email validation service is unique in that it offers in-depth AI scoring for each validation result. This can reduce costs in a few key ways.
Spam traps, for example, are always harmful to your email list. Online services create spam trap addresses to catch spammers that scrape the internet for addresses or buy email lists. They should not receive inbound mail; sending it to one will cause ISPs to mark your IP or domain as spam.
However, other email addresses are technically valid but may not register as such. Among these includes catch-all emails. Some companies utilize catch-alls to capture incoming messages even if the sender did not provide a valid recipient. They can ensure that a business gets all critical incoming data.
Whether or not a catch-all email is helpful depends on the company’s use case. Individuals often do not oversee these addresses personally, making them less than ideal for your email marketing. However, some catch-all addresses connect with real people, making it more of a judgment call for your brand.
The scoring feature scores these types of emails on a ten-point scale, with one being the least likely and ten being the most likely to respond. You paid to acquire those emails, so reaching them is worth your while.
As you learn more about these addresses, you can scrub them from your list if necessary.
How to implement email validation
Implementing email validation is easy. You can begin with one of two methods and use your new email bounce checker in no time.
First, upload an email list to an email validation tool. ZeroBounce, for example, allows all users to validate 100 email addresses from their list per month.
After you upload your file, allow the system several minutes to validate each address. You can refresh the page to observe your results as they happen. Once the process completes, you’ll receive an email and an encrypted password to retrieve your results and protect your data.
Then, use your results to determine which addresses you need to delete. Use the ZeroBounce status code guide to help you through this process and to understand better why our system marks each address accordingly.
However, validating an email list one time isn’t enough in today’s digital marketing world. ZeroBounce’s email validation API allows you to validate new email addresses in real time. If the new address is fake or invalid as it enters the form, the API rejects it before it enters your email list.
The API code is ready to add to your website, landing page or wherever you capture new email signups. After you install the API, the email validation system will ensure that only valid contacts get through, keeping your email bounces low.
Frequently asked questions
Email validation allows us to determine whether or not an email address is accurate and usable. By validating an email, you can rapidly clean your email lists by removing any fake or incorrect data. Email validation software also helps you identify typos or misspellings in an otherwise valid email address. Rather than scrubbing a valuable address from your list, you can correct the issue and use it for your email marketing. Both are essential as sending messages to invalid addresses harms your email reputation. Anytime you send an email that does not reach the inbox, it bounces. When your bounce rate exceeds 2%, ISPs view your domain as a suspicious sender and often relegate you to the spam folder. If you want to deliver your messages and increase your campaign performance successfully, email validation is a must.
An email will bounce whenever you attempt to send a message to an invalid address. If the email address does not exist or is no longer in use, your ESP cannot deliver the content. This is known as a hard bounce. Soft bounces can also occur. These can happen for multiple reasons, including:
- The recipient’s email server is down
- The recipient’s mailbox is full
- Messaging frequency
- Email file size
You can control your number of soft bounces by adhering to the best email-sending practices. Standard mail providers will provide accepted limits for messaging frequency and maximum email size.
You can quickly identify invalid addresses on an email list using an email validator or email validation API. The status of each address on your list serves in part as an email bounce checker. An email sent to an invalid address will bounce as no destination is available. You can safely send your content without issue if the address status is valid.
The time it takes for an email to report as a bounce depends upon your deliverability settings. The period is typically a few hours. During this window, your ESP can re-attempt the delivery in the event of a soft bounce. This is helpful if the receiving server utilizes anti-greylisting technology. As long as you validate your list before launching your campaign, your bounce rate will be minimal.
The industry’s top email validation services are generally accurate as they cross-reference data available around the internet. However, ZeroBounce offers a 98% accuracy rating supported by a money-back guarantee. That’s possible thanks to two of our defining features. The first is anti-greylisting, which allows our system to intelligently retry validating email addresses that do not receive an initial response. The validation process can fail when an email server receives too many requests. This causes many competitor email validation tools to generate an inaccurate “invalid” response. The ZeroBounce email validation system continues its efforts until it receives an accurate result. Second, ZeroBounce takes its validation further by offering AI scoring. While many validators tag certain emails such as catch-alls as invalid, our system provides a score out of ten. This gives you accurate insights letting you know that the address is valid but may be too risky to consider using. ZeroBounce gives you the power to make better decisions regarding your marketing ventures.
Email validation ensures an email is valid by following the proper syntax and spelling rules. It can identify typos or invalid characters and correct an otherwise valid address. Finally, it can confirm that the address exists within the corresponding domain. Email verification is a more advanced process that confirms whether or not a real person uses the email address. Many types of emails exist, including bot-generated emails, no-reply emails, spam traps, and others. All these have their use and may send outbound mail but cannot or should not receive inbound messages. Failure to verify an email address after validating it also leads to bounced messages. Getting caught by spam prevention methods like spam traps can also land your domain or IP on an email blacklist. Both are detrimental to your email reputation and make it impossible to deliver messages. While both processes are distinct, both are necessary and often happen in conjunction to protect your email domain better.
If you experience a sudden increase in bounce rate or spam reports, your IP reputation is likely at risk. Harmful activity will likely land you on one or more IP blacklists.
To check your IP reputation and find out if yours is on any blacklists, use a free blacklist checker. You can enter a domain or IP address and discover each blacklist along with a corresponding status report that helps you determine why your IP is there.
Real-time blacklist monitoring also alerts you to unwanted activity regarding your IP. You can remedy any negative activity by performing checks daily and preserving your reputation before the damage becomes severe.
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