Email is a leading form of communication for businesses—and yours is likely no exception. Research shows that professionals check their email approximately 15 times per day.1 This means that every day, your company has dozens of opportunities to reach prospective users as well as current clients. The number one ingredient to success is realizing that your efforts are only effective when your messages accurately fall into the right hands. So, this means doing away with bounced emails and ensuring that you’re sending emails with success to verifiable inboxes that can receive mail.
While you may be tempted to hit send on your next email marketing campaign before verifying your clients’ email addresses, there are a few tactics you can implement in your email messaging strategy to remove the guesswork of email deliverability. Below, we’ll outline everything you need to know to get started.
Why do I need to validate email addresses?
If you’re wondering why your business should validate an email address before hitting send, the reasons are plentiful. From enjoying a higher ROI on email marketing campaigns to increasing the successful delivery of emails to recipients, email validation will be a key part of your outreach process that your business cannot neglect if it wishes to reap the most benefits from your efforts.
Let’s say you plan to send a marketing email to 1,000 users before verifying the legitimacy of the information you have on hand. Unfortunately, there’s a high likelihood that a good number of these emails will bounce. Whether invalid emails are the result of human error from typos or result from ‘dummy emails’ that consumers input to avoid any additional mail from hitting their inbox, you’ll likely find that invalid data can interfere with the success of any email communication your business strives to achieve.
On the surface, it may seem as though a few bounced emails are harmless to your business. However, a high bounce rate for any given email may mark your messages as spam to users with valid email addresses, too. The chances of your recipient viewing a message in their spam folder is so statistically low that the success of your communication with customers depends on the effective delivery of your email to a user’s inbox.
As noted above, email validation is also necessary for maximizing your ROI for your marketing initiatives. Investing in marketing strategies will result in a substantial loss if your emails fail to reach their intended audience. Validating emails means more recipients and more conversion opportunities, which will likely be the end goal of your marketing strategy.
Signs you need to validate your existing email list
Any organization that does not currently have an email validation process in place will benefit from email verification software. Additional signs that indicate a necessity for enhanced email validation include:
- High bounce rates: While bounce rates can vary considerably by industry, the benchmark for success generally states that a ‘good’ bounce rate will fall below 2%2.
- Low open rates: Poorly performing email campaigns with low open rates may stem from poor-quality email lists. Invalid emails will significantly impact this KPI.
- An increase in customer data: Chances are, your business adds a considerable amount of new consumer data to its database each day. This information needs to be continuously verified to guarantee its accuracy.
How to validate an email address (without sending an email)
You know the importance of validating emails without sending an actual email. Now, how do you get started? Your options for email verification include:
1.) Bulk email validation: validating emails in batch is a great way to quickly evaluate the accuracy of the email addresses stored in your customer database. The process is as simple as uploading your lists to our secure website. Next, we’ll return your list with emails that are formatted correctly for a better delivery rate on your next email campaign.
2.) Email list cleansing: email cleaning, or scrubbing, is a great way to clean up emails and ensure spelling and punctuation are correct. As the name implies, you’ll ‘cleanse’ your emails to guarantee their validity and accuracy.
3.) Email appending: this option centers on running user information through our email address appending software to find matches between client names and email addresses. This is a great option for businesses that have names and addresses but incorrect or nonexistent emails.
If you’d like to get a sneak peek of how our software works, try our free email lookup tool to see our email validation process in real-time today. Our software will let you know in seconds whether an email is verified, reachable, and able to receive mail.
