There’s a variety of reasons businesses, brands and individuals are using email. It’s a great way to build a relationship with your customers. You want to meet people where they are, and in modern times that means the inbox.
Not sure about the effectiveness of email? Get this: people spend an average of 143 minutes checking email every weekday.
However, if you want to reach them, you need to have their real, valid email addresses. This is where email validation comes into play.
What is email validation?
Email validation is the process of removing inaccurate data from an email database. Contact lists decline in quality, and keeping them in good shape manually is practically impossible. An email validator or verifier not only helps you save time but also, targets bad emails with pinpoint accuracy.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies approach their email marketing without planning on strategy or caring about data quality, and that will most assuredly sabotage their results. You could get in shape by going to the gym and half-heartedly doing some exercises, or you could get on a personalized fitness plan. Which one do you think will get better results?
Here are three ways email validation increases your email marketing results.
Email validation means you’ll reach real people
If you haven’t verified your list, chances are many of the email addresses are simply not real. There are good email addresses and there are bad ones; good email addresses have a live person at the other end.
The email addresses you don’t want? There’s a lot of them. They include:
- Role-based emails, such as info@ or admin@. They’re monitored by a group of people who may delete a lot of emails at once -- including yours -- or even mark you as spam.
- Catch-all emails, associated with catch-all domains and designed to accept any email that the server receives. Catch-all mailboxes will easily get full and bounce.
- Abuse emails, belonging to people who habitually mark emails as spam, even if they signed up for them.
- Disposable or temporary addresses. They work, but only for a little while. People use those because they don’t care enough about your list to give their real email. Sometimes they just want to take advantage of some promotional item.
Then there are also good email addresses that eventually become obsolete. It could be a school or workplace email that someone was using regularly until graduating or changing jobs. Maybe someone is avoiding an ex or finally deciding to get a more professional-sounding address.
The point is, even a list full of great email addresses will go bad over time.
So what happens if you don’t take those invalid or fake addresses off the list? You’ll get bounces. Also, you’ll get spam complaints or you risk hitting a spam trap. All this affects your Sender Reputation, a score used by Internet service providers (ISPs) to rate whether a sender is legitimate or not.
Email validation eliminates the bad and fake email addresses, so you’ll reach real people who can actually read what you send.
Getting started should be easy. Find a reputable company that has real people you can talk to. It helps if they let you try out their email validator and see if it’s a good fit.
Email validation stops you from being considered a spammer
Some people think of sending their email newsletters and promotions like throwing mud against the wall to see what sticks. All the addresses -- “the good, the bad and the ugly” -- are lumped into one group and the email marketer crosses his fingers. You may get some traction this way, but the results will continuously decrease.
“As the bounces pile up, as the abuse addresses mark you as a spammer, and you continue to send emails to abandoned inboxes, ISPs start to categorize you as a spammer,” says Josh Brown, Digital Marketing Consultant at Helpjuice.
“Not only that, but your email service provider may warn you about not following best practices and suspend your account,” Brown adds.
“But, I’m sending emails to people who subscribed!” you may say. It doesn’t matter. Of course, you should only be sending emails to people who signed up. Hopefully, you use the double-opt-in method to collect emails and you’ve never bought a list. But when you don’t prune your list regularly, you are certain to get a declining sender reputation.
Being regarded as a spammer means that the receptive people who signed up and want to get your emails may never see them. Because along with your deteriorating sender reputation, your emails have started landing in the spam folder. The chances of you being read there are almost nonexistent. Email validation maintains your reputation so you’ll be considered a valid sender and not a spammer.
Email validation protects your investment
When someone signs up to be on your email list, this is a significant thing and is not to be taken lightly. They’re entrusting you with their most valuable contact information. It even has a monetary value. The average email address is worth $113.48.
The ability to build a relationship with your customers is certainly there. But given what a high ROI email marketing has at $42 for every $1 spent, there’s also tremendous sales potential. If one of your subscribers is not able to get your newsletters, they may forget about you. Not receiving your emails will also tarnish your image and make you look unprofessional.
Apart from that, you’re missing out on the opportunity to connect with your subscribers and increase conversions. What’s more, email services typically charge based on the number of addresses on your list. You can keep the costs down by removing bad contacts consistently. It pays for itself.
About the Author - Paul Leslie is a content writer for email validation company ZeroBounce. He has a rich background in content creation as a writer, researcher and interviewer. Paul has conducted more than 800 interviews distributed via radio and podcasts.