Have you cleaned your mailing list? If the answer is "not really" or rather "never", you might be losing out on a great opportunity of maximizing your email marketing results.

A study by Prospectify found that, out of 1000 contacts of a company, 4.5% are not even valid after a mere 28 days.

This means that you might end up spending money, time, and valuable resources on unqualified leads - ones that have little to no chances of becoming your actual or returning customers.

Email verification is essential in order to avoid having invalid email addresses in your mailing list.

Put very simply email validation is nothing more than cleaning your email lists and eliminating those contacts that are no longer a target of your campaign.

The result is a high-quality mailing list, which has a greater chance of achieving the results that you want from your email marketing. Still not convinced? Let us tell you a bit more.

Reasons why you should verify your email addresses

There are numerous ways to generate leads in an organic way, which makes sure that the email addresses that you have are of people that are to some extent interested in your company.

Even so, it is possible that some of these email addresses on your list might not be relevant for your campaign for different reasons. These are listed below:

verify email addresses

1. Non-existent domain

When registering for a mailing list, it is possible that a user provides their corporate email address. That sounds reasonable, but what about if the company shuts down and decides to delete their domain name on the internet?

In this scenario, all the emails that have that domain name will also be deleted. This means that if one of these were to be on your mailing list, it would not be useful anymore.

2. Job changes

People change jobs all the time - and with that, they change not only their work address, but also their email address. In such a case, their previous corporate email address is either never used again, or simply deleted from their company server.

It is imperative to identify these email addresses because in case this person is still a useful lead, you can find another way to contact them and update your mailing list.

3. Change of email provider

Who has never changed their email provider? With the advancement of technology, we often see new services offered by email providers and might be tempted to use one that we do not currently use - or one might simply want to change email addresses for whatever reason.

The problem with this from a company perspective is that you might end up sending important information to inboxes that are not being used anymore - they might not even exist. Thus, email verification allows you to identify these contacts so that you can remove them from your mailing list.

4. Typing errors

Typing errors or 'typos' are not uncommon and usually not too problematic - until they are in an email address. Email addresses are like your home address, any mistake, and you might not get your delivery.

It is important to check your mailing list for any kind of typing errors. This includes email addresses that do not follow the default pattern of an email address (such as @domainx.com.br for example) or those that have a very random username - which can indicate that iti does not exist.

5. Spam traps

Some emails are made to act as a spam trap. They do not belong to any person and serve the purpose of identifying any spammers. Having good data hygiene prevents you from falling into one of these traps.

6. Catch-all accounts

Apart from spam traps, there is something called catch-all accounts that you need to be wary of. This is an email address that collects all the emails from email addresses sent to a specific domain name.

For example, if you own the domain name @workout.com, you can easily create a catch-all account that will receive any emails sent to any email address with that domain name. If someone sends an email to luiza@workout.com, the message will automatically be sent to the catch-all account.

These accounts usually do not care about the information you are sending as they do not have a single person associated with them and are generic in nature.

7. Fraudulent submissions

Sometimes, users register an email address that does not belong to them or is simply a false address - simply to avoid any promotional material that they are not interested in.

By verifying your list, you can make sure that you are sending your email to a correct address and is, in fact, likely to be read by an actual person who voluntarily gave you their correct address.

8. Role-based email addresses

Lastly, there is also the case of role-based email addresses. These do not belong to a specific person and can belong to a group of people, such as the department of a company. Examples include marketing@workout.com or support@workout.com.

Whilst these accounts might be checked regularly by actual people, you cannot really define who they are or what their interests are. This makes it harder for you to segment them and also eliminates the possibility of creating personalized messages in your email.

By verifying your lists you can quickly get rid of these contacts. Sending emails to any of the accounts mentioned above means spending valuable resources that could be used elsewhere - such as on leads that will actually bring your campaign visible results.

How does email verification translate into better results?

Whoever has worked on an email marketing campaign knows all the elements that need to be well thought of, to make sure that it's successful.

You need a good title, which would make your target user want to open the email and, more importantly, include a message that resonates with the needs of that person. Moreover, you need to think of a user-friendly template that catches their attention. It also needs to be responsive so the user can open it on their laptop or their phone. You would even think about segment your email lists and performing A/B tests to check what is working and what is not.

It is a fact that the list of things to do is a big one, and whilst email marketing has proven to be successful, only a slight error in any of these things and all your efforts can go to waste.

With so many things to take care of, it is easy for someone to forget something seemingly small that should, in fact, be on the top of their list of priorities - email verification. After all, what is the point of creating the perfect email if it does not even get to your lead in the first place?

Do not worry, though, because it does not need to be a time-consuming task. We have got you covered as we bring you the email verification tool that checks your list automatically, giving you a status report on each of the email addresses in your mailing list.

Having said that, you might still have some doubts about the importance of email verification. The numerous advantages speak for themselves:

Protection against blacklisting

As a sender, your email address can end up on a blacklist - that are lists that are known to identify spammers. This means that your email can be blocked even before they reach your targeted individual's inbox.

By having your mailing list verified, you reduce the risk of ending up on a blacklist.

In addition, the email marketing tool can also block customer campaigns that reach a certain volume of hard bounces. For some platforms, this volume is between 2-3% which means you need to pay attention to your rates.

Improve delivery rate

Delivery Rate is the percentage of emails sent that reach the recipients' inbox. As you can imagine, this is one of the most critical metrics of your campaign.

The harsh truth is that if not delivered, your campaigns will be useless. After all, you developed a fantastic message so that someone can get the opportunity to read it, right?

By verifying your email list and removing unwanted email addresses, you improve your delivery rate, which in turn signal to your other recipients that your emails are worth receiving. Again, the delivery capacity is improved.

Improve your KPIs

Apart from your delivery rate, there are numerous other email marketing metrics that help you gauge the success of any given campaign:

  • Bounce rate: this is the rate of all the emails that bounce back, or in other words, those that simply are not sent to the recipient,
  • Open rate: this metric tells you, out of the emails that were sent - how many were actually opened by users,
  • Unique open rate: this person only opened one of your emails and then never looked at one of your campaigns again? This is what this KPI tells you.
  • Click-through-rate (CTR): this tells you the number of people that are clicking on the links provided in your emails.
  • Unsubscribe rate: people on your list should have the option to unsubscribe. If the number of these people is very high, it can mean that something is wrong with your campaign.

All these metrics are essential in understanding the success of your campaigns. However, an unverified list can badly impact these metrics, hindering your ability to have an accurate analysis of the performance of your campaign.

Improve your ROI

We already mentioned that your email marketing campaigns can provide a great return on investment. However, these can be even better if you verify your mailing list.

Every email sent is also money spent. Similarly, every email that doesn't make it into a useful inbox is money wasted.

By verifying your mailing list, you increase your chances of investing valuable resources in activities that are likely to bring you the desired result. In other words, you can improve your ROI and reduce costs.

Optimizing segmentation efforts

A big part of the success of any email marketing campaign depends on your segmentation efforts.

Segmenting your list is no more than creating groups of people with similar interests so that your messages are more personalized.

The benefits of doing this are numerous - since more and more consumers expect to be treated like the human they are, instead of a number.

However, an email list that has not been verified makes it difficult to segment properly. After all, how can you really collect more information about a contact that may not even exist?

Email verification makes sure that all the email addresses on your list are associated with real people - who have interests, pain points, and proper profiles.

Increase sales opportunity

As a Digital Marketer, you must be familiar with the concept of the marketing funnel. First, you attract a lead. Then you build a relationship with them till the purchase has been made. And lastly, you build loyalty so that you can have returning customers.

For all of this to happen, you need to have a valid and open communication channel with your audience. This would not be possible if the address you have for them is incorrect.

Thus, email verification opens doors for you that you need in order to have good quality relationships and consequently create tangible sales opportunities.

Focussing on what is important

As we have seen, setting up an email marketing campaign takes dedication, and you cannot be spending time thinking about the validity of the email addresses on your mailing list.

To focus on what is important and create successful campaigns, the verification of your mailing list is fundamental.

Once you start checking your email data, you can eliminate contacts that do not really matter. While the size of your list will decrease, the quality will increase, and so will your engagement.

Verify your emails quickly!

Checking your email list does not have to be a burden. Email verification tools efficiently do this for you - with just a click of a button and without bothering your recipients.

Simply import your list and receive a result of each contact. From then on, you can decide what to do with the contacts and have yourself a high-quality list!

Interested? Come find out how the best email verification tool on the market can help you optimize your campaigns and increase sales!